Tennessee can do better than right wing Senator Marsha Blackburn

Echo to the editor of the Williamson Herald newspaper, in Tennessee.

Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn is an airhead - but that's just my Maine Writer opinion.

Senator Marsha Blackburn in a Republican right wing Senator who claims to represent Tennessee: Disgusted by Blackburn’s column.

To say I (i.e., the letter writer) was disgusted by Marsha Blackburn’s commentary about Critical Race Theory written in [a recent] email (and published on her website) from the Herald is an extreme understatement. 

Blackburn writes on her website: 

What Senator Blackburn Is Doing To Stop Critical Race Theory

Although I respect that she has a right to speak her mind, it is, nevertheless, deeply disturbing to be reminded that our state is represented in the U.S. Senate by someone who is so willing to fan the flames that keep our country divided by writing a piece of propaganda like this.

Senator Blackburn has also pushed for legislation to prohibit federal funding for the “1619 Project". 

Please allow me to clear the air on a few basic points, using facts instead of falsehoods. Critical Race Theory (CRT) has not been taught in our state’s or county’s public schools. Further, “the left” is not making an effort at “brainwashing” our kids or “shaming” white children in our state/country’s schools. And CRT does not actively encourage discrimination, nor does it “segregate people into two main categories: oppressors or victims.”

CRT “at its core” (to borrow Mrs. Blackburn’s words) IS about understanding inequality and racism in our country and encouraging debate about how we should address it. It IS based on the idea that racism is a part of our everyday lives as it is embedded into our legal systems and policies. And as such, people who do not intend to be racist may make choices that fuel racism.

It is about outcomes, not only individuals’ own beliefs. And it calls for these outcomes to be studied and rectified. Clearly, there is much room for debate about how outcomes can be rectified, but we should welcome such debate, not stymie it. 

We need to broaden our children’s world view, not narrow it Mrs. Blackburn points out the voice of one parent (of many, I’m sure). But there are also many parents who believe — as my wife and I do — that our kids are very capable of critically considering many ideas. We believe it is important that they are exposed to these kinds of ideas and that they should be encouraged to consider the implications of our history, both the good and the bad, including how it has informed both our historical and current laws and policies. This is why we are so concerned by the law recently passed in TN (SB 0623) and by propaganda like Mrs. Blackburn is spreading.

I agree, parents need to show up at school board meetings. But we need to show up to make sure that our kids are allowed to learn about institutionalized racism. We need to make sure our board members understand that we know this teaching does not imply that white kids are demonized. Rather, we believe it is important that our kids are allowed to consider ideas in a broader context. Our kids are very capable of critically considering these kinds of ideas, and they need to be given the opportunity to do so.

Sincerely,  Tony Caudill in Franklin Tennessee 

Critical Race Theory is a dog whistle issue to stir up white supremacy

"Slavery was real!"- Political conservatives have used Critical Race Theory (aka #DRT) with incredible effectiveness to cause anxiety, to get people angry, and then get them to the polls, says Rutgers University President Jonathan Holloway.

Critical Race Theory

Interesting Q&A with an expert published in NewJersey.com:

Rutgers' President reports to the Star-Ledger, "What’s all this buzz about critical race theory?"

A Republican just got himself elected governor of Virginia by vowing to ban the teaching of critical race theory. Yet most people don’t even know what that term means – including the folks who hyped it up.

We asked Rutgers President Jonathan Holloway, a leading scholar of Black history and the author of The Cause of Freedom. Below is an edited transcript of his conversation with Star-Ledger Editorial Board Member Julie O’Connor.

Q. What is critical race theory?

A. Critical race theory has its roots in a concept taught in law school. The idea is that racism is systemic: Housing policy and lending practices are prime examples of government-sanctioned actions that have led to exacerbating race-based inequalities for generations of Americans. Such policies have reinforced prejudice and disparities along racial lines for centuries, and continue to do so today.

Look at redlining. Banks drew red lines around certain areas where you couldn’t get mortgages, or you’d get horrible mortgages. If you look at where Black and Brown folks could live because of discriminatory housing practices, those were redlined districts.

Redlining was made illegal in 1968, but these practices have continued with shocking consistency to the present day with segregated housing, which determines where you go to school, and a system that depends on tax receipts, which makes for poorer schools. It has this snowball effect. So, if you bring the lens of critical race theory to this, you could say, there’s a whole structure around how people live their lives – literally, where they live – that has been articulated through racialized policies.

Q. How did this obscure subject become a (wrong-minded!) central issue on the right?

A. That is the question. When I started hearing, say, six months ago, some reference to critical race theory as a divisive issue, I was like, 'wait a second' – who outside of academia is talking about critical race theory? Since then, I’ve watched it used. And it’s what you’d call ‘dog whistle politics,’ where you use certain key words that get people worked up and define them in ways so stripped of context and nuance that it becomes bastardized. It’s no longer what critical race theory is. It has now become this tool. Political conservatives have used this with incredible effectiveness to cause anxiety, to get people angry, and then get them to the polls.

Q. Do you think the meaning of critical race theory has evolved? It also seems like a vague, catch-all term now for what some people view as the excesses of wokeness.

“I’ve never figured out what ‘critical race theory’ is, to be totally honest, after a year of talking about it,” Fox News’ Tucker Carlson recently admitted. So what is it, and why is it so important?

A. Yes, it has become that. Look at the language we’re using now, in terms of trying to describe ourselves and our country: ‘Excesses of wokeness.’ Wow, how did we get to this place?

Really serious ideas in higher education do eventually go down through k-12 spaces, that’s just called education. But talking about critical race theory in the k-12 space, that’s extremely rare. Frankly, it’s something one might find in very fancy, elite private schools. It’s like one of these things that’s being passed off as a threat, that doesn’t exist. That’s what’s so frustrating. Critical race theory has become a stand-in for anxiety, for frustration, for feelings of being left behind, whether real or imagined.

Q. Seven states have already outlawed teaching critical race theory, and 13 others are considering similar bills. Does that concern you?

A. Absolutely. And it’s not about outlawing critical race theory – the fact that legislatures are outlawing what can be taught, period, is extremely unsetting. The whole point of education is to discover and test new ideas and see what shakes out. Evolution was once declared illegal to be taught. Years ago, Arizona outlawed the teaching of ethnic studies in universities. Are you kidding me? It’s McCarthyism on a different topic: trumped-up anxieties over racial belonging or access to power along racial lines.

Q. In a CBS News survey in October, 62 percent of likely Virginia voters said 'school curriculums on race and history' were a major factor in their choice for governor – that’s a higher percentage than those who said taxes or mask-wearing, and it wasn’t far below crime or the economy. What do you make of that?

A. These attacks are working because they get to deep-seated anxieties about an individual’s place in society. There’s no doubt that people who have had a lot of unquestioned authority for a long time are now seeing that authority questioned. The mainstream is shifting, and certain ideas are not as revered as before.

Just in our lifetimes, the idea that people of the same gender could marry has gone from being absurd, to being weird, to being uncomfortable, to being, well, why is this an issue? That this happened within 20 years is astonishing.

But the fact that this stoking the flames of racial anxieties is happening yet again tells us that it gets to the roots of how this country was organized. Where those roots are threatened is where you see deep social anxiety. Do conservatives actually care about critical race theory? I don’t know, frankly. Are they aware of how manipulative they’re being? I would hazard a guess, and say yes.

Q. How do you think the Democrats should respond to these attacks over critical race theory? Should the Virginia election serve as a warning?

A. Oh, it’s absolutely a warning. Increasingly, we’re so polarized in this country, so it may be a Democratic issue. But I would love to have critical thinkers in our legislatures, nuanced thinkers, honest brokers; people running on issues of actual consequence, like vaccines, or in Texas, a woman’s right to have a choice over abortion. Or immigration, and so forth. Let’s have disagreements over real things, and not a bunch of pumped-up cultural anxieties. That’s what I would hope for.

Q. In New Jersey, Republican Jack Ciattarelli didn’t make critical race theory a central campaign issue, but did seem to allude to it: “I don’t think we should be teaching our students that white people perpetuate systemic racism,” he said. What’s your reaction?

A. It’s a politically savvy statement because it stokes the flames. We shouldn’t be teaching people that x or y person today is guilty for these things because of who they are. We should be teaching people the actual history. And the actual history is going to be very challenging. That’s not an invention of the political left, that’s how the past is treated by the present. The past rarely looks good. 

And there is structural racism in this country. To say there isn’t is utterly naïve.

Q. What are American kids missing today when it comes to our racial history?

A. They’re missing history. The people who criticize critical race theory for doing violence to the past need to look at what boards of education are doing right now. They are trying to change the literal terms about the way society was organized in the past, to serve a current agenda. Like Mississippi’s efforts to outlaw using the word “slave.”

Instead, it was supposed to be “laborer.” This was like, two years ago. That is insanity.

For decades, state boards of education or legislatures have banned the teaching of certain elements of the country’s past because it made their state or region look bad. If that’s your starting point, you’re going to retard the development of the people you’re educating. You’re not educating them, you’re indoctrinating them.

While history is constantly being reinterpreted, the fact is, these things happened. Slavery was real. And to suggest otherwise is to do a violence to the present, about how we understand ourselves.

Maine Writer post script- Critical Race Theory is racist fuel to white supremacists.  They finally found three words they know how to read. Unfortunately, the literal translation for this label is "racism" wrapped in a difficult to comprehend euphemism.

Senator Marsha Blackburn is an Idiot fan club! Just click "like"!

Taaaa-daaaa! I was delighted to find a social media page titled "Marsha Blackburn is an Idiot". Check it out!

Bennett cartoon published in the Chattanooga Times Free Press 

So, my series about Blackburn's incompetence is not an original idea! I'm glad to be like minded with 300 plus people who support the Marsha Blackburn is an Idiot social media page with "like".

This blog is my own first in a series of echoes titled "Blackburn is an Idiot", or "BIAI".  In my opinion, Blackburn's wrong-minded supporters are zealots who practice snake worshipping, believe the earth was created in seven days, aka, "creationists" and that evolution never happened (reference Scopes Monkey Trial*).  These weird constituents are the right wing Tennessee idiots who elected BIAI. Unfortunately, she has delivered for them.  In other words, "Stupid Is As Stupid Does", or #SIASD is the BIAI slogan.

Following is an opinion echo, published in the Williamson Herald, in Franklin, Tennessee.  A ray of BIAI hope beams from this opinion. At least, some Tennesseans are not among Blackburn's weird BIAI cult. 

Letter to the Editor: Disgusted by Blackburn

It is deeply disturbing to be reminded that our state of Tennessee is represented in the U.S. Senate by someone so willing to fan the political flames that keep our country divided by writing propaganda.

 
Please allow me to fact check BIAI, to correct the falsehoods she spews in her op-ed articles. 

In fact, contrary to her uninformed position, Critical Race Theory (CRT) has not been taught in Tennessee's public schools. Furthermore, what BIAI claims as “the left”, are not making an effort at “brainwashing” kids or “shaming” white children in our state/country’s schools. 

Moreover, CRT does not actively encourage discrimination, nor does it “segregate people into two main categories: oppressors or victims.”

Check out the best selling book "How to be an Anti Racist" by Ibram M. Kendi.

CRT “at its core” (to borrow Mrs. Blackburn’s words) IS about understanding inequality and racism in America and encouraging debate about how it should be addressed. It IS based on the idea that racism is a part of our everyday lives as it is embedded into our legal systems and policies. And, as such, people who do not intend to be racist may, inadvertently, make choices that fuel racism.

It is about outcomes, not only individuals’ own beliefs. And, it calls for these outcomes to be studied and rectified. Clearly, there is much room for debate about how outcomes can be rectified, but we should welcome such debate, not stymie it. We need to broaden our children’s world view, not narrow it.

Mrs. Blackburn points out the voice she hears from only one parent (but, of many other idiots, I’m sure). Yet there are also many parents who believe — as my wife and I do — that our kids are very capable of critically considering many ideas. We believe it is important that they are exposed to these kinds of ideas and that they should be encouraged to consider the implications of our history, both the good and the bad, including how it has informed both our historical and current laws and policies. This is why we are so concerned by the law recently passed, in Tennessee (SB 0623: Tennessee passes bill to withhold funding for schools teaching about systemic racism)
and by propaganda like Mrs. Blackburn (aka #BIAI) is spreading.

Parents need to show up at school board meetings to protest this discriminatory bill. But we need to show up to make sure that our kids are allowed to learn about institutionalized racism. 

We need to make sure our school board members understand that we know this teaching does not imply that white kids are demonized. Rather, we believe it is important that our kids are allowed to consider ideas in a broader context. Our kids are very capable of critically considering these kinds of ideas, and they need to be given the opportunity to do so.

Sincerely,

Tony Caudill,  in Franklin, Tennessee

*A misdemeanor, punishable by fine in Tennessee, to “teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible....

It's time to formally launch the #BIAI fan club! 

https://www.facebook.com/MarshaBlackburnIsAnIdiot