https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/12/02/ap-african-american-studies-black-history/
This piece was printed in the WAPO Weekly insert to the Pilot this morning.
I see it as a hopeful and helpful way to teach MORE of the history of this country.
Can’t wait to hear the cries of CRT out of the right.
Tidewater News and Opinion Forum 
Voodoo? Santeria?
Why not Frederick Douglas, or Walter E Williams?
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I would guess that Frederick Douglas would get substantial coverage in the course. Walter E. Williams, maybe a mention. The fact that this story mentions neither says almost nothing about the actual content of the course.
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But it does go on and on about Voodoo which is pretty much irrelevant to Black history outside of New Orleans.
BTW, regarding deletion of posts, I briefly accidentally deleted this one and then recovered it. It is amazingly easy to do.
So, if a post disappears just tell me.
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“But it does go on and on about Voodoo . . .”
That was the journalist’s choice.
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Voodoo is derived from a West African religion loosely known as Vodoun. It followed the enslaved Africans into the Caribbean, especially Haiti. It may have some Christian characteristics that were forced on them by Catholics for conversion.
New Orleans was not the only place. The Carolinas had versions.
Keeping this in mind, I would say Voodoo had an impact on the enslaved throughout our history with African Americans. Black history in the US would be missing a cultural artifact without including the prominent religious conflict between African traditions and culture and Western ones.
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The teacher featured in the story says, “African American history does not begin and end with slavery.” That sounds like an intellectual step forward to me.
But later she leads a discussion by asking her students, “Why have we been taught to be afraid of Voodoo?” That sounds like an intellectual step backward. A better question would have been, “How have we been taught to be afraid of Voodoo?”
So, on the evidence provided I wouldn’t call this particular course CRT, but I’d say it can be used to teach CRT.
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Personally, I believe a large part of the racism we have in this country today is due to a lack of education about all of our history. While doing research for a paper I presented on the Second Amendment, I was shocked at the things I was learning for the first time. Aside from things like slave patrols, I kept running across things like the Colfax massacre and the 1921 Tulsa race massacre. I had always believed I had a pretty good background in American history. I was wrong!
Hell, I’d never even heard of the “Negro Motorist Green Book” until the movie came out. And that was last published in 1968! If you don’t know anything about where racism is coming from, you are unarmed to fight it. CRT is not about making white people feel guilty. It’s about understanding where beliefs about racism are coming from.
As for “witches,” the belief in witchcraft is the reason women were denied access to the medical profession until a few hundred years after the last witch was burned at the stake. Women are the natural caregivers, yet superstition has kept them out of the business since the days of the Inquisition. If the real history of witchcraft had been taught, medical science might be a lot farther along than it is.
And if the real history of racism is taught, we might get a lot farther along in race relations than we currently are.
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You can try to sugar coat it all you want but CRT is defined in encyclopedia Britannica as a movement that believes that all law enforcement and legal systems are inherently racist and that white people exploit black people for personal gain. Pretty outlandish nonsence. I think I will trust an unbiased source over a partisan hack any day.
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You? Trust unbiased sources??
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
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Strange you would consider EB biased. Now we know where your warped views come from…fantasy land.
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The only “unbiased” sources you trust are the ones that tell you what you want to hear.
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Leaving aside that you have distorted the actual EB article on CRT, the reality is that it is a boogeyman conjured up by the Republican Party. It only existed in very obscure and arcane academic papers until GOP decided it would be useful politically in their ongoing program of racial divisiveness. In the end, it was kind of a bust as an issue and maybe even counter-productive, but they tried, bless their hearts.
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Reasonable people will read the definition as clearly as I did. The left is the distortion, parody and nonsense king, bless their hearts. Democrats wouldn’t exist without OPM to promise.
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Read slowly for comprehension
https://www.britannica.com/topic/critical-race-theory
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As long as it doesnt try to convey any responsibility for the past on anyone living today, doesn’t create modern day oppressors or oppressed, doesnt try to tie modern racial failures to the past, identifies Nat Turner as the cold blooded murderer he was instea of a hero, includes the part where blacks brutally kidnapped and sold fellow blacks to slavery as the supplier, includes the part where Africans enslaved southern Europeans, etc. You know, all the real history that the CRT narrative doesnt want to teach.
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If you read the article, you would have seen that mentions of the beginnings of the slave trade in Africa, including the selling of slave by Black leaders there, was included.
The point of my posting this was to show that African American history can be taught without the thought police going gaga because they believe little Johnny and Jenny are being indoctrinated and told they should feel badly about the history of this country, the entire history.
And many modern racial failures ARE tied to the past. To say otherwise is to be disingenuous.
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“Being told to feel bad” and responsible as oppressors is exactly what CRT teaches. Racial failures are closely tied to apathy in education and no desire to assimilate, not the past. That group is in the minority among fellow peers but receives the highest accommodation funding and attention among all races but still fails. Culture? Racist views? Could care less?
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“ “Being told to feel bad” and responsible as oppressors is exactly what CRT teaches.”
You should read your own reference in the EB. It has quite a detailed history and reasoning regarding CRT.
Maybe you won’t feel so put out…besides if you feel you are being told to feel bad, but don’t, what’s the beef?
https://www.britannica.com/topic/critical-race-theory/Basic-tenets-of-critical-race-theory
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I don’t have a personal beef because I know better. School children are not mature enough to know better but you knew that ..
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Well then , you still have a beef.
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Read slowly for comprehension
https://www.britannica.com/topic/critical-race-theory
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I did. What is your opinion of the third tenet of CRT as studied in universities?
“ Third, owing to what CRT scholars call “interest convergence” or “material determinism,” legal advances (or setbacks) for people of colour tend to serve the interests of dominant white groups. Thus, the racial hierarchy that characterizes American society may be unaffected or even reinforced by ostensible improvements in the legal status of oppressed or exploited people. Perhaps the most provocative argument offered in support of this thesis was the suggestion by Derrick Bell, an intellectual forefather of CRT and the first Black tenured law professor at Harvard University, that the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which overturned the segregation-supporting “separate but equal” doctrine established in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), occurred when it did because (1) elite whites were concerned about potential unrest among Black former soldiers who had fought bravely for their country in World War II and the Korean War but were now expected to return to lives of oppression and exploitation by whites; and (2) the world image of the United States as an egregiously racist society threatened to diminish American influence among developing countries and to undermine the country’s strategic efforts in the Cold War against the Soviet Union. Although widely dismissed at the time, Bell’s view that the Brown decision was a product of interest convergence between whites and Blacks was supported by later historical research, which indicated that the decision of the U.S. Department of Justice to side with proponents of desegregation was influenced by a raft of secret communications from the U.S. State Department regarding the need to improve the country’s image abroad. The thesis of interest convergence has since been applied to numerous other legal cases involving the rights of people of colour.”
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So, let’s test your comprenhension – which part of that first paragraph describing the tenets of academic CRT is demonstrably false?
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RE: “You know, all the real history that the CRT narrative doesn’t want to teach.”
It is impractical to teach any subject holistically. To fully interpret Black History would also require modules in genetics, socio-biology and anthropology, but that would be asking too much of the course designers.
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…”would also require modules in genetics, socio-biology and anthropology, ”
Just how much of that is taught in good old History of the Untied States today? I didn’t take a lot of history in school, but none of those items were mentioned. Why would it be necessary to teach it as part of African American history?
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RE: “I didn’t take a lot of history in school, but none of those items were mentioned.”
They weren’t mentioned much when I was in school, either, but that was 40 years ago and E.O. Wilson’s “New Synthesis” hadn’t gained much traction, yet. Wilson proposed that social behavior can be examined and explained in terms of biological evolution.
Wilson’s ideas show up all the time nowadays in the context of history. For example, I read about a hypothesis just last week that claimed there is a genetic link between the Enlightenment and earlier Christian family planning policies that discouraged incest.
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“They weren’t mentioned much when I was in school”…
And they are not part of history studies today, except at graduate levels. K-12 history is names date and happenings.
The “context of history” is NOT academic history at ELHI level.
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In a response to Paul, I noted that the Democratic party would not exist without OPM to throw around for votes. As an example. Washington state, with Biden approval, will provide and subsidize health insurance for criminals illegally living in the US at “taxpayers” expense as a feel good progressive measure. It must be a testiment to Washingtonians gullibility or a result of “legal” drug abuse. Pathetic..
https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/3771724-biden-administration-approves-washington-state-request-to-offer-health-insurance-to-undocumented-immigrants/
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If you could see past your hatred maybe you would notice that undocumented men, women and children are human beings and that when they fall ill or are injured they WILL get medical care. Since they generally cannot, someone else will have to pay. Including them in existing programs is more cost effective, more humane, and will save lives. Too bad you adhere to an irrational party ruled by hatred and emotions. The Democrats try to solve problems rationally, as in this case.
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The illegal immigrant issue needs to be dealt with, no doubt. However, we are very dependent upon cheap, undocumented labor that won’t and can’t complain if they are underpaid, even not paid, have an accident, or work in unsafe conditions, etc. The reality is we probably have at least 15 million illegals, or less than 5% of our population. Even if we could deport 1000 per day, 365 days a year, it would take 45 years. And where would we send them? Most may come across the Mexican border, but that does not make them Mexicans. So there is the conundrum in a nutshell.
That is why you see no progress in immigration reform.
So, as long as they are here, providing affordable access to health care, public education and even drivers’ licensing is smart. Sick, uneducated and unskilled drivers are a hazard to our economy if not our very life style.
Dreamers were close to getting recognized, but anti-immigrant fervor and ideology said no.
And we have our laws regarding the admission of refugees.
Unfortunately this issue will stay a political hot potato so long as our national policy is along the lines of “illegal immigrants are criminals” but “we need their cheap labor”.
Don has favored a good idea regarding a form of guest worker program with legal protections for workers. I would add to that, a path to citizenship via green card qualification after so many years as a guest worker. That doesn’t seem to sell the populists on the right pushing European chauvinism, but I think it is about time we recognized that we are not Northern Europeans anymore. We have been an immigrant nation since we arrived here, and it is time to acknowledge that gracefully and morally.
IMO
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