CounterSpin Kimberle Crenshaw Full Show
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This week on CounterSpin: “This is a sickness that cannot be allowed to continue. Please report any sightings so we can quickly extinguish!” Donald Trump’s disturbing September 5 tweet paired with his claim that “teaching this horrible doctrine to our children is a form of child abuse in the truest sense of those words.”
What is the sickness, the doctrine that Trump says is “being deployed to rip apart friends, neighbors and families”? It’s Critical Race Theory, or really any of a whole group of interrelated social justice ideas, like structural racism, implicit bias or privilege—tools for talking about and addressing persistent inequities in US society.
Trump’s September executive order on “combating race and sex stereotyping” banned any training addressing racial or gender diversity for federal employees, government contractors and the US military. The effects were immediate and chilling—not just the end of workplace diversity trainings, but academics forced to cancel lectures, research projects suspended, curricula scrubbed for fear of running afoul of what’s being called the Equity Gag Order. And yet this obviously suppressive effort has been largely shrugged off by media that ought to be sounding the alarm. Oh, McCarthyism—how can we miss you if you won’t go away?
Resisting the effort to silence necessary conversations about racism is Kimberlé Crenshaw. A pioneer in critical race theory, she’s a professor of law at UCLA and Columbia Law Schools, and executive director of the African American Policy Forum and the Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies. We talk with her about Trump’s order and the #TruthBeTold campaign that’s pushing back on it, and the ideas behind it.
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Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at coverage of President-elect Joe Biden’s cabinet picks.
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Transcript: ‘This Order Puts the Weight of the Federal Government Behind Anti-Antiracism’
Not only is she one of my favorite writers, I’m so glad you got her to address this critical muzzling of information and discussion in the polis. Thanks.
“Let’s abolish the tools for addressing historic inequities in U.S. society to deal with ‘combating sex and race stereotypes.’” – Republicans are masters of doublespeak
Ahhhh.. the ‘Party of Lincoln’ is at it again? (That expression always amused me in-that it was a tacit admission that you had to go back ~150 years to find a laudable figurehead in your party). I wonder which side of this issue POTUS Lincoln would’ve been-on? (Hint: it wouldn’t be Trump/GOP’s side..)
He was the first Republican President. He oversaw America during its bloodiest war and the freeing of the slaves (slave ownership is something Democrats wanted). That is the reason he is mentioned. Nobody voted for the party of Lincoln. We all voted for Trump. Nobody on stage states that they are a Lincoln Republican. They state that they are a Reagan Republican.
You’ve created this little idea in your own head and it just isn’t true.
The bottom line is that people are tired. Trump will be going away soon, and presumably dumb executive orders like this one will go away soon after. The Republicans aren’t listening and the Democrats are already on side, so what’s the point in outrage?