Here is a supercut of the spin the left-biased media and its commentators were putting on the Republican victory in Virginia, where Loudoun County was Graund Zero for parent-school board battles over the teaching of “critical race theory, or CRT:
CRT is a generalization, allowing progressives who desperately want to have our rising generations indoctrinated into the useful (well, to them) construct that the United States was founded on racism, that its institutions and laws are poisoned by racist beliefs and intentions, that whites are all complicit in a perpetual effort to obstruct the progress and rights of black citizens, and that blacks have been and are perpetual victims requiring permanent and ongoing remedial benefits, standards and advantages. This is being dishonestly called ‘teaching history,” when it is not. It is, instead, teaching a narrow, activist-centered interpretation of history that is no more “factual” than Marxist theory, libertarianism, or Islam. It is also, by its very nature, not anti-racism, but anti-white and anti-American.
Like so many other public debates over culture and policy, the progressive trick that worked so well during the Obama administration has been re-loaded, aimed and fired at criticism of the CRT push. All criticism of black politicians and leaders was (and still is) declared “racist.” It worked, too. Criticism of Barack Obama and others was muted, as potential critics shrank from being stigmatized. Opposing policies that were proposed by black activists or existing policies, like affirmative action, on rational and legitimate grounds also risked being called racist. Oppose the removal of a Thomas Jefferson statue? That’s racist. Point out that Black Lives Matter is an anti-white, anti-police, Marxist con? You believe black lives don’t matter! Racist!
This has been so effective that it was only natural that the same strategy would be employed to make parents wary of opposing public school lessons that were designed to make all children detest their own nation, while encouraging black children to abandon the concept of personal accountability for the acceptance of group grievance and permanent government stewardship. Whites are expected to regard themselves as unjust beneficiaries of a racist society, requiring them to be permanently penitent and submissive. Teaching “white privilege” is based in critical race theory, though it is not technically part of the theory. So is arguing for the elimination of certain laws, like shoplifting, refusing to incarcerate “non-violent” criminals, “defunding the police,” “reparations,” airbrushing away the nation’s honors to its Founders, and so much more.
On his excelled newsletter on substack, Ethics Alarms commenter Humble Talent does a superb job explaining the rhetorical and conceptual slight of hand underway, as he writes in part,
To boil the theory down as I understand it; Because many of (particularly) America’s laws, rules and traditions were written by people who were racist, white supremacy lives on between the margins, and so we should look at those laws, rules and traditions to see if they have racial connotations, and correct those connotations where possible.
Crenshaw and Bell’s versions of critical race theory did not necessarily say that racial outcomes were per se the result of white supremacy, but the framework biased the assumption towards that outcome.
One thing that most of the proponents and opponents of CRT have in common is that they’ve never read a thing about it, and so you have a topic where the label carries a vastly different connotation depending on who is using it.
And the further you get away from the source material, the worse you get, even current literature on Critical Race theory that extensively quotes the works of Crenshaw and Bell is understood to be a poor reflection of the original theories. Ibram Kendi’s “How To Be An Anti-Racist” and Robin DiAngelo’s “White Fragility” are great examples. These aren’t serious, critically thinking people, they’re dwarves standing in the shadows of giants, trying to make bank.
Which leads to a slew of related problems: The left is calling all kinds of things that aren’t traditional CRT “CRT”, and using CRT as a justification for all kinds of bad behavior. The right sees that bad behavior and pushes back against it, lumping traditional CRT in with current CRT, and a laundry list of racial hot topics. On the conservative side, this is actually very easy to track: We were seeing things come out of academia that were unacceptable, and Christoper Rufo weaponized CRT as a pushback against it. Almost all the chatter today is the result of one man’s work, and that’s kind of amazing.
The New Yorker did a piece on it, and I think they’re pretty fair about it. Read the whole thing, but Rufo said it very clearly.
“’We’ve needed new language for these issues,’ Rufo told me, when I first wrote to him, late in May. ‘ Political correctness is a dated term and, more importantly, doesn’t apply anymore. It’s not that elites are enforcing a set of manners and cultural limits, they’re seeking to reengineer the foundation of human psychology and social institutions through the new politics of race. It’s much more invasive than mere ‘correctness,’ which is a mechanism of social control, but not the heart of what’s happening. The other frames are wrong, too: cancel culture is a vacuous term and doesn’t translate into a political program; woke is a good epithet, but it’s too broad, too terminal, too easily brushed aside. Critical race theory is the perfect villain,’ Rufo wrote.He thought that the phrase was a better description of what conservatives were opposing, but it also seemed like a promising political weapon. ‘Its connotations are all negative to most middle-class Americans, including racial minorities, who see the world as ‘creative’ rather than ‘critical,’ ‘individual’ rather than ‘racial,’ ‘practical’ rather than ‘theoretical.’ Strung together, the phrase ‘critical race theory’ connotes hostile, academic, divisive, race-obsessed, poisonous, elitist, anti-American.” ‘Most perfect of all,’ Rufo continued, critical race theory is not ‘an externally applied pejorative.’ Instead, ‘it’s the label the critical race theorists chose themselves.'”
And that leads me to the progressive side: They do call it CRT. They’re backpedalling desperately away from it because Rufo is right, but it’s not hard to find examples of horrible behavior being done in the name of CRT. Progressives are saying that the things we’re seeing aren’t CRT, that there aren’t any examples of CRT in K-12 education, that it’s entirely university level work.
I don’t know whether they’re informed, ignorant, or gaslighting. I mean that, ridiculous as it may seem, any of that is possible.
No, I think it’s pretty clear they are gaslighting, and are convincing themselves as part of the exercise. Read the whole essay. Humble concludes,
“Governments are starting to legislate against CRT, and those laws are a real mixed bag. I’m leery of the government legislating on what can be in a textbook, but if academia isn’t going to regulate itself, and the teachers can’t find ways to teach about racism without resorting to some of the absolute garbage we’re seeing coming out of classes, I don’t see an alternative.”
And watch this podcast. Guest Tony Kinnett, a school administrator in Indiana as well as conservative activist and commentator on education, explains how CRT gets baked into academic curricula as “anti-racism”….
Ethics Alarms 
CRT does not say that whites are all complicit in a perpetual effort to obstruct the progress and rights of black citizens. It simply says that racism is part of everyday life, so people—white or nonwhite—who don’t intend to be racist can nevertheless make choices that fuel racism.
Critical race theory is an academic concept that is more than 40 years old. The core idea is that race is a social construct, and that racism is not merely the product of individual bias or prejudice, but also something embedded in legal systems and policies.
The basic tenets of critical race theory, or CRT, emerged out of a framework for legal analysis in the late 1970s and early 1980s created by legal scholars Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Richard Delgado, among others.
A good example is when, in the 1930s, government officials literally drew lines around areas deemed poor financial risks, often explicitly due to the racial composition of inhabitants. Banks subsequently refused to offer mortgages to Black people in those areas.
Today, those same patterns of discrimination live on through facially race-blind policies, like single-family zoning that prevents the building of affordable housing in advantaged, majority-white neighborhoods and, thus, stymies racial desegregation efforts.
Kelly, did you read the essay above? Or do you just copy-paste this response when your Google alert for CRT says there’s a new page with CRT in the text?
You know the answer.
So, I derive from this that 1) you didn’t read the post, or Humble’s explanation, which is accurate. 2) You’re mouthing talking points that you know, or should are false. If CRT holds that white people engage in racism by just participating in society, then it does hold that whites are all complicit in a perpetual effort to obstruct the progress and rights of black citizens unless they do as activists demand.
How OLD the construct is is 100% irrelevant. Astrology is thousands of years old, and that shouldn’t be taught in the schools either. I know the “core idea”: it was in the post that you didn’t read. “Constructs” do not belong in public school education, nor should they be taught to children.
Read posts, rebut them if you can. Don’t read titles as regurgitate your talking points. Next time, your comment won’t make it to the blog.
Annnd, the Jack Marshall SMACK-DOWN that I’ve come to love so dearly!
The problem is that this fails to interact with reality. I understand to some extent the original works of Crenshaw and Bell, I explained the theory as I believe they imagined it, and to an extent, I think it’s a worthy framework. You mentioned redlining… Sure. And there are things that live on today that would benefit from being viewed through that lens.
But there are two issues… First and most obvious is that some laws, rules or traditions are worthy even if they carry a latent racial coloration and not all issues are racial issues, even if they have racial outcomes.
The second is that your side of the aisle is, to put it mildly, fucking awful at controlling mission creep. And this is what I was referring to when I said that your argument fails to interact with reality: Democrats and progressives were referring to lesson plans in K-12 schools as CRT. Those lessons were being found objectionable in part because they were teaching race essentialism. Even if I give you the argument completely and agree that the race essentialism we were seeing taught in schools wasn’t actually CRT, that fails utterly to interact with the concern that race essentialism was being taught in K-12.
If you as a parent got to peer into the window of your child’s classroom and saw something that you found deeply morally objectionable, would you be allayed by the assurance that you were calling it the wrong label?
After the section that Jack posted above, I described what the people who were informed, ignorant, or gaslighting might look like. You’ve demonstrated that you’re probably in the first or third groups.
So tell me, what best fits you;
Informed
“It’s possible that they’re informed, that they understand CRT the way that Crenshaw and Bell envisioned it, that they don’t see similarities to those writings in the actions of 2021 educators or the writings of Kendi and DiAngelo, and they want to draw stark differences between them. If that’s the case: Welcome to the struggle! If we’re arguing over semantics and you’re really against the same things we are: Put your money where your mouth is. Help us stamp out the excesses of stupid, petty activists posing as educators, and take back your label.”
Gaslighting
Finally, it’s possible that they’re gaslighting. That they know very well what they’re doing, and why they’re doing it, that they really want to teach K-12 children about race using oppressor/oppressed paradigms, and they’re using CRT as cover.
Oops. I edited “informed” to “misinformed” in the quote from your essay, because I thought it was a typo. (It’s the kind I make a lot, as you know.) Fixed. I’m sorry.
No problem, sometimes I wish I had a typo fairy on my shoulder, fixing my errors in real time.
This is admirably restrained, given that it’s obvious kelly never bothered to read the post or your segment of it. I salute you. I am constantly temped to just delete comments like that.
To be clear, I think you’re probably right. And my impression is that most of the people that are inclined to defend CRT from rhetorical creep and probably also the kind of people that would be in favor of the kind of educational excesses that we’re talking about. My expectation is that even if they’re not happy about the blurred definitions, they’re not going to go so far as to take pains to differentiate those excesses from traditional CRT, because they understand that it’s a deathknell for their political pet project.
But on the off chance that they’re just really concerned about definitional persistence (which would be especially novel from progressives generally), I’m willing to entertain the possibility.
“and that racism is not merely the product of individual bias or prejudice, but also something embedded in legal systems and policies.”
“Today, those same patterns of discrimination live on through facially race-blind policies, like single-family zoning that prevents the building of affordable housing in advantaged, majority-white neighborhoods and, thus, stymies racial desegregation efforts.”
So, equality before the law just isn’t good enough. Equality of outcomes, regardless of individual merit, is what we need to legislate and throw more money at to transition into a “post-racial” society?
Hasn’t that been tried, at staggering expense? What do you say about a black family that’s jumped these white-devil obstacles?
Nice appeal to authority, by the way. You even got the “e” right in Kimberle.
HT wrote in his blog,
“Governments are starting to legislate against CRT, and those laws are a real mixed bag. I’m leery of the government legislating on what can be in a textbook, but if academia isn’t going to regulate itself, and the teachers can’t find ways to teach about racism without resorting to some of the absolute garbage we’re seeing coming out of classes, I don’t see an alternative.”
I, too, share HT’s concerns about legislating what can, must, cannot, and must not be written in books and taught in schools. That smacks of restricting freedom of speech and educational liberty of teachers to teach according to their curriculum, from either side.
With respect to textbooks, though, the missing link in all of this is that the major textbook printers standardized their textbooks according to either New York or California curriculum because they were, for the longest time, the largest purchasers of school textbooks, and it made perfect sense to base their printing off of those states. A smaller state such as Iowa or Idaho, or private schools for that matter, would not have the bargaining power to move a publisher to print other topics in their textbooks. A large private school system might be able to use its own textbooks but that would only make sense if it something as large as the Catholic school system but even that system is not uniform throughout the nation, so that means the large states control what is included in the textbooks.
Turning to the video lead-in, though, the talking heads are either too stupid or too biased to appreciate that what they are doing is exactly what they accuse the Republicans of doing, only from the other side. Listening to them, you get the sense that they either don’t know what they are talking about, are too blind to see that they are using race to divide society, or are outright lying about their position. While I generally think people are sincere in their beliefs, the individuals in that group are truly diabolic.
If any party has systematically destroyed race relations over the last 50 years, it has been the Democrat party by focusing on inherent differences and using those differences to establish quotas, set-asides, or outright preferences. The Democrats and the Left (though, I might be repeating myself) have used race as both a shield and cudgel, weaponizing it to silence opposing viewpoints.
If there is further racial conflict in this nation, it will be the result of those people, not the idiots running around with tiki torches. I mean, when did a Polynesian light source made of bamboo become the dominant symbol of white supremacy? It’s no longer a burning cross but a Hawaiian luau featuring ukeleles, pork roasts, and sweet drinks with umbrellas. I for one am not afraid of some moron running around in flowered shirt carrying a torch. I fear the David Dukes, the Al Sharptons, the Maxine Waterses (sp?), and the Joy Reids because they do so much more damage than a loose affiliation of supposed white supremacists, racists, Nazis, and Klansmen ever thought about doing.
jvb
I especially liked the woman talking about Trump’s openly racist comments. I keep asking people who say that to cite me an example of what they are referring to. They have nothing.
And everything they can cite, can be easily demonstrated to be the work of clever editors who splice together sound bites, or zero in on a sentence, omitting the previous one(s) by him or others that provide the essential context. Truly despicable. Maybe evil is the right word, actually, when you’re engaging in character assassination.
Are judgements people make about others based on race or on observed behaviors demonstrated by an individual which may also be prevalent in a particular socioeconomic group?
This cuts both ways. If I as a white male want to associate with those whose attitudes and ideals most closely mirror my own requires that I discriminate among people who may be part of a larger group yet that discrimination is not at all racially based.
When affluent buyers of homes start acquiring and renovating homes in nearly 100% minority neighborhoods residents complain about gentrification. If the buyers are white are the minorities racist for objecting to seeing their communities transformed into more affluent ones or is the issue something else.
We don’t live in the 30’s or even the 20th century. What seems to be defended by the proponents of CRT is that they see today’s laws reflecting the majority demographic and because many choose not to abide by the system of laws – which apply relatively equally across all racial lines but not necessarily across economic ones – then the outcome is evidence of systemic racism. I don’t expect that urban inner city low income residents want to associate with people like me and I probably won’t be seeking any of them in my circle of friends not because of any racial or ethnic difference but because we have vastly different perspectives, attitudes and aspirations.
The historical issues of racism in this country must be taught in the context of the time and the contemporaneous events that which amplified bigoted sentiments. And, if you are to teach about bigotry you must include the lynching of Italians, the demonization of the Irish by the nativists, slave holding indigenous populations as well as the African kings that profited from the Atlantic slave trade. By omitting atrocities committed by others children associate only whites with bigotry and racism. That is why many oppose the concepts of white privilege, systemic racism and the infusion of Marxist tenets embodied within Critical Theory and its successor Critical Race Theory across the K-12 curriculum.
Every act of social violence has been predicated on a belief that the established group was in peril. It matters not who makes up that established group. Ibrihm Kendi creates fear in both groups for money. Fear is what drives people to seek protection and serves as a call to act.
Ok… from personal experience as a parent, it’s not good. It makes kids and society at large collapse right into the hero/victim/villain triangle. What one do you want your 6 year old to be? Opt out. Step out of the paradigm. They’re little kids!!! They shouldn’t be given these options at all from the education system. If anything has ongoing “systemic” problems, it’s our school system. Shame on them for promoting such hurtful rhetoric. How dare they put kids in positions of victims and oppressors and saviors. Shame on them. Shame on us for allowing it.
Bingo.
Kelly stated “Today, those same patterns of discrimination live on through facially race-blind policies, like single-family zoning that prevents the building of affordable housing in advantaged, majority-white neighborhoods and, thus, stymies racial desegregation efforts.”
Single family zoning does not discriminate based on race. Considering the fact that higher income families which include Blacks, Asians, Pakistanis, Indians and other nonwhites are able to buy those homes when lower income whites, Blacks, Asians, Pakistanis cannot does not mean it stymies efforts to desegregate neighborhoods. Whites still outnumber all other individual ethnicities so it stands to reason that even if all income was equally distributed across all races whites (66%)would have more single family homes than (Blacks 13%). When you add in the other nonwhite populations that can afford such homes the ratio among non black owners/ Blacks increases.
When was the last time you saw a government program designed to attract affluent whites to build high end homes in blighted areas to attract whites to predominately black areas. When developers try to revitalize an area the locals complain about gentrification. Newsflash, being poor does not mean having to live in a crime infested area where some discard their waste indiscriminately. I worked at changing conditions in West Baltimore and the majority were unwilling to do their part in making their low income neighborhoods clean and attractive. “Dat’s da gubmints job” is what I heard far too often. When she gets out of her safe space and gets her hands dirty trying to get people to do their part maybe then I will listen to her POV.
And if the whites dare leave for better, safer neighborhoods, they call it white flight. What is more, last year you saw BLM and their useful idiots marching through revitalized areas yelling “black people used to live here!” and “bring back chocolate city!” My response is “how, why, and to what end?” When things change they usually change for a reason. The City of Newark used to be a variegated city of nationalities, mostly with intact families, functioning schools, and well-attended churches, where on every side street there was a factory making some item or other. Heck, my grandmother used to dress up to go to the Bamberger’s in Newark, with its tearoom (when last did you hear of a department store tearoom?).
Although there are still a fair amount of Portuguese in the Ironbound, the Italians had already been leaking for some time to Nutley and to Morris County, where they could own homes and send their kids to safer schools. Then the companies started moving operations out of Newark to places where they would be taxed less. Then came LBJ and the Great Society and the black family as a unit started to fall apart.
Then also came the riots in 1967, although the current black population will correct you if you call them that and say you must call it the Newark Rebellion, as they try to ennoble it as the time the black community stood up and said “we won’t tolerate this anymore,” rather than what it was, an assault on the rule of law. When it was over, the remaining white population of Newark mostly said “screw this, we’re out of here.” Previously Jewish Weequahic flipped to black almost overnight (some fled to Passaic, many more across the river to Williamsburg and Park Slope). To this day the huge, once well-attended synagogue stands like a mostly ignored monument to a time long gone and forgotten. The pews are empty, the bimah is bare, the ner tamid long extinguished, the ark contains nothing but dust, and the whole place is surrounded by a black iron fence with a padlocked gate, most likely never to swing open again.
Hugh Addonizio, the last white mayor, went to prison for corruption, Kenneth Gibson became the first black mayor, and the rest is history. Away from downtown there are still blocks that are nothing but liquor stores, paycheck loan places, and seedy storefront churches (or mosques), while everything else is boarded up or in ruins. The current mayor talks about wanting to redevelop the place, but to his own black-centric plan, he will NOT let the place turn into Brooklyn, he says. All well and good, but so far it hasn’t worked. The fact is that the majority of the population of Newark that isn’t criminal consists of crappy, untalented, unambitious, entitled people, who really aren’t interested in starting businesses, building things, or finding new and more useful ways of doing things. What they ARE interested in is getting as much as they can out of life for the least effort. Oh, the graffiti may have been replaced by street-art murals, the “candy stores” may have been replaced by Dollar General, and the afros and bell bottoms may have been replaced by dreadlocks and cargo pants, but the bottom line is that things really haven’t moved forward from the 70s, except two more generations have grown up crappy and entitled. Of course they call it “generational poverty,” and think that the same developers who aren’t interested in trying to build in crappy, high-crime areas should build apartment building for the black and brown people to live in for free. I seem to recall they did something like that with the projects back then. I don’t see the point of building another district of housing whose denizens will just rip out the copper piping so they can buy drugs. Poor people stay poor because they keep doing the things that make them poor.
A year and change after the fact, downtown Minneapolis still lies in ruins and Portland is a lawless ghost town. Seattle just elected a number of non-radicals, including a practical mayor, but I think it’s too late to save the place. The ordinary people of that city saw their government turn its back on them and throw them to the radical wolves once. They’ll never fully trust it again. Minneapolis turned back the attempt to replace the police department, but I don’t think it matters any more. I can’t see ordinary people wanting to live in a city where something like that would even make it onto the ballot, where you have to vote and then cross your fingers that you won’t be thrown to the wolves.
We have discussed how higher education in this country is a lost cause and can no longer be counted on to produce productive, responsible citizens. Is local government in this country also a lost cause? I’m beginning to think it is.
The Writing is on the wall for local government. When concerned parents speak out about things like CRT or one tries to find out why their board has done less than nothing to help his daughter, who was (allegedly) raped in their school, and is called a “domestic terrorist”, I fear that things may be escalating out of our control, ready or not.
A couple of days ago I wrote this regarding the recent election results…
Yup, it’s all or nothing for progressives now and the post election brazen assault on Republicans has begun. Keep a really close eye on the left leaning media.
As for critical race theory; overt and covert critical race theory is pure anti-white racist propaganda, period. Social justice warriors have brainwashed a huge swath of our society into believing that the overt anti-black racism of the distant past never left our society and it’s now covert and built into literally everything we do right down to being on-time for work, they call it systemic and/or structural racism. This societal brainwashing has led directly to overt anti-white racism as being acceptable and expected as a counterbalance to the perceived covert anti-black racism. Racism has a definition: “prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against a person or people on the basis of their membership in a particular racial or ethnic group, typically one that is a minority or marginalized.” The problem with all this perceived covert anti-black systemic or structural racism is that it cannot be identified but yet there’s a cultish following that seems to think that all the racism innuendo based only on outcomes is absolute fact and proof of racism and anyone that agrees with the innuendo is a racist. It’s all or nothing for these people, you either agree with them or you’re tarred as a racist. The absolutism surrounding CRT is immoral.
Racist see everything through the bigoted eyes of their own race identity and exclude all other factors as possibilities. A great example of this is the race hustling “antiracist” Ibram X. Kendi. Kendi has publicly stated that “where I see racial disparities I see racism”, this outcome based statement is rooted in pure race based bigotry and bigotry is defined as an “obstinate or unreasonable attachment to a belief, opinion, or faction; in particular, prejudice against a person or people on the basis of their membership of a particular group.” Here is the kind of “antiracist” activism that Kendi is promoting…
It’s really clear to me that the overall theme of Kendi’s statements is that if you’re not an antiracist activist who is “aggressively against racism” then you’re a racist. This is delusional thinking and a complete bastardization (change something in such a way as to lower its quality or value, typically by adding new elements) of what a racist actually is. The word racist is literally defined as “prejudiced against or antagonistic toward a person or people on the basis of their membership in a particular racial or ethnic group, typically one that is a minority or marginalized”. Kendi is flipping that defined word on its head and actively promoting that everyone must be looking at the outcomes of everything and if the outcomes are not equal then they must openly call it racism, no critical thinking is allowed and if you don’t follow suit then you’re a racist. Kendi’s absolutism is immoral. Kendi is a race hustling liar and quite likely an anti-white racist! There are lots of brazen race hustling liars out there, you can see them all over the news just like in that first video Jack shared in this blog post, here’s another one.
Can our culture survive the irrational assaults we’re seeing from all these brazen race hustling liars?
In my comment above, the sentence…
“The problem with all this perceived covert anti-black systemic or structural racism is that it cannot be identified but yet there’s a cultish following that seems to think that all the racism innuendo based only on outcomes is absolute fact and proof of racism and anyone that agrees with the innuendo is a racist.”
…clearly has an error. I typed the word agrees instead of disagrees. Probably happened in one of my many edits to condense before posting. The sentence should read…
“The problem with all this perceived covert anti-black systemic or structural racism is that it cannot be identified but yet there’s a cultish following that seems to think that all the racism innuendo based only on outcomes is absolute fact and proof of racism and anyone that disagrees with the innuendo is a racist.”
I for one welcome the Democrats doubling down on their rhetoric.
So far they’ve devalued parent’s concerns about how their children are educated- dismissing the issue as a mere “wedge issue” to drive rubes to the polls or as a “dog whistle” concealing hatred of minorities (never mind it was minority parents who’s concerns likely flipped their votes).
Now the latest wokescoldery is that the poors need to stop complaining about inflation.
Keep it up Democrats.
Please.
I for one welcome the Democrats doubling down on their rhetoric.
So far they’ve devalued parent’s concerns about how their children are educated- dismissing the issue as a mere “wedge issue” to drive rubes to the polls or as a “dog whistle” concealing hatred of minorities (never mind it was minority parents who’s concerns likely flipped their votes).
Now the latest wokescoldery is that the poors need to stop complaining about inflation.
Keep it up Democrats.
Please.
I’m going to keep up your double post as intentional irony.
I keep wondering where the term ‘dog whistle’ came from in this context.
Should dogs everywhere feel insulted? Is this a smear on dog owners? Inquiring minds want to know.
A dog whistle, in reality, is a specialized whistle that emits a sound at frequencies that only dogs can hear, because they have cognition on a more broad scale than we do.
A dog whistle, rhetorically, is a signal that only certain people can hear, because they have the frame of reference to hear it. “Let’s Go Brandon” means something very different depending on whether you know the context, so “Let’s Go Brandon” is a dog whistle.
The problem with calling people out for using “dog whistles” is that they’re dog whistles… You’re only aware of the semantic overload if you know the appropriate context. Most people will say things like “Let’s Go Brandon” and think nothing more than that they’re showing support for Brandon, (This might be a bad example, just because of how prolific the saying is now, but you get my point.) So what they’re doing is assuming bad intentions on behalf of the “signaler” because they understand the dog whistle and assume that the signaler does too.
I can think of no better example than Kelly Donohue, a four-time Jeopardy contestant back in April of 2021. After his first win, when he was being introduced, he held a single finger to his chest. After his second win, when he was being introduced, he held two fingers to his chest. After his third win, while he was being introduced, he flashed a white supremacist hand gesture. Or at least that’s what the people sensitive to white supremacist dog whistles said… He was almost certainly just holding three fingers up to his chest. I’m not sure what he would have done at six. For the great crime of not knowing that his hand was configured in a way roughly approximate to a gesture that white supremacists use, he was subjected to a massive hate campaign: He and his family received death threats, people called his employer, and 450 Jeopardy alumni wrote the show saying that the show should do a better job of policing contestant conduct. Whatever the hell that means in that context.
If the point of a dog whistle is that it’s code, that it isn’t commonly understood, why would you assume that someone was sending coded messages when the more likely explanation is so much more benign?
We all know the answer.