This ain’t Pendleton or Calgary, but a round-up you shall have anyway. This here is for all those folks who are wondering what important writing on FtB they might have missed related to CRT… plus a few links to other places like The Root & Wonkette, because I love me some The Root & Wonkette. Hell, when we’re done, you’ll have a whole summer reading list just of CRT related things. Fun!

Let’s start with TheRoot, since there are two pieces there that I consider essential reading.

First up, there’s a kinda basic CRT ‘splainer from Harriot. It certainly hits all the right notes to explain the popular outrage against CRT, but I still say “kinda basic” because I’m a legal nerd & Harriot gives what I think is inappropriately short attention to the legal origins of CRT. Now, it’s true that the first discipline outside legal studies to take up the term CRT was educational & pedagogical studies, and it’s also true that the people infected with antiCRT rabies don’t actually know about or care about the work done in law schools, I’m still going to harrumph for a paragraph about how Harriot does many good things here but doesn’t pay enough attention to my law prof heroes. So there.

The other piece that is even more essential reading, if that’s possible, is Harriot’s post that can be boiled down to

why the conversation over CRT is stupid

Go read that one as well.

On to our own blog network! Largely in reverse chronological order (meaning most recent at the top), I give you FtB’s coverage:

Mano is speculating that the CRT label will now become mainstream. He includes a Seth Meyers bit, but leaves out whether CRT can become mainstream without losing all contact with its original meaning. (It already has in Republican land.)

I took on some basic Q&A here. With more to come, of course. You think I could be satisfied with a couple thousand words?

Marcus did yeoman’s work diving into critical theory more broadly and sharing some of how we got CRT and its tools.

Mano gives us some good, on point quotes to distinguish CRT’s focus on systemic racism from the right wing’s preferred focus: conscious prejudice of rare individuals.

PZ called attention to Michael Harriott’s work analyzing the relationship between poor historical pedagogies and opposition to (the distorted, nearly imaginary right wing conception of) the 1619 project and relates that to right wing faux rage at CRT.

==> But hell, why not just read the original article at The Root?

PZ also addressed the advantages for white people of an understanding of racism that doesn’t rely on evil motives to explain the continuing existence of racist disparities, but instead assigns a large portion of the causality to legal and institutional inertia in a society that was undeniably born awash in racism.

And, he also gave us a bit of levity in this upsetting time with a cartoon.

PZ really hit this stuff early, it seems, with FtB’s first 4 posts in a row. This one is about Chris Rufo, the disingenuous right wing activist who consciously set out to demonize CRT and thus brought CRT as a term into view of non academics in the first place. This entire focus on CRT goes right back to this fuck. (I actually missed this one at the time, not sure why, then had to read about Rufo in The Atlantic.)

Nice work on this stuff, PZ!

ON TO WONKETTE!

They’ve done many pieces over the last two months, accelerating in June.

Most recently they’ve spoken about Tucker Carlson’s weird rant, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the US military standing up to congressional Know Nothings for the importance of studying ideas with which we may disagree (and, also, slipping in a bit about how CRT isn’t all that disagreeable), how the CRT panic caused a near riot at a school board meeting in Virginia, a bonus post where CRT is mentioned by Congressjerk Josh Hawley as a justification for denying senate confirmation to Kiran Ahuja (surprisingly the nominees the GOP has most vociferously opposed have all been women, and all but one women of color, at least by my count) but most of that post is about Hawley’s misuse of Dr. King. Oh, hell. Read it anyway!

When Ted Cruz said that critical race theorists were exactly the same as KKK members, Wonkette was there for that shit! They, like PZ, covered Chris Rufo’s malignant mendacity that sparked the current anti CRT panic and the ignorant, waffle headed attempts to ban CRT‘s grad school analysis of legislative & jurisprudential tendencies resulting in statistical racial disparities from kindergartens in the name of educational freedom. Oh! And it turns out that near riot Wonkette covered above? Well two weeks before that, at another Loudon County, Virginia school board meeting they also had loud not racists yelling how much they don’t want anyone to learn about racism or how to fight racism because they are such passionate opponents of racism.

Wonkette’s first article on the topic (an outlier from April of this year) covered Idaho’s attempt to ban CRT in the state’s high schools and kindergartens. Looks like that’s going to be a thing for a while.

Wow! That’s a lot of reading!

There couldn’t be anything more to say or hear about CRT, could there?

Well, actually, there sure as fuck is! Notice that none of that stuff is actual information about CRT from the people who coined CRT, or provided its theoretical foundations, or did the early work to establish it as a respected field of study. For that you’d have to read Matsuda or Delgado or Williams or Crenshaw or Bell. BUT LOOK AT YOU, YOU LUCKY FUCK A DUCKS! You’re getting a brand new Pervert Justice post in just a couple days that will introduce you to the “what” of CRT in the words of just such folks as that.

And you thought I was exaggerating when I said I’d be giving you your whole summer reading list!