The left responds to CRT critics with absurdities

 Rich Lowry:

...

The Yale professor Timothy Snyder, a scholar of totalitarianism and 20th-century atrocities, has written a piece for The New York Times Magazine titled “The War on History Is a War on Democracy.”

At The Atlantic, Anne Applebaum published a piece with the headline “Democracies Don’t Try to Make Everyone Agree.”

Applebaum summarizes what she thinks is the crux of the anti-CRT push in schools: “Schoolchildren should not be taught the history of racism in America; they should not learn about slavery; they should not be allowed to think about the long-term consequences. That, apparently, is now the consensus in a segment of the Republican Party.”

Not to put too fine a point on it, but this line of attack on anti-CRT bills is either woefully misinformed or willfully dishonest. It doesn’t interact at all with the intention or the text of the anti-CRT provisions. In sum, it is a hysterical smear.

Applebaum doesn’t even try to provide an example of the alleged campaign to erase slavery and racism from the nation’s curricula, even though there’s already been a lot of anti-CRT movement in the states.

But, hey, evidently, being a fierce proponent of open debate and historical accuracy frees one from the obligation of trying to understand the people you are criticizing or of providing actual evidence for your charges against them.

Snyder goes even further. He explains at length Russian efforts to minimize the Stalin-era famine in Ukraine and to squelch discussion of it — a gross offense against historical memory. This campaign is formalized in “memory laws” that forbid speaking the truth and protect “the feelings of the powerful” rather than “the facts about the vulnerable.”

“This spring,” Snyder intones, “memory laws arrived in America.”

Then he recites the supposed parade of horribles. He says the new anti-CRT rule adopted by Florida’s state school board seeks, like Russia’s 2014 memory law, “to silence a history of suffering” and “to forbid education about racism.”

Either Snyder doesn’t know what he’s talking about because he hasn’t taken the time to understand the state of play in Florida or he’s being deliberately deceptive.

The rule adopted by the Florida board says, in a passage that Snyder conveniently doesn’t quote, “Instruction on the required topics must be factual and objective, and may not suppress or distort significant historical events, such as the Holocaust, slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction, the civil rights movement and the contributions of women, African American and Hispanic people to our country.”

This is like Vladimir Putin’s handiwork?
...

Snyder says this means that “since Jim Crow is systemic racism, having to do with American society and law, the subject would seem to be banned in Florida schools.”

This is utter nonsense. First, the sentence prior to the one about systematic racism, quoted above, says that slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction, and the civil-rights movement can’t be suppressed or distorted.

How is that consistent with a ban on the teaching of Jim Crow?

Indeed, it is written in Florida statute that students are to be taught “the history of African Americans, including the history of African peoples before the political conflicts that led to the development of slavery, the passage to America, the enslavement experience, abolition, and the contributions of African Americans to society. Instructional materials shall include the contributions of African Americans to American society.”

The rule adopted by the Florida board of education in no way supplants the statute but adds further guidance for teachers in how to implement it.

You wouldn’t know that from Snyder’s article, which is huffy about truth and accuracy without displaying any commitment to them.
...

Proponents of CRT seem comfortable in lying about CRT and lying about what its critics are saying.  At its heart, the critics do not want kids to be taught that they are born oppressors or victims.  Now those who have been pushing that dialog are even lying about that and their own books on the subject.  

Thomas Sowell has written extensively on the history of slavery that has existed in various forms for about eight thousand years, long before even so-called indigenous people populated America.  BTW, those people also practiced slavery.  More white slaves were taken in North Arica than black slaves were ever brought to America.  Black slaves still exist in parts of Africa.  What CRT proponents are pushing is a misleading sliver of the history of slavery.

See, also:

One Big Shift Shows That Conservatives Have CRT Proponents on the Run

Taking the Racism Test