critical race theory | The Casual Blog

November 26, 2021

Happy Native American Heritage Day!

Happy Native American Heritage Day! Here are a few more pictures from my recent visit to the Four Corners area. Monument Valley (above) is a Navajo Tribal Park, and the people that live there are almost all Navajos. One morning a Navajo guide drove us out on the red dirt to see more of the strange rocks. He was a friendly guy, and he was happy to talk about his culture, including their food, festivals, and clan system.

As we passed by little camps of people who lived in that harsh climate without electricity or running water, I wondered how they managed. But it occurred to me, of course, they help each other when they need help. And our guide helped me understand, they don’t feel like they need a lot of things. They like being there, in that land with their families.

As a schoolchild I learned the story that Thanksgiving was a holiday that everyone liked and no one could criticize. It is hard to take issue with conscious gratitude, or getting together with loved ones for a celebratory feast.

But I’ve learned more recently that Native Americans have good reason to dislike the myth of the first Thanksgiving, which makes it hard to spot and understand the greed and violence of many of the Europeans who colonized North America. I heard a good Post Reports podcast this week that included reflections from Wampanoag descendents of those who helped the Pilgrims grow food for the prototype Thanksgiving, and who ultimately became victims.

A Wampanoag woman interviewed in the podcast said she always thought America’s having a single day for giving thanks was a bit strange. In her tradition, people were taught to be thankful every day.

For those brought up, as I was, to view Native Americans as interesting but backward, and the taking of their lands as divine manifest destiny, it’s not easy to hear that many colonial Europeans were merciless pillagers. But it’s definitely worth replacing the myth with actual history, since we get connections to real people, including living Native Americans and their ancestors, rather than fantasy superheroes and supervillains.

On the history front, I started reading The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, by David Graeber and David Wengrow. The book is a new synthesis of current archeology, anthropology, evolutionary biology, and other research bearing on the development of humans and their institutions. It’s long, but I’ve already encountered some exciting ideas.

Graeber and Wengrow argue that the concepts of freedom and equality that we thought were developed by the intellectuals of the Enlightenment were actually first worked out and shared by Native Americans, who discussed them over a period of decades with the first European traders and missionaries. Leading eighteenth-century European theorists described these ideas and practices as coming from America, but for later colonial generations, committed to extirpating Native cultures, dissonance made it impossible to entertain the notion of those cultures as intellectual pioneers and leaders.

If recent developments are any guide, it may be a while before these ideas make it into our childrens’ history textbooks. I’m still trying to understand parents disrupting school board meetings around the country in protest against the teaching of what they call “critical race theory (CRT).” I finally figured out that this crowd has redefined the term to have nothing to do with its original academic meaning. For certain angry white parents, CRT now means “teaching history related to American slavery and its aftermath in a way that includes the physical horror and moral shame of it.”

Now Republican-dominated legislatures across the country are banning the teaching of CRT and other efforts to educate children regarding racism. This is disturbing, as are death threats against educators, but this is also educational, in a way. We might have thought everyone understood at least the basics of the American slave system and agreed it was wrong. We may have further thought that no one would feel threatened by a fuller understanding of how that system shaped our country. But now we know that for some of our fellow citizens, this is definitely not the case.

Widespread ignorance about our racial history could be viewed as a failure of our educational system. But to some extent, it has quietly been the status quo for many years. New light is being shined on this shameful history, and for many, and probably most of us, that’s something to welcome and reflect on. Deeper understanding may help us improve our institutions and our communities.

At the same time, it’s definitely frightening when angry anti-CRT parents and Republican politicians start talking about burning books and attacking educators.

This is a wake-up call. Scholars are continuing to make new discoveries, and we’re getting new opportunities for exploration of fresh ideas. But we also have new threats that we better treat seriously. We cannot allow provocative ideas to be banned, books to be burned, and educators to be terrorized and silenced. Our democracy is in trouble, and it needs us to lift our voices.

July 9, 2021

Some good soul, and talking about race

This past week we went out to see a movie for the first time since BC (Before Covid). Sally had read about a new documentary, Summer of Soul, playing at the Rialto, our old time neighborhood movie house. There was only one guy there selling tickets, and he also sold drinks and snacks, so it took longer than usual time to get a ticket, popcorn, and a beer.

But it was so worth it! Summer of Soul is about a concert series in the summer of 1969 in a park in Harlem with mostly Black musicians and hundreds of thousands of Black people listening, singing, and dancing.

The musicians included already famous and future legendary performers, including Stevie Wonder, B.B. King, Nina Simone, David Ruffin, Max Roach, Ray Baretto, Mahalia Jackson, the Fifth Dimension, Sly and the Family Stone, and Gladys Knight and the Pips. That is, some of the very best gospel, blues, jazz, soul, and rock ever made. The musicians seemed to feel the love, and their performances showed it.

It was amazing that it ever happened, and unfortunate that it never became a cultural touchstone, like Woodstock, which happened the same summer. Fortunately, the producers saved the videotapes, and now, 52 years later, we can get a good look at what we missed. It may be just the right moment to discover and cherish this wonderful moment of Black culture. The film is streaming on Hulu.

As you probably already know, race is multi-dimensional issue in the United States, which we haven’t fully worked through. One indicator of this is the odd new moral panic about the teaching of critical race theory. I learned last week that parents in Loudoun County, Va. and other places are harassing and threatening school board members because they believe their young children are being taught this specialized CRT scholarship.

This notion, promoted by fearmongering rabble rousers at Fox News, is almost certainly untrue. But it’s concerning that these parents, who presumably love their children, seem really worried. They apparently think their children may learn some really bad lessons — ones that run contrary to our traditional narrative of progress and harmony.

It isn’t surprising that being clear and direct about race makes some white people uncomfortable. For one thing, it isn’t how we were taught. For another, it may involve unpleasant feelings, like regret, shame, and guilt. For some, there could be a feeling that their position in the hierarchy is indefensible and threatened. And it isn’t surprising that some react to this discomfort defensively, converting it into anger and denial.

But I still find it remarkable that those who want avoid the issue attack those who would like to address our racial history and problems as racists.

Anyhow, for those who aren’t full of that sort of fear and anger, I recommend a recent podcast series from RadioLab: The Vanishing of Harry Pace. It tells what is known of Pace, a highly accomplished businessman who wrote popular songs, started Black Swan records, led a Black insurance company, and then seemed to change his racial identification.

Part of what’s fascinating is how race can seem firmly fixed, and turn out to be highly ambiguous. Similarly, history that we assume must be well settled can turn out to be full of uncertainty.

Along this same line, remember the Alamo? The way I heard the story as a kid, it was a heroic battle for freedom in Texas. This was not true, according to Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth, by Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson, and Jason Stanford. In an interview on Fresh Air, Burrough explained that the battle was part of a struggle mainly about preserving and expanding slavery by white settlers in what was then part of Mexico, where slavery was generally illegal.

The supposed idealism and heroism were Hollywood creations. Burrough noted in the interview that contradicting the traditional accounts of the heroism of Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie, etc. made some people, including militia types, extremely upset.

Getting back to music, I’ve been reading a biography of Claude Debussy by Stephen Walsh. As is usually or always true with music writing, it doesn’t succeed in conveying anything close to the actual music, but it does suggest perspectives for listening. Debussy’s music, some of which I’m capable of playing on the piano, was highly original, but he also acknowledged being inspired by music from other cultures, including the Javanese gamelan tradition of Indonesia.

Inspired by Walsh’s account, I decided to track down some gamelan music, and found plenty on YouTube. The examples I heard didn’t sound at all like they could be Debussy’s model, and I’m inclined to think he drew more from traditional Japanese music. But with YouTube it was surprisingly fun to dip into Javanese and Japanese music. It inspired me to start exploring other traditional world music through there — from eastern Europe, native Americans, west Africans. There’s a ton!

These photos are from Jordan Lake this week. There weren’t a lot of birds there, and those I saw didn’t perform any spectacular feats, like catching a fish. But I liked this osprey.

May 6, 2021

Flowers, and the latest culture war battlefield: stopping anti-racism

Raulston Arboretum is a quiet refuge for plants, birds, and people. Before the pandemic, I visited the big garden at N.C. State a few times each spring to see the new blooms, and I really missed it last year. Now it’s open again, and things are growing wonderfully. The daffodils have gone and the irises are waning, but the roses have arrived in force.

It’s really cheering to see our leaders working on some of our real problems, like climate change, infectious diseases, police violence, roads and bridges, jobs with fair wages, child care, health care, voting rights, and education.

Not so cheering is the latest culture war ploy to rouse the MAGA base: attacking critical race theory and education on the legacy of slavery. Outside of specialized scholars, few had heard of critical race theory until recently, and none had reason to worry about its undermining the social order. Now Republicans in several states are working to ban it from classrooms, and McConnell and most GOP senators are characterizing anti-racism as “divisive nonsense.”

Critical race theory raises problems concerning race and the legal system. McConnell, the Fox pundits, and their allies are promoting the view that this amounts to criticizing America as hopelessly evil. Their position is that talking about our race problems is essentially traitorous, and should be stopped.

This is bizarre, but also makes a kind of sense. For anyone just arriving from outer space: Americans have been thoroughly socialized in a caste system that distinguishes between people and allocates privileges based on skin color, with the lighter people generally privileged over the darker people. Understanding how this came to be, how it works now, and what can be done about it is complicated. The background includes hundreds of years of history, as well as laws, schools, and customs.

It hadn’t occurred to me until this week that a possible response from the right wing, or anyone, could be: the racial caste system doesn’t exist. That’s as delusional as saying the last election was stolen from Trump, or that we need to change our voting laws to prevent fraud by Democrats. But here we are.

Of course, some well meaning people believe that the best thing to do about our race problems is to try to treat all people the same and act like race does not exist. In fact, it’s true in one sense that race is a fiction. It’s a creation of culture, rather than of biology.

But a key part of our culture rests on what we’ve learned to think of as differences in races. We’ve been thoroughly schooled in those supposed differences, to the point that many of us mistakenly think they’re inherent in nature. Becoming conscious of our own understanding of race and getting rid of the myths and fears we carry around is a big educational project. It requires some long discussions, with good teachers and leaders.

We have some such leaders working to correct unfairness in our system, but unfortunately, there are others, like McConnell and the Disgraced Former President, now proposing to lead in the opposite direction.

On top of the spurious racial notions bequeathed to us by our forefathers, politicians have been using race as a political wedge issue for several generations. Cynical politicians periodically organize by stoking groundless fears of attacks by violent erratic dark-skinned people, or (with no regard for consistency) of overly diligent dark-skinned people taking our jobs. This lying strategy has often been successful in attracting votes, and has reinforced the caste system.

The right-wing attack on critical race theory is related to this, but with an interesting twist. Instead of directly targeting dark-skinned people, it targets those who want to discuss the systemic problems of the caste system. As part of this, in a classic Orwellian/Trumpian move, it tries to re-label anti-racism as racism.

The right-wing objective is to prevent discussions that challenge the advantages of the privileged caste. As a bonus, it provides a moral self-justification for silencing the discussion: the privileged silencers can think of themselves as good people who oppose racial distinctions.

As Americans, we’ve been taught to think of ourselves as on the whole good, well-meaning folks. We’ve been steered away from learning much about the immoral and tragic forces that helped build our country (like slavery and expulsion of indigenous peoples) and the continuing brutality of our caste system (like widespread police violence and mass imprisonment).

Our education system has been sadly deficient in equipping us to address such problems. For a long time, many of us in the privileged castes barely noticed how the caste system disadvantaged the low caste folks. With de facto segregation, we seldom saw them, except when they quietly worked for us. Many of us accepted the system as on balance a pretty good one.

But here we are. We’re learning more about the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow, and the bloody resistance to the civil rights movement. We’re learning more about how we took the land of indigenous people through brutal violence and trickery. We’ve started the discussion about fixing our caste system, which will not be easy. Even ignoring the right wingers who view any such efforts as treason, there are still many who believe the stereotypes they were taught Unpacking such ideas will take a lot of work.