Critical Race Theory isn’t about race or science or math — it’s about politics
April 27, 2022
Critical Race Theory is not pushing a radical race theory in the name of science.
Instead, it’s a radical race theory accompanied by a radical political theory that leaves some even on the Left uneasy as they manipulate facts under the guise of science.
We saw it play out as the state of Florida released some examples of textbooks that included CRT material, as was requested by liberals who wanted to see what the state was talking about when Florida objected to CRT’s inclusion in math textbooks.
One of the materials shared by the Florida Department of Education was a graph from a survey called the Implicit Association Test that breaks down subconscious racism by ideological affiliation and by age, according to the example shared by CNN.
In the shared example, older people and conservatives are shown to be the biggest racists — on at least a subconscious level — according to the results of the test.
But the problem with the example shared in the textbook isn’t that it highlights a problem of race.
In actuality, it highlights a problem with liberal politics dictating science, which seems to be a common failing of both CRT and the 1619 Project, a foundational piece for its liberal believers that sought to make CRT respectable under the guise of history.
Critics of the Implicit Association Test, which include the people who designed the survey at Harvard, have that it is being misused and have questioned the utility of the results.
“The IAT, this research suggests, is a noisy, unreliable measure that correlates far too weakly with any real-world outcomes to be used to predict individuals’ behavior — even the test’s creators have now admitted as such,” according to the New York Magazine.
In fact, over the last seven years, there’s been a big fight about IAT, with academics becoming so disgusted with the debate- and so irate over the personal attacks- that some don’t even want to participate in the debate anymore.
“I appreciate your interest but I’m mostly trying to extricate myself from that debate — it’s genuinely unpleasant,” Hart Blanton, a University of Connecticut researcher who has criticized the IAT, told Vox when contacted about his criticism of IAT.
The Vox article cataloged some of the criticisms of IAT.
The piece was pretty scathing and all the more impactful because Vox’s own implicit bias would be to support CRT purveyors, which it does not do in this instance.
How unscientific does something have to be exactly for both New York Magazine and Vox to agree that liberals shouldn’t be using it, if only because it’s harmful to their policies?
CRT comes close to answering that question.
This CRT isn’t just a problem in elementary, middle and high schools in Florida, or around the nation, because it promotes racism.
It’s also been a problem at research universities too because it promotes inaccurate data for political gain that many Left-leaning academics disagree with.
How will lower-level schools like public K-12 schools have the chance to educate if they teach using a methodology that’s already tearing academics apart?
Public schools are exactly that: public.
They should seek to create the broadest possible support from the general public for the curriculum, and they certainly shouldn’t seek to promote controversial results where there is no scientific consensus and will further divide the community and weaken support for public schools
The implicit bias of the textbook creators and publishers showed that the inclusion of the IAT example was a political act, not a scientific act, as the publishers purposefully chose an example that already has come under fire for questionable scholarship.
Either that or the publishers didn’t vet the science behind what they were publishing, which is hard to believe.
But CRT proponents, including those who are working in K-12 education, are so mesmerized by their theory that explains everything, that they would rather use substandard work to make the point than choose a less controversial example that enjoys more consensus.
And that’s likely because there are no “less controversial” examples of CRT.
The danger that comes with all such proponents of theories everything, such as Marxists, is that the only objective truth they know is the truth they force others to go along with, even if unwillingly.