Its A Lie Bigger Than The Big Lie, And Liberals Tell It Daily – Patch.com

(This is the first article in a three-story series examining critical race theory: What it is, why there's opposition to it, and whether its components pose a danger to students.)

DALLAS, TX What if the Tea Partiers, QAnon conspiracy believers and Charlottesville marchers had a point?

All they want is the country the founders set up: white rule, without interference from the people they believe have less value. Yes, women have the vote today, and African Americans are free, but that's not what the founders had in mind. They made no provisions to empower women, and many of the men who signed the Declaration of Independence paradoxically owned other human beings.

It's a lie bigger than "The Big Lie" that Donald Trump was cheated out of a second term. That lie that America was intended to be a place where all men are equal under the law might just be wishful thinking on the part of progressives.

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That's why, with all eyes still trained on what the Democrats exiled to D.C. will do about voting laws in Texas, we're looking at critical race theory as one of Gov. Greg Abbott's legislative objectives. In fact, much of his shopping list is about keeping the powerful in power and narrowing access for those who would challenge the status quo.

Time is rapidly running out on the current special session, and Abbott threatens to continue calling them until he can pass his agenda. The most publicized of those action items led to what The New York Times has called "Jim Crow 2.0" laws.

And it's not an exaggeration to say that Abbott is using the power of his office to keep his base white, conservative, Christian, straight Texans as elites, while actively hobbling anyone who doesn't conform to that Hallmark Card of homogeneity.

The fracas of Democrats abandoning the state to prevent Abbott's voter suppression laws still captures most of the media attention. But that doesn't mean his agenda doesn't still look at punishing transgender athletes, lashing out at social media for tamping down crazy right-wing theories or, of course, conservatives' boogeyman of the moment, critical race theory.

Because CRT is just that a theory not everyone even agrees what it means. But Abbott and his cronies want to make sure your kids are kept safe from such subversive propaganda.

"Critical race theory," according to the The Associated Press, "is a way of thinking about America's history through the lens of racism. Scholars developed it during the 1970s and 1980s in response to what they viewed as a lack of racial progress following the civil rights legislation of the 1960s."

Historian Michael Phillips is the author of the fist comprehensive history of race relations in Dallas, "White Metropolis: Race, Ethnicity, and Religion in Dallas, 1841-2001."

He says that CRT was formulated by legal scholars a half-century ago, and revolves around a few basic ideas: "that race is an idea that has no basis in science but shapes almost every aspect of every American life such as education, housing, health policy, policing, and the law; that American courts, police, schools, colleges, and the health care system today continue to perpetuate white supremacy; and that Black voices have mostly been silenced and need to be amplified and heeded if racial justice is to be achieved today."

Without the New York Times' 1619 Project, CRT might have remained an obscure topic perfect for salon chitchat at some academic function. But then the NYT began to examine how the paper might correct the white bias endemic over its entire history of coverage.

Phillips explains that the 1619 Project "was a series of stories that aimed at overturning centuries of 'Founding Fathers' worship. The series argued that the real birthdate of the country we live in was not July 4, 1776, but rather August 1619 when a ship bearing more than 20 enslaved Angolans docked in Virginia, thus beginning the 250-year history of human bondage in what became the United States."

According to Indiana university professor Lasana Kazembe, CRT quickly became a straw dog for everything they feared liberal academics have been promoting since the counterculture '60s.

"Without fully understanding either CRT or 1619," he says, "outraged conservatives have rallied against both of these topics out of utility and fear. Essentially, their uninformed, 'Trojan horse-style' outrage functions as a catch-all to dissuade and remove people's ability to critically question and indict the contentious historical legacy of the U.S. and the White-dominated managerial structures of US society."

As Kazembe sees it, "this is not a battle against CRT. For that to be the case, one would have to first understand what CRT is and how it functions." Because the very people who decry it can't really discuss it in detail, CRT has simply become a punching bag stuffed with ideas conservatives abhor such as the idea that it teaches kids to hate their roots.

He also agrees that, to some degree, the people who marched in the streets chanting "Jews will not replace us" are clamoring for a country built on white autocratic rule.

"I do agree with your question's premise," he says. "The outrage has been definitely manufactured, conflated, and propagandized. In the end, what we're left with is not a critical analysis or even an authentic disagreement, but people's perceptions and subjective reality. It's a conversation being waged not on intellectual grounds, but on mania grounds."

And Phillips agrees. "It is in some ways, a pure media creation like widespread fear over fluoridated water and communism in the McCarthy era, or later panics over sexual content and violence in hard rock music lyrics, supposed Satanic ritual abuse in child day care centers, the pernicious influence of computer games, and so on."

Such panics always develop, he explains, "when older white, straight men believed that their monopoly on economic and political power and their control of the culture are being challenged. That doesn't mean the issue is not vital. The attempts to whitewash history and suffocate discussions of how this country is fundamentally racist will leave students unable to understand the world they live in."

Tomorrow: "We hold these truths to be self-evident," said Abraham Lincoln, "that all men are created equal." That idea was a radical departure from what the founders set in motion. It also cost the president his life.

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Its A Lie Bigger Than The Big Lie, And Liberals Tell It Daily - Patch.com