Opinion | Why conservatives really fear critical race theory - The Washington Post - 0 views
www.washingtonpost.com/...ally-fear-critical-race-theory
Critical Theory race conservative Culture crisis
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Since last summer, Republicans and Whites in particular have become less supportive of the Black Lives Matter movement than they were before Floyd’s death.
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Why? Because theoretical discussions of racial injustice turned into a more direct personal challenge to the race in power.
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When your priority is to preserve a particular mythology — the United States as a land of equal opportunity — the push to take a critical view of the United States’ racial history becomes a threat.
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It might result in a real rethinking of the order of things, which might result in culpability, which might result in recognition that recompense is needed. (Hm, recompense — sounds like “reparations,” a subject America remains unwilling to touch with a 10-foot pole.)
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But disguising one’s discomfort with racial reconsideration as an intellectual critique is still allowed.
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Thus has emerged the conservative obsession with critical race theory (CRT), a mode of pushback that has taken on a life and logic of its own.
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t is a psychological defense, not a rational one. And it has become so prominent because the status quo is comfortable, and accountability is not.
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Calls for racial accountability can feel like an attack when you aren’t ready to acknowledge how your behavior, or that of your ancestors, has harmed others.
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It suggests that our nation’s history of race and racism is embedded in law and public policy, still plays a role in shaping outcomes for Black Americans and other people of color, and should be taken into account when these issues are discussed.
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Instead, these critics have expanded the concept to stand in for anything that reexamines the United States’ racial history, from the New York Times’s 1619 Project to K-12 curriculums that dare to state (accurately) that the Founding Fathers enslaved people
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Critical race theory has been purposely mischaracterized as a divisive form of discourse that pits people of color against White people, that reduces children to their race.
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these are straw man arguments, the use of which highlights the discomfort underlying critics’ obsession with CRT in the first place: their fear of criticism itself, and an anxiety about what actually addressing racial inequality might look like.
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Progressives have tried to push back against the anti-CRT wave by attempting to more clearly explain the concep
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their time would be better spent seeking ways to address the response underlying conservative resistance — worries about culpability, recrimination and displacement.
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Objections to CRT are an emotional defense against unwanted change, not an intellectual disagreement. Conservatives were never debating the facts.