I mean, yes, the US is a white supremacist settler colonial nation. But it seems like just in the last year that all over the country at school board meetings white folks are getting whipped up into a frenzy over the idea that maybe the US isn't quite so perfect, and that white people just might happen to have had some historic advantages that POC were never given. These meetings are something else. White folks getting into fights and making threats over it.
So what has changed? Is it just a reaction to BLM? I don't think material conditions for white folks have degraded all that significantly in the last year to where there's a materialist answer (though I'm open to hearing it). Is it manufactured outrage from conservative media? I genuinely don't know. But this social phenomenon fascinates me - meaning how white people are reacting to relatively minor attacks on white supremacy and the fact that demographics are shifting and will create a more diverse country in the future.
manufactured outrage from conservative media?
yes, of course
Conservatives have literally less than nothing tangibly to offer anyone through the political process, so they have to resort to endless nonsensical culture war grievances to mobilize their feral hogs
Conservatives have literally less than nothing tangibly to offer anyone through the political process
And yet they manage to be successful not only in the U.S. (where the federal government is set up to allow certain types of minority rule), but elsewhere, too.
It goes to show that material conditions are only one factor in forming people's political opinions, and probably a shrinking one in the imperial core. Standards of living have been so high for so long that they're part of the status quo and no one gets credit for them. Major political change seems impossible, so a promise to improve conditions doesn't carry the weight it theoretically could. And then there's the whole conservative propaganda project, which is largely designed to decouple people's political opinions from material reality.
We can't rely on deteriorating conditions to drive people left, and accelerationism is completely nonsensical in this environment. Deteriorating material conditions make people more receptive to leftist ideas, but we have to put in the work of guiding them in the right direction and fleshing out those ideas.
Also, politics isn't seen as a means for creating material change anyway.
If there's anything White Americans hate more than anything it's change that paints them or their beliefs in any but the most positive light
A local high school tried to change their football team's name from the Crusaders to the Chargers and a bunch of guys showed up in full-plate to yell at everyone
Counter protest in chainmail and robes and accuse them of not knowing the history of the crusades.
" HALT TEMPLAR SCUM, HIS HOLINESS POPE JOHN POPE THE 8TH HATH DECLARED THY ACTIONS HERESY AND AS SUCH YOU AND YOUR ORDER ARE SUBJECT TO EXCOMMUNICATION AS OF THIS MOMENT "
You just gotta show up with a halberd or similarly heavy, range-y weapon to punch through that.
Probably could have just given them a push to knock them down and then watch them have heart attacks trying to get back up
School curricula have long been carefully managed to obscure white supremacy and now that that's actually getting pushback, the forces that previously operated quietly have had to go loud, so to speak.
conservative media is once again banging on the drums of nonsense, getting all the piggies riled up.
we are a white supremacist, settler colonial nation. that cannot exist without a massive campaign of truth regulation - disguise the founding genocide of the nation, diffuse the purposeful creation of whiteness as social control, and reify the "rights" and "freedoms" the country has had to be dragged kicking and screaming into acknowledging.
so if schools teach their children that whiteness was constructed, that natives were not hapless friends who accidentally all died, and that racism was not washed away in a cleansing baptism in 1965... they have to react.
we're a reactionary country so all they know to do is react. plus the news media is owned by billionaires who want to see those structures of oppression remain as stable as possible.
one example I'll leave you with is the push for charter schools. a perfect intersection of neoliberal privitization ideology, the re-capture of public space by billionaires in the face of legitimate left wing awakening, and the reconstruction of racial hierarchy that was "abolished" in schooling back in the late 50s and 60s.
any loss of power is top much power lost, so now CRITICAL RACE THEORY is some horror as opposed to an academic and rational analysis of the world.
It's not just CRT. The Right broadly wants to get control of the education system as much as they can, and they're focusing on the state/local level. There's already talk of refusing federal funds to have complete control over what they teach, and I'd expect that to gain steam.
Nope, charter schools are a :LIB: obsession. That's why you mostly see them in poor urban areas. It's a classic "market based" solution that those freaks love.
Conservatives want public schools that they pick the curriculum, or public money to subsidize Christian schools' tuition. Charter schools are fine for poor minorities or whatever, but their own kids will get either a GODLY education, a common sense conservative one, or both.
They're not. A charter school gets public money, but it's not run by the government. What I'm talking about are vouchers that would allow parents to use the tax dollars that would fund their kid at a public school, but they can use it to pay tuition at private religious schools.
It's manufactured outrage. It's so effective because people are primed for it from being feed similar things in the last. The vast majority of the people up in arms about critical race theory have no idea what it actually is.
Many, many of these things tend to be astroturfed by the Koch Brother(s - Rest in Hell, David) or other billionaires. Once it hits corporate news a few times it grows in popularity and becomes the thing to do.
It's astroturfed. This is what right-wing activism looks like on the ground, and the Left should take some notes at least.
The Right is really focused on local school boards as their next political project, and ~critical race theory~ is the latest meme they use to get parents riled up. 30-45 year old white parents are their bread and butter demographic, so infiltrating school boards is doubly effective for conservatives.
This feels exactly the same as the stupid college campuses moral panic about 5 years ago. Also that one moral panic in the 90s. Also the bussing riots. Actually now I'm thinking this might just a thing conservatives do every 5 years except this time they found a fancy academic term to go after.
"I got colonized and all I got was this stupid land acknowledgement" :kkkanada:
This. Same people screaming about CRT now were in the local news mad at new drainage ditches and before that it was because there might be a new gas station. It just goes on and on over the stupidest shit. I don't even register it as culture war anymore because we didn't even have any changes to the curriculum to begin with. The conservatives aren't fighting anyone, they're just angry. The bill they want to pass on this can't define what CRT even is and is basically unenforceable.
Hasan was watching a Fox and Friends segment on this, and after casually googling every interviewed "outraged parent" he figured out that they were each, surprise surprise, connected in one way or another to some Republican organization/grift.
What's especially insidious is that these grifters post their "viral" school board meetings to their garbage facebook groups, and dox parents and students that speak against their anti-CRT hysteria.
Is it just a reaction to BLM?
Is it manufactured outrage from conservative media?
Yes. Academics may have been talking about CRT for a couple of decades but the hoi polloi only found out about it since September 2020.
