Now it’s making the jump to K-12. My second grader is apparently learning how to develop an “identity” around her “skin tone” (according to an email from her teacher). This has had the predictable effect of making my daughter unhappy with her dark skin. Kids are perceptive. Her teacher is making a big deal out of skin tone and how society sees dark skinned people as inferior, and naturally she wonders why society might pervasively believe it if it wasn’t true. (She goes to a progressive, diverse, private school in deep blue Maryland, so she’s not developing this sentiment from the other kids. I went to a very white, quite red Virginia public school 30 years ago and nobody ever told me about brown skin being bad.)
> In early June, Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) signed a bill that restricts what teachers can teach in K-12 schools and at public universities, particularly when it comes to sexism and racism. It bans 10 concepts that Republican legislators define as “divisive,” including the idea that “one race or sex is superior to another,” that members of a particular race are inherently inclined to oppress others, and that “the U.S. and Iowa are fundamentally racist or sexist.”
The wording ‘divisive’ in all these laws is interesting. Why is this the operative word here? Banning ‘concepts’ on the grounds that they are ‘divisive’ is some of the one of the most Orwellian language I’ve ever read.
It just seems like laws with the title ‘propagation of divisive concepts prohibited’ will evolve to an even expanding list of thought crime.
This isn’t a comment on how race should be treated and discussed in a classroom.
The word “ban” is Vox’s editorialization. These laws don’t “ban” ideas—they regulate the content of what school boards can include in school curriculums. In a sense these regulate students’ “thoughts” insofar as we expect public schools to teach kids to believe certain things and not other things. But that’s the point of school! Schools inherently must decide between how to teach certain things.
This is a good point. Then again, the ideologies they're fighting as "divisive" have been pushing the position that some ideas can be harmful. So it seems like their own rhetoric is now being used against them, and if they don't like it, maybe they should rethink their own positions on this particular issue.
I went to a decently progressive elementary school, and the kids were absolutely racist by second grade. It'd be nice if we could just ignore race, but that's not reality yet.
Second graders aren’t “racist.” They see color differences, just like they can see if kids are short or tall or skinny or whatever. They are either taught or learn by observation to associate color with other things.
Perhaps their racism was a result of "progressive" schools and parents of kids in those schools seeing everything through a lens of race or other identity markers?
I'm pretty sure it was because kids are assholes. And because it's easy to pick on outsiders. The class had 20 white kids and 3 black ones, obviously they're going to be singled out by the 7 year olds.
Anyway, this was before progressive meant seeing everything through the lens of race, so it definitely wasn't that.
If you tie your identity, your idviduality, your importance to your melanin amount or ethnicity you are racist. You are dividing up humans into "us and them". You are using it to set yourself apart, to make yourself different (which inevitably leads to divisiveness and bigotry because you've divided up humanity) and to stake out a claim of ownership on some part of human culture.
It's not your culture it is our culture. We are all humans. All culture is human culture.
Bigotry will persist for as long as people invest importance and value into ancestral and cultural differences between groups. Whether as a positive (celebrate X culture) or negative (blame Jews).
Obviously, until we view ourselves as united, as one. We will remain divided.
Not going to lie, but that type of education seems like a great way to create a massive bolus of right-leaning kids that reject the ideas forced on them by their parents generation (they always rebel!) that just lead to self-defeating internal dialogue.
Why on earth is this comment here? It has nothing to do with the article or the thread, and it's not the first comment I've seen like this. (The other recent one was a random rant about Tesla self-driving.) Is this comment the product of a bot, maybe? Or is there an HN client application with a bug, appending comments to the wrong place? Just human error?
I dont really get your analogy; thats not the argument being made here. An initial offering industry/mechanism isnt going anywhere, it will just likely gradually shift from IPO to ICO. The reason bankers make absurd fees from IPO's isnt from their due diligence, its from market access. Thats coming to an end.
Parent said in his comment, the teachings made his brown skinned child feel inferior, and he didn't feel this way as a child with the old way of teaching.
Do you think my progressive Maryland school is throwing “skin color is really important in society” while leaving “but all skin colors are equal” out of the discussion?
But we’re dealing with kids who haven’t yet been socialized with the ideal of color blindness, like you and I. At the same time, they don’t take what teachers say at face value.
Teachers say “skin color is really important” and “America is systemically racist against dark skinned people.” Teachers can say “but all skin colors are equal” but that isn’t necessary what kids take away. What do they mean by “equal?” Is it a euphemism, like so many others we use? Is it moral equivalence rather than literal equality? At the same time, teachers are saying people with different skin colors are different—the kids are taught to celebrate their diversity. And why would so many people think people with dark skin are inferior if there wasn’t some truth to that? You can’t tell second graders that skin color is a big deal but also not a big deal.
Also, the premise isn’t true. I grew up in Virginia when it was a red state. I went to college at Georgia Tech, where most of my classmates were from red parts of the south. But I’ve only ever been called a racial slur twice, both times by homeless people who weren’t white.
Telling brown kids that society is systemically racist against them when it isn’t true does harm. It divides them from their white peers and makes them look for racism where it might not exist.
The TV show “White Lotus” actually has a great take on this. Native Hawaiian girl goes to elite school and visits a Hawaiian resort with her friend’s wealthy white parents. She’s learned CRT education at her college and become woke. She convinces a native Hawaiian hotel worker to ignore his moral compass by telling him to steal her friend’s family’s jewelry because after all white people stolen Hawaii from people like him. He gets arrested and it ruins his life. And she strains her relationship with her white friend, who genuinely cared about her as a person. As the parent of a brown girl the show articulated exactly what I’m afraid of with CRT education.
> Telling brown kids that society is systemically racist against them when it isn’t true does harm.
Is it also harmful to tell them society isn't systematically racist when it is true? I'm not sure 2nd grade is the place for this discussion, but there are lots of pre-existing divisions on race that will affect people's interactions. For me it's worth being aware of them, calling them out, and not perpetuating them. We've just been through massive unrest due to policing disparities, and I would want brown kids who are likely to interact police on their own to be aware of some aspects of it.
“Systemic racism” is itself a woke term that misleadingly imputes prejudice and intent onto basically economic factors. As a brown guy in America, I can expect to make more money, and my kids will have higher income mobility even if I came here in poverty, than whites. I have half the chance of being shot by the police and a third the risk of being incarcerated than white people. I can expect to live longer as a brown man than white women. What does it mean to say American society is “systemically racist” against me and my kids?
It’s not just my kind of brown people either. The incarceration rate for Hispanics is now below that of whites: https://www.slowboring.com/p/hispanic-prison (even though Hispanics are much more likely to be in the 18-35 demographic where incarceration is highest). Studies show Hispanics are converging in terms of income over generations at the same pace as Italians, etc. American Hispanics live as long as white people in Denmark. What does “America is systemically racist” mean for them?
This system of “white supremacy” that holds back all non-white people just doesn’t exist. It’s a myth.
> I have half the chance of being shot by the police and a third the risk of being incarcerated than white people.
This claim completely contradicts every statistic I've seen on the topic. Can you pass along a source for this? It's a significant adjustment to my thinking on this topic if I can cite a source.
If it's the book you link to the end of your comments, I'll have to have it to my reading list.
The seemingly higher rate for hispanics disappears when you adjust for the fact that the median hispanic is 28 and the median white person is 42. (The odds of being shot by the police drop sharply after 35.)
> The dwindling of Hispanic-white disparities is even more remarkable in light of criminal behavior being so heavily concentrated in adolescence and young adulthood,. The median age for Hispanics is 29.8 years versus 43.7 for whites, meaning even in a system free of prejudice that punished solely on the basis of crimes committed, we would expect criminal justice disparities between the populations to be growing, not shrinking.
"Systemic racism" targeted generally at non-white people isn't feature of American society. It's much narrower than that: persistent disparities for Black and indigenous people.
> Telling brown kids that society is systemically racist against them when it isn’t true does harm. It divides them from their white peers and makes them look for racism where it might not exist.
Okay, but it is true. We have the history and numbers to know that.
Perhaps second grade is too young, but omitting this reality from k-12 completely would be as blind as omitting buffer overflow attacks from a course on memory architectures.
Things are as they are because of how they were (and still are).
Not at all. I'm saying all people were not treated as equals, and when they asked about it they weren't given an answer. The school didn't know how to talk about it at all so it didn't.
I think the key part here is "pretend these factors didn't exist at all". I think answering questions when they are raised is very important, and I agree with you that kids are perceptive. On the other hand, they should also be offered a chance to live without thinking about that if it's possible.
For instance that these teachings are racist and racism is a despicable ideology that deserves no serious consideration or even consideration in any form or shape.
> This is the next batch of folks who will be doing your IPO paperwork:
No these are not the next batch of people filling out your IPO... that article you picked is like half a dozen randos attending an optional one time event that from the selective information they gave doesn't even seem to represent progressive views. Then soundbites were taken out of context by a hardline conservative outlet and you were told that this is what the left stands for. Can you honestly tell me that you believe progressives want to mandate that you begin every day chanting "i am tango-unchained and i am racist"?
Back to the article, what did the rest of that conversation look like besides a single screenshot? Is there any context where it might make sense to say "i am racist" without literally wearing a white hood. Maybe those words are being used to capture concepts that are more difficult to explain than firing someone based on the color of their skin or telling your daughter she shouldn't marry outside her race. These aren't dumb people and they made the decision themselves to say these things and I'm sure had good reasons that made sense in the moment.
The professor screenshotted here has like 22 years of legal teaching experience. Don't you think there's a chance he was having an interesting conversation about intellectual concepts and was taken out of context? That article you posted never asked these questions or got the "other side" and asked him to explain himself. Instead we just have quotes from a few conservatives that were offended by the training. It kind of reveals the purpose of this article.
It's fine to have ideological disagreements, but to frame this article as representing a movement let alone a generation of thinking is dishonest and hysterical.
I am brown and I can’t believe what the western countries are doing with going back to racial segregation days. Instead of teaching everyone to work hard snd accomplish hard things, they are being taught that they can’t achieve hard things because the boogeyman is stopping them. Victimhood doesn’t help kids. Even the most successful black and brown people like Lebron James who achieved what they did via working hard know this but they don’t want to teach that to the kids. It’s mind boggling.
Now a days there’s literally no difference between a woke and a racist. Both believe in judging people by their skin color instead of the content of their character.
Racism and actual crime gets conflated, and that is a major problem within America.
If someone is the victim of a crime, it should not matter whether that crime was racially-motivated or not. Serve justice, full stop. Don't feed into racial realism.
Things get really bad when it gets twisted to the point of "who cares about this particular crime, RACISM is the problem!" This leads to injustice because focus is shifted from the real crime to an abstract ideological debate. And it happens all the time.
Racism is a problem when it obstructs justice, whether it's Jim Crow laws that are literally racist, or "woke" media grifting that muddies the water with race realism.
So your response to a person with brown skin say that their experience doesn't matter? Why doesn't it matter because you read that they where lucky or that you experienced something different?
I say it from my own personal experience as a light skinned black person, I've seen how the police laser focus on my dark skinned friends and, I've seen the subtle differences in behavior displayed by white people in their presents.
I suspect that it’s not luck, but rather than the racism that exists in America isn’t directed at brown people generally, but Black people specifically. And while I’m fully supportive of combatting that, I’m not okay with schools telling my brown daughter that she faces systemic racism that she doesn’t. We shouldn’t project the Black American experience and pedagogy designed around that onto all brown people, which is what we’re on the path to doing. It’s not actually true and we should be truthful with our kids. By 2060, 40% of the country will be Hispanic or Asian. Our overall approach to race issues must accommodate their reality as well.
Now it’s making the jump to K-12. My second grader is apparently learning how to develop an “identity” around her “skin tone” (according to an email from her teacher). This has had the predictable effect of making my daughter unhappy with her dark skin. Kids are perceptive. Her teacher is making a big deal out of skin tone and how society sees dark skinned people as inferior, and naturally she wonders why society might pervasively believe it if it wasn’t true. (She goes to a progressive, diverse, private school in deep blue Maryland, so she’s not developing this sentiment from the other kids. I went to a very white, quite red Virginia public school 30 years ago and nobody ever told me about brown skin being bad.)
Anyone who objects to this sort of teaching—not just teaching history, to be clear, but teaching woke concepts—is attacked as a Republican: https://www.vox.com/22644220/critical-race-theory-bans-antir...
> In early June, Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) signed a bill that restricts what teachers can teach in K-12 schools and at public universities, particularly when it comes to sexism and racism. It bans 10 concepts that Republican legislators define as “divisive,” including the idea that “one race or sex is superior to another,” that members of a particular race are inherently inclined to oppress others, and that “the U.S. and Iowa are fundamentally racist or sexist.”