Comment by apostacy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by apostacy | Hacker News Reader

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> That's always been true, and CRT has nothing to do with it.

I have seen it happen to preteens first hand. Children that a year ago were comfortable hanging out, are no longer so.

CRT encourages kids to engage in paint-swatch racialism.

It is heartbreaking to see first hand children who used to just be able to play together, worry about whether they should include or exclude other kids because of what they look like.

Teaching children to pre-judge people because of where their pigmentation is on a paint swatch is grotesque and it is child abuse.

If your ideology leads you to hurt children, then your ideology must be wrong.

So, pre-judging people is wrong because it erases their identity by making unfounded and unfair presumptions about who they are because of arbitrary physical characteristics that they can not control. Racial pre-judgement is a dangerous bronze-age heuristic that society should try to be moving past, but CRT encourages it.

Implanting racial self hatred (and racial pride) is a pernicious and dangerous thing to do, and if you can't see that I don't have time to educate you. Reducing human beings down to being "black and brown bodies" is disgusting. The correct response to that kind of dehumanization can only be disgust. And again, people in positions of authority imposing that in CHILDREN. At least adults have more agency to push back.

I don't care if that isn't "real" CRT. It doesn't matter if what I am talking about isn't textually correct. If the CRT you are talking about only exists in the minds of obscure scholars and texts, then it is just a fantasy, and doesn't really exist. The only real CRT is what is actually being implemented in classrooms across the country.

> CRT encourages kids to engage in paint-swatch racialism

No, it doesn't; paint-swatch racialism is solidly embedded in American culture, abd CRT is quite distant from it. Not, again, that anyone is actually teaching CRT to kids.

It’s true that “CRT” is the label to which the American Right has attached their longstanding slander against the anti-racist elements of the left, that by opposing institutional racism that favors whites they paint whites as racist based on their race, but the Right changing the label they attach that lie to doesn't make it either the broader lie or the new association true.

> If your ideology leads you to hurt children, then your ideology must be wrong.

Well, yes, that's among the many reasons why a reflexive defense of white supremacy that leads you to invent a whole false narrative around Critical Race Theory to justify mandated teaching of whitewashed history to children is wrong, sure.

> I don't care if that isn't "real" CRT.

You should care, because caring about being lied to about that would tell you to look behind the lie and see that CRT has been around for decades, no one has tried to teach it to kids, no has proposed teaching it to kids, and there's been no change in that or anything adjacent to it recently that could explain any of the things which have been blamed on it. The only thing that has changed connected to CRT is that in the last year, the American Right, out of the blue and with little connection to reality, adopted it as a label to which they attached the same lins which the anti-anti-racist segment of the Right has used against contemport anti-racists for generations (even before CRT existed).

And that might lead you to consider the actual causes of the tensions you see, rather than the self-serving narrative of a political faction that has had strategic leverage of disaffected White racist as a central strategy since...well, just a little earlier than CRT was first developed.

> Children that a year ago were comfortable hanging out, are no longer so.

Yeah probably no lurking variable there...

> If the CRT you are talking about only exists in the minds of obscure scholars and texts, then it is just a fantasy, and doesn't really exist. The only real CRT is what is actually being implemented in classrooms across the country.

Imagine replacing CRT in this sentence with quantum physics or advanced macroeconomics. It doesn't make sense, and leaning heavily on "oh but the children" doesn't really win any points if you don't have a rational explanation of how this is happening.

> Yeah probably no lurking variable there...

You are teaching kids to be uncomfortable with each other based on what they look like. You are telling kids that they are fundamentally different from each other. You are telling kids that "race" is the most important element of their identity, and that they are wrong for trying to overlook how they are different.

That is child abuse.

I've heard fire and brimstone priests who turn people against each other use exactly the same defense for traumatizing kids. It is something like: It's not my fault that I'm giving 6 year olds nightmares; I'm just exposing them to reality. I'm actually helping them!

Telling children that they are terrible people and need your permission to be good is a horrible thing to do. And I think that in the future you will end up being seen as no better than abusive clergy.

> Imagine replacing CRT in this sentence with quantum physics or advanced macroeconomics. It doesn't make sense, and leaning heavily on "oh but the children" doesn't really win any points if you don't have a rational explanation of how this is happening.

It makes perfect sense. If everyone is learning a flawed or incomplete version of quantum mechanics, then that is what quantum mechanics effectively is. The fact that a "better" version of it exists somewhere is meaningless. Physics isn't right because feelings and because a majority of people say it is right. This is basic epistemology.

If you can defend any ideology by simply saying that the version being widely taught is wrong, and somewhere, there is a correct version of it.

You can try to defend CRT abuse by saying that it isn't "real" CRT, but that again means almost nothing. The problem is not about textual adherence, it is about abuse of people.

I'm equally not impressed with people dismissing stuff like The Killing Fields as "not really Communism", as if that even matters. People aren't complaining about the text of CRT, they are complaining about harm done to people.

And yes, if you are hurting children, you are prima facie wrong. It is an incredibly short chain of reasoning.

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