The Truth About ‘Race Theory’: Co-Founder Breaks Down GOP Gaslighting

At least 25 states have taken action to ban the teaching of critical race theory. It comes as Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) compared CRT to the Ku Klux Klan. NBC’s Mehdi Hasan spoke to one of the co-founders of the theory, Kimberlé Crenshaw, about what Republicans are getting wrong about her work.

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The Truth About ‘Race Theory’: Co-Founder Breaks Down GOP Gaslighting

71 comments

    1. @Scientific Methodologist Regardless of their “news” source, liberals know where to find and read for themselves the actual bill, legal document, or statute to form their own opinion. Can’t say the same of “conservatives”.

    2. @Scientific Methodologist
      The closed-minded ones are the ones who think that Trump won the election and blacks are coming for their children.

    3. Scientific is a brand new troll and you all answered him. You all just put loot in his pocket by doing so. For heavens sake check their effing content. Stop helping them.

    4. @kathy weis
      I am skeptical that people can get paid by the response. How would that even work, and who would pay it? If you know, i am genuinely curious.

  1. The anti “cancel culture” party wants to cancel certain discussions in education.
    Quelle surprise!

    1. @Some Guy So, you like excuses. Good for you. Do excuses help or just make you feel better for failing?

    2. @David Eby I do quite well for myself and my family. The difference between you and me is I know the difference between empathy and weakness. I also think we are our brothers keepers, you know like Jesus said.

    3. Trump lost. You failed and a bunch of you got so upset that you stormed the capitol.
      But sure. Racial discrimination is just an excuse.
      Don’t be stupid

    4. @Some Guy Well,if you think being our brothers keepers means keeping them down. Democrats know they have to keep Blacks in line to be successful. Democrats hate Black free thinkers.

    1. @Nita Ross No one called him a liar or of saying anything wrong. “Shameless” is what one is called when one teams up with the person who insults his wife in order to make political gains. Oh yeah, and trying to go to Mexico while his constituents are in a deep freeze…beyond shameless!!! There is so much more…

    1. MLK would understand the different aspects of CRT and be able to discuss the nuances intelligently. Not everything is “yes or no”

    2. MLK would completely endorse the idea that we should be teaching about systemic racism in this country.

    3. @DG youtube – You say that because you feel this network just accuses everyone they don’t agree with as “racist “, correct? I hear that a lot from folks. BUT HELP ME OUT- are you SURE that this network accuses everyone of racism? Or, is it possible, that the reason you THINK that is because that is what the news you like TELLS you that this network does? I think you’re being told to think that by fox/oann/et al and you believe it. Can you then show us ALL these example of msnbc accusing people of racism?

  2. Everybody should read Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee. Dee Brown.
    Should be in every high school.

    1. We still have to try.
      Who knows, Mary might have a couple beers too many and accidentally watch this.

    2. We’re all kind of “siloed” these days, with huge sections of the population listening to demagogues as though they were hearing voices from On High.

      We’ve even got senior military officers telling crowds we should have a Republican Revolution like the one in “Mini-Mar.”

  3. The rant against critical race theory is pointless given how it’s a college elective course that grade schoolers will probably never be exposed to. It’s just a new iteration of red meat alarmism like the call against Sharia Law, something else that most people will never deal with in their lives to begin with.

  4. You didn’t think the grievance industry was going to break their own rice bowls, did you?

  5. The bill they passed in Texas also forbids teaching any topic that involves race or any current issues that are deemed controversial.

    1. “keep the people dumb” has always been a successful move for cultures and societies throughout history. wow. they’ve really hit on something haven’t they?

  6. “Now the Christian right has more or less collapsed as anything but an identity category. There are still lots of religious fundamentalists, but not, post-Donald Trump, a movement confidently asserting itself as the repository of wholesome family values. Instead, with the drive to eradicate the teaching of ‘critical race theory,’ race has moved back to the center of the public-school culture wars.
     
    I put critical race theory in quotes because the right has transformed a term that originally referred to an academic school of thought into a catchall for resentments over diversity initiatives and changing history curriculums” (Michelle Goldberg “Why the Right Loves Public School Culture Wars” ‘NYT’ 05/03/2021).

    1. @Brown Bear … Sunday schools and mobilehomeschools are the most common “choice” for conservative whites…

    2. Imagine the foundational categories of the country becoming a minority concept and apparently that is a good thing. Could you imagine the Chinese going through this sort of make over? CRT is a subversive made up story (it’s in the title – THEORY) that is being pushed onto the country to further divide us. There are hundreds of videos of POC parents at Teacher-Parent meetings talking about the dangers of this theory. Get out of your leftist propaganda bubble and experience first hand what people are talking about.

    3. The problem at the heart of all this is a Republican cult built up over four decades by the GOP, plutocrats, Reich-wing demagogues, Reich-wing Christian nationalism religious leaders, and Reich-wing print, radio, TV, and social media, programmed 24/7, radicalizing them and creating mass delusion. A straight line can be drawn through to the inevitable catastrophic conclusion witnessed today from Lee Atwater, Roger Aisles, Pat Buchanan, Rush Limbaugh, Pat Robertson, Newt Gingrich, Ann Coulter, Karl Rove, Lou Dobbs, Mitch McConnell, Billy Graham, Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, Jim Jordan, to Donald J. Trump, Matt Gaetz, and Marjorie Taylor Greene. Sure, some in the Republican cult truly are that ignorant or gullible; but most are willfully ignorant, being fed the lies they want to hear. They bear personal responsibility. Part of it’s a cultural problem, as some mostly older white people’s mistaken perception is that the America they knew is slipping away. Well, America is still America, but–like most nations–is constantly evolving, as progress invariably rolls on, but they are unwilling to accept that, or change with the times.

      Those Americans elected that pitiful, pathetic puerile President, and have continued to support him no matter what travesty he committed! The creators of the Republican cult have always been weak men, and now find themselves harnessed by those they sought to enslave, subject to the fickle whims of a moronic madman and the mob whose ignorance they relentlessly nourished and cultivated. They created the beast, thought they could ride the tiger, exploit it for their own greed, vanity, and power, too stupid or uncaring to realize that it would instead inevitably come to consume them.

      American conservatism has always been the endless, futile quest to justify greed, but *_the coin of the realm in GOP land is fear; it’s what they peddle, it’s what they traffic in, it’s what they carry in their pocket at all times. Then, they turn that fear into hate. And that hate is the poison killing them, America, and all of us. It’s the poison to which the Republican cult has become addicted._*

      Republican cultism is the disease, Toxic Trump is merely the most visible symptom and but one carrier of that disease. It existed before Trump, and it will continue when Trump is gone—unless or until the problem is adequately addressed. COVID-19 is also a disease; but a virus is blameless, unlike those who engage in willful ignorance. America would have confronted and easily conquered COVID-19 disease, had America not already been diseased for so long with Republican tribalistic partisan cultism. Racism, xenophobia, homophobia, misogyny and religious bigotry all were central to the formation of the Republican cult, and remain its lifeblood.

      “United we stand, divided we fall.” A simple concept, really, that too many Americans seem to have forgotten or abandoned. Our nation is like an airplane; it requires both the left and right wings working together in tandem to operate properly and safely. Only problem is the Reich-wing decided to try flying solo, forcing us all into a nose-dive! Care about the issues, disdain political gamesmanship, while still recognizing politics is an inseparable and necessary element. Have always respected and valued loyal opposition, even if in disagreement with the ideology. Fact is, though, the GOP has abdicated the requisite role of loyal opposition to become a mindless, tribalistic, hyper-partisan Reich-wing cult that places greed and political party over truth, reason, decency, and country.

  7. “[The] Exclusion Act marks the first time in American history that the United States barred a group of immigrants because of its race and class. The act also set the terms for the first large-scale deportation of an immigrant group” (Erika Lee “At Americas Gates: Chinese Immigration During the Exclusion Era, 1882-1943” p.2).

    “The Chinese Exclusion Cases have never been overruled, which is what allowed the Court to rely on the ideas they expressed. As long as these cases remain good precedent, administrations will be tempted to embrace them. And sometimes they will: Both the Obama and the Trump administrations defended the expedited-removal system.
     
    … The Supreme Court’s decision has given the administration the green light to subject any person it designates as an undocumented immigrant to the expedited-removal system based on a set of legal doctrines grounded in notions of racial superiority and xenophobic fear (Leah Litman “The Supreme Court Didn’t Have to Rely on Xenophobic Logic: But it Did” ‘The Atlantic’ 06/25/2020).

    1. “We have met the enemy, and he is us!” ~ Walt Kelly
      “The secret of freedom is educating the people, whereas the secret of tyranny is keeping them ignorant.” ~ Robespierre
      “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities” ~ Voltaire
      “There can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet.” ~Abraham Lincoln
      “The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.” ~ Charles Bukowski
      “Everybody has a right to their opinion, but nobody has a right to be wrong in their facts.” ~ Bernard Baruch, quoted in 1946 AP article.
      “It’s easier to fool people than it is to convince them that they have been fooled.”
      ~ Mark Twain
      “It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.” ~ James A. Baldwin
      “When stupidity is considered patriotism, it is unsafe to be intelligent.” ~ Isaac Asimov
      “If we are to have another contest in the near future of our national existence, I predict that the dividing line will not be Mason and Dixon’s but between patriotism and intelligence on the one side, and superstition, ambition and ignorance on the other.” ~ Ulysses S. Grant, 1875
      “When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.” ~ Typically misattributed to Sinclair Lewis, the original source of this quote is unknown, but likely derived from labor activist Eugene V. Debs 1917 quote, “Every robber or oppressor in history has wrapped himself in a cloak of patriotism or religion, or both.”

      Before World War II, Charles Lindbergh typified American heroism with his daring flights, including the first solo transatlantic flight, and his celebration of new technology. He parlayed his fame and heroic stature into a leading role in the America First movement, which opposed America’s entrance into the war against Nazi Germany. In 1939, in an essay entitled “Aviation, Geography, and Race,” published in that most American of journals, Reader’s Digest, Lindbergh embraced something close to Nazism for America:

      “It is time to turn from our quarrels and to build our White ramparts again. This alliance with foreign races means nothing but death to us. It is our turn to guard our heritage from Mongol and Persian and Moor, before we become engulfed in a limitless foreign sea.”

      The America First movement was the public face of pro-fascist sentiment in the United States at that time. In the twenties and thirties, many Americans shared Lindbergh’s views against immigration, especially by non-Europeans. The Immigration Act of 1924 strictly limited immigration into the country, and it was specifically intended to restrict the immigration of both nonwhites and Jews.

      Once again, nationalism, aka fascism, has risen its ugly head in America, in European nations, and in some other countries around the world. The fight of good people against ignorance, the fears that sprout from it, the hate which then blossoms, culminating in the bitter toxic fruit of evil, senseless brutalities and deaths, is a constant, never-ending battle we fear, but it is a battle from which we must never shrink.

      In this era, the likes of Toxic Trump and Marginalized Greene have become the face of the new “America First” fascist movement built up over the last four decades by the GOP, Reich-wing plutocrats, demagogues, and media. But, as with Lindbergh, the American people gradually come to recognize their dysfunctional poison and reject it. Most Americans understand, accept, and appreciate that the enduring strength of America is that we are a nation of immigrants and multiculturalism, a “melting pot” where the best ideas rise to the top, and superficial differences are meaningless in the face of our common humanity and purpose. Most Americans want competent leaders who speak truth, who strive to unite, who are not corrupt, who care about them. So, it should come as no surprise that President Biden is already receiving high marks from the public, while Toxic Trump never managed to rise above even a 50% approval rating. To conclude where begun, the following quotes are submitted for further reflection:

      “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” ~ George Santayana
      “History doesn’t repeat itself. But it does rhyme. ~ Mark Twain
      “That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.” ~ Aldous Huxley
      “If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us! But passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives us is a lantern on the stern which shines only on the waves behind.” ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  8. When it comes to discussion about race many people argue it’s the past and not relevant today, then turn around and defend the confederacy.

  9. This reminds me of the movie ‘A Few Good Men’ where the Jack Nicholson character lashes out and says, “The truth?, you can’t handle the truth”. In this case it is most of American society telling the GQP controlled state legislatures that they can’t handle the truth about our country’s history of slavery. Truth and reconciliation, folks, truth and reconciliation. The true history MUST be taught without revisionism or sugar coating.

    1. We dont have slavery in the USA. Nobody is a slave. You want to create racial tensions in order to take down America.

    2. You say the true history must be taught but this lady lies in her interview. She says African Americans did not get the vote for 70 years after the Civil War . which is a bold-faced lie in 1870 the 15th Amendment passed and all men got to vote. It took longer for women to get the vote but it was ALL women not just blacks. If you want people to believe the truth start telling the truth! Don’t twist it so it fits your view..

  10. Good teachers will address these questions as kids ask them. They will do their best. But if you discuss American History you have to discuss the history of American racism.

    1. thank you. clear as can be is what you say. the sad thing is they are trying to legislate good teachers away from being able to address questions honestly. and this will simply rid the world of good teachers. because good teachers don’t like, and are not so good at lying. very sad.

  11. A video came out a month ago with Heritage Action giving these Republican clowns talking points on “Cancel Culture” and “Critical Race Theory.” In fact, Heritage literally stated that cancel culture wasn’t working well enough to help them in their crusade against voting rights so they had to find something else that would work. These talking points are just more insanity to dismantle our democracy and help Republicans gain power. I’m so sick of them and their lawless corruption! Enough is enough!

  12. The U.S. Senate voted unanimously to make Juneteenth a Federal Holiday. But some of the very same people want to make it illegal to to teach and explain why it is a Federal Holiday…!!!..You Cannot fix Stupid. ..!!!

  13. It’s like South Africa would say there was no apartheid. This is the most stupid theory I’ve ever heard of. How can any country become civilized without history.

  14. “We have met the enemy, and he is us!” ~ Walt Kelly
    “The secret of freedom is educating the people, whereas the secret of tyranny is keeping them ignorant.” ~ Robespierre
    “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities” ~ Voltaire
    “There can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet.” ~Abraham Lincoln
    “The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.” ~ Charles Bukowski
    “Everybody has a right to their opinion, but nobody has a right to be wrong in their facts.” ~ Bernard Baruch, quoted in 1946 AP article.
    “It’s easier to fool people than it is to convince them that they have been fooled.”
    ~ Mark Twain
    “It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.” ~ James A. Baldwin
    “When stupidity is considered patriotism, it is unsafe to be intelligent.” ~ Isaac Asimov
    “If we are to have another contest in the near future of our national existence, I predict that the dividing line will not be Mason and Dixon’s but between patriotism and intelligence on the one side, and superstition, ambition and ignorance on the other.” ~ Ulysses S. Grant, 1875
    “When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.” ~ Typically misattributed to Sinclair Lewis, the original source of this quote is unknown, but likely derived from labor activist Eugene V. Debs 1917 quote, “Every robber or oppressor in history has wrapped himself in a cloak of patriotism or religion, or both.”

    Before World War II, Charles Lindbergh typified American heroism with his daring flights, including the first solo transatlantic flight, and his celebration of new technology. He parlayed his fame and heroic stature into a leading role in the America First movement, which opposed America’s entrance into the war against Nazi Germany. In 1939, in an essay entitled “Aviation, Geography, and Race,” published in that most American of journals, Reader’s Digest, Lindbergh embraced something close to Nazism for America:

    “It is time to turn from our quarrels and to build our White ramparts again. This alliance with foreign races means nothing but death to us. It is our turn to guard our heritage from Mongol and Persian and Moor, before we become engulfed in a limitless foreign sea.”

    The America First movement was the public face of pro-fascist sentiment in the United States at that time. In the twenties and thirties, many Americans shared Lindbergh’s views against immigration, especially by non-Europeans. The Immigration Act of 1924 strictly limited immigration into the country, and it was specifically intended to restrict the immigration of both nonwhites and Jews.

    Once again, nationalism, aka fascism, has risen its ugly head in America, in European nations, and in some other countries around the world. The fight of good people against ignorance, the fears that sprout from it, the hate which then blossoms, culminating in the bitter toxic fruit of evil, senseless brutalities and deaths, is a constant, never-ending battle we fear, but it is a battle from which we must never shrink.

    In this era, the likes of Toxic Trump and Marginalized Greene have become the face of the new “America First” fascist movement built up over the last four decades by the GOP, Reich-wing plutocrats, demagogues, and media. But, as with Lindbergh, the American people gradually come to recognize their dysfunctional poison and reject it. Most Americans understand, accept, and appreciate that the enduring strength of America is that we are a nation of immigrants and multiculturalism, a “melting pot” where the best ideas rise to the top, and superficial differences are meaningless in the face of our common humanity and purpose. Most Americans want competent leaders who speak truth, who strive to unite, who are not corrupt, who care about them. So, it should come as no surprise that President Biden is already receiving high marks from the public, while Toxic Trump never managed to rise above even a 50% approval rating. To conclude where begun, the following quotes are submitted for further reflection:

    “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” ~ George Santayana
    “History doesn’t repeat itself. But it does rhyme. ~ Mark Twain
    “That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.” ~ Aldous Huxley
    “If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us! But passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives us is a lantern on the stern which shines only on the waves behind.” ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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