What if the movie Face-off had been set during the 1860’s? I think it would have gone a little something like this. (Photo NYTimes)

The first half of this piece can be found at Pseudohistory Repeats Itself, Part 1, an extended fisking of is School Choice Is Not Enough: The Impact of Critical Social Justice Ideology in American Education by Zach Goldberg & Eric Kaufmann 

Guilt by Association

Over and over, Goldberg & Kaufmann (G&K) express concern about white kids who fear that they will be perceived as racist:

As a likely consequence of this fear, those exposed to CRT become less willing to criticize a black schoolmate, preventing black pupils from hearing useful feedback from classmates.

And,

[T]he teaching of CRT is likely to significantly impair the peer feedback process for black students, limiting potential opportunities for black students’ intellectual growth.

“Useful feedback” is the most euphemistic way of describing racially-motivated bullying I’ve ever heard.

They attempt to quantify this phenomenon by asking how comfortable someone feels criticizing their peers of different races. People reporting more exposure to teaching about racial injustice tend to be more concerned about criticizing students of color, whereas students of color feel more comfortable criticizing their white peers. The latter case is, presumably, the thing that really scares them. Especially scary since it appears to increase the more “CRT”  they report having been exposed to. Suddenly, instead of being “helpful feedback,” (like when Black kids are on the receiving end), for some reason, it is now described in grave-sounding tones. They don’t seem quite so worried that white kids will lose out on the benefits of this criticism.

Until, hilariously, G&K realize the implicit contradiction and make sure to wedge this sentiment into the very end of the section (in defiance of the article’s primary thrust about the dangers of CRT):  “[T]hese results would suggest that teaching more CRT is likely to benefit white students by introducing a greater willingness among pupils to criticize them while harming black students by withholding the criticism that might further their intellectual development.”

Saved it at the last minute!

Whites who say they were taught three or more CRT concepts were nearly 13 points more likely to say they would have been uncomfortable criticizing a black schoolmate compared to whites who were taught no CRT. Ironically, the effect of CRT is to discourage criticism that might help to improve the very minority outcomes that CRT claims to care about.

This is not, in fact, a thing “that CRT claims to care about.” Critical race theory seeks to explain broadly disparate life circumstances among racial groups. It is concerned with matters of wealth, power, and law. It spends considerably less time (in my understanding) on whether it would be helpful for Trevor to tell his classmate to consider whether all lives actually matter.

Yet, they cannot help themselves. They go further still: white kids should not be made to learn anything that causes them to have an emotional reaction.

We find that white respondents with higher CRT-related exposure feel more guilty about their race, experiencing negative sentiment toward their own group. Whereas 39% of whites who did not report any CRT-related classroom exposure indicated feeling “guilty about the social inequalities between white and black Americans,” this share rises to 45% among whites who reported being taught one or two CRT-related concepts, and to between 54% and 58% among whites who reported being taught three or more concepts. Here, we should also note that levels of agreement with this statement are considerably and significantly higher among white liberals (65%) than white conservatives (29%), which accords with the findings of past research.

No one alive currently should, in fact, feel shame or guilt about the past. We weren’t there. It wasn’t us. Even people whose direct ancestors did awful things are not, themselves, responsible for those acts. To live otherwise would be to inhabit a prison of unatonable regret.

This does not imply that downplaying the evils of history is necessary. Rather, the fact of our innocence and non-involvement is what allows us to deal honestly with those evils. Only someone who felt kinship with the past’s worst racists would feel a need to make justifications and excuses for them. Obfuscating the truth about historical actors aligns oneself with those whose reputation the lies burnish.

As far as the “guilt” described in that survey, the extent of distress it causes is unclear. It is possible, of course, to feel guilt within one context without it being an ever-present part of your day-to-day life. Someone can say they feel “guilt” over things which they understand not to be their own literal fault. I might say I feel “guilty” that I missed your birthday party because my flight was canceled. Or I might say that I feel “guilty” that I relished tearing apart your idiotic CRT push-poll faux research article. Of course, I would not feel true guilt in either of these cases. I would feel rhetorical guilt, rather than the emotion of guilt. It is even possible to recognize a certain level of group culpability, without feeling as if you have a personal relationship to it. Needless to say, the potential meanings of “guilt” used here are broad. And its negative effect on students is unspecified.

Good old-fashioned civic engagement

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A product of concerted pro-Confederate ‘Lost Cause’ historical revisionism: Charlottesville’s 1924 dedication ceremony for one of history’s biggest losers, Robert E. Lee. Fewer tiki torches visible at this gathering than the one 93 years later, but they’re there in spirit.

The gilded pricks who populate think tanks will stake out a justification for whatever deranged policy ideas it is in their interest to. Having been inoculated against the Dunning-Kruger Effect by years of steady income telling rich people what they want to hear, they feel perfectly comfortable wading into any area and splashing their ignorance across any op-ed pages that will have them. They’re not writing for scholars, they’re writing to prop up profitable political interests by giving their desires a thin veneer of intellectual plausibility.

So ordinarily the faux “studies” cranked out by such groups are beneath consideration, but I ran across one by accident and found it so dense with bad reasoning, historical inaccuracy, and paranoia that it renewed my belief in whatever the opposite of the authors beliefs were. It was begging for someone to write a scornful blog post about. It’s shameful that politicians use articles like this as cover for hobbling education in red states, an effort which has kept pace with the radicalizing authoritarianism of the right.

After all, by receiving a PhD, I became duty-bound to defend the search for knowledge and the dissemination thereof. Under a moonless sky, I pledged a blood-oath to denounce really bad scholarship, contrived in service of illiberal ends, whenever and wherever it was reasonable for me to do so. As long as I felt like it.

I have fairly low respect for sociology as it is, but this motivated-reasoning sociology has got to be as bad as it gets.

School Choice Is Not Enough: The Impact of Critical Social Justice Ideology in American Education by Zach Goldberg & Eric Kaufmann 

A primary inspiration for the desire to remake education in the graven image of right-wing hagiography can be found on the collapsing husk of twitter, where one of the authors shared a thread expounding on his belief that younger people are trending more Democratic than previous generations. They draw a straight line from this to modern schooling. This is the kind of view that everyone’s loud conservative uncle has, but Goldberg & Kaufmann (G&K) are determined to bring rigor to it!

He points to the eye-watering turn away from conservatism pictured in this graphic. Unlike previous generations, millennials aren’t voting for Republicans as much as they get older. Without bothering to compare this idea to any other theories, G&K declare that educational wokeness must be the reason. Surely, nothing else about politics or the world could be different than 30 years ago. It must be the kryptonite…of critical race theory…which is warping these children’s view of the world!

It should be fairly obvious that there might be a few flaws here.

It assumes that education itself is different enough than it used to be in the 1980s that it changes student’s thinking permanently, and indeed that schooling itself is a strong determinant of adult political views. (While most of us probably imagine ourselves coming to our beliefs about politics through a process of learning and reasoning—research suggests that for most people, those things serve more as justification than inspiration.)

As for competing explanations for the difference among Millennials, a few alternatives spring immediately to mind. One would be that the generation currently settling into middle-adulthood has been denied the economic stability that usually ensconces people into the feeling that they have a stake in preserving the conservative status quo. Millennials are worse off in almost every economic sense: paid less, for longer hours, buried under student debt, unable to buy homes (which are, relative to income, about six times more expensive as they were 60 years ago). And all against a preposterous din of stultifying boomeristic obliviousness about the value of hard work. A situation of their own making, as champions of austerity.

Or what about the other ways in which unpopular conservative positions have come to affect younger people and new millennial parents? Abortion rights, climate change, LGBTQ rights, frequent school massacres. Or merely the fact that for the entirety of millennials’ political memory the GOP has been a ghoulish assemblage of hateful little weirdos.

The authors don’t WANT to find out why people dislike their ideas, they want to turn them into dinosaurs

To even more directly contradict the hypothesis that Millenials’ reluctance to grow more conservative is due to education–the same trend is evident in the UK! This is a good control group. Our educational systems and history are markedly different, but Millenials in both countries are experiencing very similar economies.

For this reason, Kaufmann cropped this chart to avoid showing that the UK was on it, because it would undermine his point if a country with a different history, racial makeup, and educational system exhibited the same trends as us. But indeed, they don’t actually care about understanding this–they care about doing the thing they want to do anyway, which is to warp the history that students are taught in school in the vain hope that it will alter their thinking.

Professor Xavier’s School for Mutant Intellectuals

Conservatives of this ilk often begin by defining a constellation of ideas that make them uncomfortable and then giving them a scary name, to “other-ize” relatively well-accepted facts or reasoning. Fascist thought-leader Christopher Rufo, a successful practitioner of this technique, explained how he does it a couple years ago:

Journalists covering the reactionary hysteria over CRT allowed this admission to slide. By the time this moral panic hit their radar in 2021, it had been all over conservative media for a while (building steam as backlash to 2020’s protests against racialized police violence) and they didn’t feel the need to interrogate its origins when they could simply write “both-sides” stories on it. Instead, these astroturfed campaigns have been treated as good-faith disagreements over how to teach subjects dealing with America’s past, rather than an overt attempt to channel white resentment. Fortunately for racists, there’s nothing remotely difficult about finding kooky-sounding lessons in a country of 350 million, and cherry-picking it for your racist audience to say “see!”

It also escaped the notice of much of the media that Rufo’s earlier career was in pushing creationism for the Discovery Institute–an earlier educational panic that had all the precursors to this one, but with less emotionally-fraught topic (and one which was easier to dismiss as a religious effort that had no place in secular science classes).

It should come as no surprise to see several of Rufo’s ideological collaborators linked to overt white supremacism recently: Nate Hochman, Richard Hanania, along with book-banning, Hitler-quoting, censorship front Moms for Liberty. One of the authors of this very “study” (Kaufman) was even in Hanania’s small think-tank, the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology. And lest one assume that this was a large amorphous group, where he wasn’t close to the famous eugenicist, it was literally three people.

Survey Course

The thesis of this work is that if you are merely exposed to dreaded woke/CRT/social justice theories, even without agreeing, that you are more likely to end up voting for Democrats. What follows are then a series of questionnaire data that they attempt to mangle into this theme. If you don’t want to read an overlong explanation of their bullshit claims and the numerous ways they obfuscate, ignore important correlations, and generally exhibit a degree of carelessness and bias you would expect from a pseudo-academic article written to be printed out and waved around by red-faced Republican town council members–skip to the end.
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