Politics Should schools teach Critical Race Theory?

The white supremacist system is that deep and working by design.

Look how they say one's an "Ethnicity" and all the others are "Races"...

It's some of the dumbest shit ever. I never fill these out...

 

Europe is a big place. It's ridiculous to lump all of Europe in with what Britain/France/etc did. That's like putting Canada and Mexico in on everything America has done in the past twenty years. I'm just tired of people making generalized comments about massive groups of people. That's all it is. That has been my stance on here from day one.

 

But this is where things break down, because Dviss is making this argument that "white" doesn't exist, and yet people still make judgements based on me having white skin. You can't simultaneously tell someone that white isn't real while also telling them that they should feel bad for being white. It makes no sense man.

 

I wear some plain, non threatening clothing as well. I only own a couple of shirts that might be aimed at making a statement. And I only buy one if it speaks to me in some way. Wearing a shirt like this does indeed bring conversation. I particularly like this one, because at first glance it is just a NASCAR shirt. The casual non-observant types will walk right past. And that's great. The very observant people I pass are the ones that notice and might strike a conversation. This is also great. It is a way to spark conversation with only those that are observant and interested in the things around them.

Also, I wear this shirt because the hand-wringing over CRT is ridiculous. It is not actually political. Yes, the right wing, in their fake indignation, have MANUFACTURED it into something political. But, teaching the truth about our history as a country is not political. Facts don't care about feelings. Facts themselves are apolitical. And this shit storm whipped up by conservative talking heads and the powers behind them is bullshit, racist, and does not have a place in this world.

 

interesting but I know people outside this country who use white as a descriptor for light skinned people and it has no connection with american slavery...British literature is filled with it....Chinese name for caucasians is Bai ren....white human.....the construct you allude to is great...that we are all the same race, but it's not been in practice for thousands of years...not just american history...look at white faced Chinese Opera or Kabuki Theater...the Chinese use umbrellas in the sunlight to be lighter skinned...personally I have seen bad behavior and racism in my homeland since I ..was a toddler...it's never talked about or highlighted enough for those who have swept it under the rug.....but race is a distraction from what good people and bad people have in common ...it's also a distraction from classism ..keep the poor infighting while we rob them blind. As it stands all ethnic minorities in film and literature or at school use "white" as a descriptor even if it's wrong...everyone from Richard Pryor to Dennis Banks used it. Pretty ingrained in our mind....as well as the minds of people who weren't ever colonized by Europeans....like the Siamese

 

Yeah, this is my take as well. Racism should not be tolerated. All humans are the same race.

This is mostly just a tool to keep poor people arguing with eachother rather than the taking control from the elites.

 

There was a time when Irish or Italians were not considered "white," isn't that correct? Now they are considered white. Kinda weird they weren't at one point.

 

I 100% encourage teaching our past as historically accurate as possible. The good and the bad. We don't want people to forget about the bad things that this country has done. Hell, we need to start teaching some of the bad things that we have done abroad and not just at home, but I also don't want my kid to grow up feeling ashamed to be "European." I don't want her to grow up hating our past. This country did some awful things, but we did some great things too. There's good and bad, and I think that's true of most countries.

 

In theory that's nice, but that's not how it's playing out. Young people are tearing down statues of people like Lincoln.

 

MMmmm... Nah we're both a little off. And even he didn't invent the construct and concept of race. Again, it's America:

The reality of race: The term ‘white people’ was invented by a playwright in 1613

Thomas Middleton’s ‘The Triumphs of Truth’ is the earliest printed example of a European author referring to fellow Europeans as ‘white people’.

The Jacobean playwright Thomas Middleton invented the concept of “white people” on October 29, 1613, the date his play The Triumphs of Truth was first performed. The phrase was first uttered by the character of an African king who looks out upon an English audience and declares: “I see amazement set upon the faces/Of these white people, wond’rings and strange gazes.” As far as I, and others, have been able to tell, Middleton’s play is the earliest printed example of a European author referring to fellow Europeans as “white people”.

A year later, the English commoner John Rolfe of Jamestown in Virginia took as his bride an Algonquin princess named Matoaka, whom we call Pocahontas. The literary critic Christopher Hodgkins reports that King James I was “at first perturbed when he learned of the marriage”. But this was not out of fear of miscegenation: James’s reluctance, Hodgkins explained, was because “Rolfe, a commoner, had without his sovereign’s permission wed the daughter of a foreign prince”. King James was not worried about the pollution of Rolfe’s line; he was worried about the pollution of Matoaka’s.

The concept of race
Both examples might seem surprising to contemporary readers, but they serve to prove the historian Nell Irvin Painter’s reminder in The History of White People (2010) that “race is an idea, not a fact”. Middleton alone did not invent the idea of whiteness, but the fact that anyone could definitely be the author of such a phrase, one that seems so obvious from a modern perspective, underscores Painter’s point. By examining how and when racial concepts became hardened, we can see how historically conditional these concepts are. There is nothing essential about them. As the literature scholar Roxann Wheeler reminds us in The Complexion of Race (2000), there was “an earlier moment in which biological racism… [was] not inevitable”. Since Europeans did not always think of themselves as white, there is good reason to think that race is socially constructed, indeed arbitrary. If the idea of “white people” (and thus every other race as well) has a history – and a short one at that – then the concept itself is based less on any kind of biological reality than it is in the variable contingencies of social construction.

There are plenty of ways that one can categorize humanity, and using color is merely a relatively recent one. In the past, criteria other than complexion were used, including religion, etiquette, even clothing. For example, American Indians were often compared with the ancient Britons by the colonizers, who were descendants of the Britons. The comparison was not so much physical as it was cultural, a distinction that allowed for a racial fluidity. Yet, by the time Middleton was writing, the color line was already beginning to harden, and our contemporary, if arbitrary, manner of categorizing races began to emerge.

The scholar Kim Hall explains in Things of Darkness (1996) that whiteness “truly exists only when posed next to blackness”: so the concept of “white people” emerged only after constructions of “blackness”. As binary oppositions, whiteness first needed blackness to make any sense. The two words create each other. The scholar Virginia Mason Vaughan writes in Performing Blackness on English Stages, 1500-1800 (2005) that: “Blackfaced characters in early modern dramas are often used... to make whiteness visible.” Black and white have never referred to defined groups of people; they are abstract formulations, which still have had very real effects on actual people.

The slave trade
There is little verisimilitude in describing anyone with either term, which explains their malleability over the centuries. How arbitrary is it to categorize Sicilians and Swedes as being white, or the Igbo and Maasai as both black? This kind of racial thinking developed as the direct result of the slave trade. Hall explains: “Whiteness is not only constructed by but dependent on an involvement with Africans that is the inevitable product of England’s ongoing colonial expansion.” As such, when early modern Europeans begin to think of themselves as “white people” they are not claiming anything about being English, or Christian, but rather they are making comments about their self-perceived superiority, making it easier to justify the obviously immoral trade and ownership of humans.

Hall explains that the “significance of blackness as a troping of race far exceeds the actual presence” of Africans within England at the time. Before Middleton’s play, there were a host of imagined black characters, such as in Ben Jonson’s The Masque of Blackness (1605), which featured Queen Anne performing in blackface, as well as Shakespeare’s “noble Moor” in Othello, staged a couple of years before Middleton’s play. Understandings of race were malleable: in early modern writing, exoticized characters can be described as dusky, dun, dark, sable or black. Depictions of an exoticized Other weren’t only of Africans, but also Italians, Spaniards, Arabs, Indians, and even the Irish. Middleton’s play indicates the coalescing of another racial pole in contrast to blackness, and that is whiteness – but which groups belonged to which pole was often in flux.

The Shakespearean treatment
Consider the Dark Lady of Shakespeare’s sonnets. In sonnet 130, he says of his mysterious paramour that “her breasts are dun”; in sonnet 12, he references her “sable curls”; and in sonnet 127 he writes that “black wires grow on her head”. As is commonly understood, and taught, Shakespeare subverted the tradition exemplified by poets such as Petrarch who conceptualized feminine beauty in terms of fairness. Part of this subversion lay in pronouncements such as the one that states that black is “beauty’s successive heir”, a contention of Shakespeare’s that can seem all the more progressive when our contemporary racial connotation of the word is considered. Thus, how much more radical is his argument in sonnet 132, that “beauty herself is black/And all they foul that thy complexion lack”. Shakespeare’s racialized language connoted a range of possibilities as to how the Dark Lady’s background could have been imagined, and the conjecture that she was based on women variously European or African indicates this racial flux in the period.

Or take Caliban, the native of the enchanted isle colonized by Prospero in The Tempest. Often sympathetically staged in modern productions as either an enslaved African or an American Indian, there are compelling reasons to think that many in a Jacobean audience would rather understand Caliban as being more akin to the first targets of English colonialism, the Irish. By this criterion, Caliban is part of the prehistory of “how the Irish became white”, as the historian Noel Ignatiev put it in 1995. None of this is to say that Caliban is actually any of these particular identities, nor that the Dark Lady should literally be identified as belonging to any specific group either, rather that both examples provide a window on the earliest period when our current racial categorizations began to take shape, while still being divergent enough from how our racialized system would ultimately develop.

Race might not be real, racism is
Yet our particular criteria concerning how we think about race did develop, and it did so in service to colonialism and capitalism (and their handmaiden: slavery). Bolstered by a positivist language, the idea of race became so normalized that eventually the claim that anyone would have coined such an obvious phrase as “white people” would begin to sound strange. But invented it was. With the re-emergence today of openly racist political rhetoric, often using disingenuously sophisticated terminology, it is crucial to remember what exactly it means to say that race is not real, and why the claims of racists aren’t just immoral, but also inaccurate. Middleton demonstrates how mercurial race actually is; there was a time not that long ago when white people weren’t white, and black people weren’t black. His audience was just beginning to divide the world into white and not, and, unfortunately, we remain members of that audience.

Race might not be real, but racism very much is. Idols have a way of affecting our lives, even if the gods they represent are illusory. In contemplating Middleton’s play, we can gesture towards a world where once again such a phrase as “white people” won’t make any sense. In realizing that humans were not always categorised by complexion, we can imagine a future where we are no longer classified in such a way, and no longer divided as a result of it either.

 

Giving your child knowledge of self is the best empowerment you can give them. Understanding where you came from means you can do better.

Sorry, but y'all SHOULD be ashamed of that shit. So ashamed you don't repeat it like America's trying to do now.

 

You don't seem to have a clue of how HORRIBLE he was... If you don't know, your history was hidden from you so you could hold that belief about "The Great Emancipator"... Lincoln wanted us to go back to Africa... Also, Why the fuck do we think that the mysoginistic enslavers and their documents are infallible??


From Lincoln's Speech, Sept. 18, 1858.

"While I was at the hotel to-day, an elderly gentleman called upon me to know whether I was really in favor of producing a perfect equality between the negroes and white people. While I had not proposed to myself on this occasion to say much on that subject, yet as the question was asked me I thought I would occupy perhaps five minutes in saying something in regard to it. I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the black and white races -- that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making VOTERS or jurors of negroes, NOR OF QUALIFYING THEM HOLD OFFICE, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any of her man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race."


Largest Mass Execution in US History: 150 Years Ago Today
Lincoln ordered the execution of thirty-eight Dakota Indians for rebellion—but never ordered the execution of Confederate officials or generals.

December 26, 1862: thirty-eight Dakota Indians were hanged in Mankato, Minnesota, in the largest mass execution in US history–on orders of President Abraham Lincoln. Their crime: killing 490 white settlers, including women and children, in the Santee Sioux uprising the previous August.

The execution took place on a giant square scaffold in the center of town, in front of an audience of hundreds of white people. The thirty-eight Dakota men “wailed and danced atop the gallows,” according to Robert K. Elder of The New York Times, “waiting for the trapdoors to drop beneath them.” A witness reported that, “as the last moment rapidly approached, they each called out their name and shouted in their native language: ‘I’m here! I’m here!’ ”

Lincoln’s treatment of defeated Indian rebels against the United States stood in sharp contrast to his treatment of Confederate rebels. He never ordered the executions of any Confederate officials or generals after the Civil War, even though they killed more than 400,000 Union soldiers. The only Confederate executed was the commander of Andersonville Prison—and for what we would call war crimes, not rebellion.
Minnesota was a new frontier state in 1862, where white settlers were pushing out the Dakota Indians—also called the Sioux. A series of broken peace treaties culminated in the failure of the United States that summer to deliver promised food and supplies to the Indians, partial payment for their giving up their lands to whites. One local trader, Andrew Myrick, said of the Indians’ plight, “If they are hungry, let them eat grass.”

The Dakota leader Little Crow then led his “enraged and starving” tribe in a series of attacks on frontier settlements. The “US-Dakota War” didn’t last long: After six weeks, Henry Hastings Sibley, first governor of Minnesota and a leader of the state militia, captured 2,000 Dakota, and a military court sentenced 303 to death.

Lincoln, however, was “never an Indian hater,” Eric Foner writes in his Pulitzer Prize–winning book The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery. He did not agree with General John Pope, sent to put down a Sioux uprising in southern Minnesota, who said “It is my purpose utterly to exterminate the Sioux if I have the power to do so.” Lincoln “carefully reviewed the trial records,” Foner reports, and found a lack of evidence at most of the tribunals. He commuted the sentences of 265 of the Indians—a politically unpopular move. But, he said, “I could not afford to hang men for votes.”

The 265 Dakota Indians whose lives Lincoln spared were either fully pardoned or died in prison. Lincoln and Congress subsequently removed the Sioux and Winnebago—who had nothing to do with the uprising—from all of their lands in Minnesota.

Mankato today is a city of 37,000 south of Minneapolis, notable for its state university campus, which has 15,000 students. In Mankato, which has heretofore neglected its bloody past, a new historical marker is being erected at the site of the scaffold, at a place now called Reconciliation Park. The marker, a fiberglass scroll, displays the names of the thirty-eight Dakota who were executed.

The Minnesota History Center in St. Paul is currently featuring an exhibit titled “Minnesota Tragedy: The U.S.-Dakota War of 1862.” “You can’t turn your head from what is not pretty in history,” said Stephen Elliott, who became the director of the Minnesota Historical Society last May after twenty-eight years at Colonial Williamsburg. He told the Minneapolis Star Tribune, “Whatever we do, it’s not going to somehow heal things or settle it.” The impressive state-of-the-art exhibit includes the views of both white settlers and Indians, voices from the past as well as the present. “Visitors are encouraged to make up their own minds about what happened and why,” the official guide declares. The website and online video are particularly impressive.

 

Abraham Lincoln even AFTER the Emancipation Proclamation, carved out places where slavery could still exist.

Know your history and know thyself...

 

I'm sorry but no. I watched a great documentary on his life... It was incredible! Highly recommended.