PERSPECTIVE FROM THE 19TH HOLE: This is the title I chose for my personal blog, which is meant to give me an outlet for one of my favorite crafts – writing – plus to use an image from my favorite sport, golf. Out of college, my first job was as a reporter for the Daily Astorian in Astoria, Oregon, and I went on from there to practice writing in all of my professional positions, including as press secretary in Washington, D.C. for a Democrat Congressman from Oregon (Les AuCoin), as an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, as press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor (Vic Atiyeh), and as a private sector lobbyist. This blog also allows me to link another favorite pastime – politics and the art of developing public policy – to what I write. I could have called this blog “Middle Ground,” for that is what I long for in both politics and golf. The middle ground is often where the best public policy decisions lie. And it is where you want to be on a golf course.
Here’s a new buzz-phrase: Critical race theory.
It is a phrase that is being used by many on the left to indicate that everything in this country around race and the U.S. is completely racist through and through.
Or, I guess that’s what it may means.
But, many Republicans dispute the contention and, thus don’t like what the phrase has come to mean.
Over the past few months, and particularly through June, hosts and anchors on Fox have ramped up the conversation about the theory.
The concept has been around for more than 40 years, according to EducationWeek, but it has become a major programming theme on Fox News only in recent months as parents, buoyed by conservative activists and groups, have vocally opposed the teaching of the theory — or something similar to it — in schools throughout the country. Republican-led state legislatures have voted to outlaw it.
Whenever the phrase is used by the left, it is not necessarily defined. And those who use the phrase don’t want a discussion. They, apparently, want all of us to salute.
Three columns dealing with the theory have caught my attention recently.
In the Washington Post, Dana Milbank wrote that “critical race theory (at its core, the belief that racism in America is systemic) has been around for decades in academic circles without attracting much attention — until Fox News took it up last summer.”
Typical. Fox News is the apparent source – a bad one – for a new political horse to ride.
Milbank continued: “As The Post’s Laura Meckler and Josh Dawsey report, a Fox News guest, Christopher Rufo, declared that critical race theory had ‘pervaded every institution in the federal government’ — and Trump and his allies took it from there.
“The irony, of course, is that Republicans are now proving that systemic racism exists — and they, along with Fox News, are the primary offenders. With their united stand against the voting-rights bill…they’re the ones reducing Americans ‘to their racial identity alone.’”
Retired Wall Street Journal senior editor Gerard Baker also dealt with the issue.
“I learned economics from a Marxist,” he reports. “It was the height of the Cold War, a critical moment when the survival of the West seemed in doubt, an age when many people, even those under no illusions about the unfolding terror of Soviet communism, wondered whether capitalism’s days might be numbered.
“(My tutor) was first and foremost a teacher, an intellectually insatiable pedagogue with a desire to foster among his students a hunger for a broad understanding of the discipline.”
Think of that. A requirement for critical thinking. Not a requirement to accept one train of thought.
Baker goes on to suggest that critical thinking on all counts “is the essence of a liberal education: The nurturing and development of independent minds by erudite teachers of various ideological persuasions through exposure to the widest range of intellectual inquiry.”
And it is in peril, he contends.
“The crisis engulfing our institutions represents the struggle for ascendancy of an ideology that is literally the antithesis of the educational values that have driven the West’s unrivaled economic, social and technological progress for the past few centuries.
“Critical race theory—and its various post-modern cousins—is not some interesting interpretation of social and political history that we are free to examine, embrace or discard. Its proponents do not seek to frame a critique of modern America to be tested alongside alternatives.
“They insist that a traditionally liberal approach to evaluating the merits of competing ideas is itself an outgrowth of an illegitimate system of oppression. Rejection of their critique is the product of false consciousness, since critical thought is itself invalid, the product of white male hegemony.”
The third writer on this subject is Washington Post columnist, Michael Gerson, one of my favorites.
He wrote this:
“Though our nation is beset with systemic racism, we also have the advantage of what a friend calls ‘systemic anti-racism.’ We have documents — the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, the 14th Amendment — that call us to our better selves.
“We are a country that has exploited and oppressed Black Americans. But we arealso the country that has risen up in mass movements, made up of Blacks and Whites, to confront those evils. The response to systemic racism is the determined, systematic application of our highest ideals.”
Gerson is right.
We have the wherewithal to inveigh against racism – and work hard to remove racist thoughts and actions from ourselves. And we can do so without denigrating this country as the “critical race theorists” want us to do; we can consider all viewpoints on all issues, then reject some and accept others. And recognize the good points in OUR country.
It is one trait of a civilized culture.
Perspective from the 19th Hole 