What are your thoughts re Hegelian Dialectic & CRT in the Church?

[Ken]

Exactly what "white-supremacist propaganda and myths" are history curriculums promoting today?

You want specific examples? Here is the current middle school history text being used in Louisiana today. Not the 1950s. TODAY. It was copyrighted in 2015: https://www.amazon.com/Louisiana-Our-Hi ... 1567332668

Here is how they describe secession and the civil war. By profiling the white daughter of a slave plantation owner with 150 slaves who lost their enormous cotton plantation after the war because the freed slaves "regrettably demanded high wages for their labor" Who wrote about how the Confederate cause was just and righteous, and who became a founding member of the Daughters of the Confederacy which perpetrated those myths after the war. Would you consider that a balanced treatment of slavery and emancipation? Especially for the many Louisiana children reading this text who are descendants of slaves?





In the next chapter on reconstruction the authors provide a sympathetic portrait of Francis Nichols who was, in fact, the most prominent architect of Jim Crow segregation in Louisiana and an ally of the KKK. The authors could not even bring themselves to call it "segregation". Instead they resorted to the euphemism "formal social separation of the races". Is a balanced take-home message for middle school students learning about reconstruction in Louisiana?





Historical distortion is not about telling overt lies that are easily disproven. It is about the stories you choose to tell and emphasize. And those you choose to ignore or vanish. This is a perfect example.

[Bootstrap]

Harvard Law School has one useful page on CRT:

https://harvardlawreview.org/topics/cri ... ce-theory/

This is the paper that some credit as starting Critical Race Theory:

Brown v. Board of Education and the Interest-Convergence Dilemma

The "Interest-Convergence Dilemma" is this: black interests will only be served if they can find common cause with white interests. Or in his own words:

Translated from judicial activity in racial cases both before and after Brown, this principle of "interest convergence" provides: The interest of blacks in achieving racial equality will be accommodated only when it converges with the interests of whites. However, the fourteenth amendment,standing alone, will not authorize a judicial remedy providing effective racial equality for blacks where the remedy sought threatens the superior societal status of middle and upper class whites.It follows that the availability of fourteenth amendment protection in racial cases may not actually be determined by the character of harm suffered by blacks or the quantum of liability proved against whites. Racial remedies may instead be the outward manifestations of unspoken and perhaps sub-conscious judicial conclusions that the remedies, if granted,will secure, advance, or at least not harm societal interests deemed important by middle and upper class whites. Racial justice -or its appearance -may, from time to time, be counted among the interests deemed important by the courts and by society's policymakers.

CRT is characterized by a careful look at the systems that affect black people differently than the way they affect white people and the societal reasons behind them.

[Bootstrap]

Does CRT actually have anything to do with LGBTQ or is that not part of it?

Originally, it was purely about race. But like many things about race, some have reused the same framework, putting LGBTQ people in the "opppressed" slot.

[Ken]

Does CRT actually have anything to do with LGBTQ or is that not part of it?

Originally, it was purely about race. But like many things about race, some have reused the same framework, putting LGBTQ people in the "opppressed" slot.

And women. And what they now call BIPOC. And so forth.

Which all is really irrelevant to the actual question of whether there is overt racism or systemic racism within our institutions like schools and churches.
And what should be done about it.

[Bootstrap]

Which all is really irrelevant to the actual question of whether there is overt racism or systemic racism within our institutions like schools and churches.

And what should be done about it.

I agree.

More relevant: asking our black brothers and sisters to teach us what we need to do to make them feel more welcome, finding ways to serve together with black churches to build the Kingdom of God together, giving black people the same grace that we give white people and listening when large numbers of our brothers and sisters say that there is a problem.

You don't need a bunch of Harvard academics to do that.

[Falco Underhill]

Okay Ken, but a simple link would have worked just fine.

[Ken]

Okay Ken, but a simple link would have worked just fine.

Well, do you agree or disagree that biased history is being taught to middle school students in Louisiana? If you aren't convinced we can move on to Mississippi

[Soloist]

Okay Ken, but a simple link would have worked just fine.

Well, do you agree or disagree that biased history is being taught to middle school students in Louisiana? If you aren't convinced we can move on to Mississippi

Are there also examples where the confederates are made out like evil people? Or is the bias entirely one sided?

Revisionist history makes it extremely difficult to determine actual truth of an event. If we revise historical accounts one should provide primary sources showing why the original "history" was wrong.

It does seem like that particular text book was bias but I would have to see if they provided a counterpoint to it and it was just showing the broader two sides of the story.

[Ken]

Okay Ken, but a simple link would have worked just fine.

Well, do you agree or disagree that biased history is being taught to middle school students in Louisiana? If you aren't convinced we can move on to Mississippi

Are there also examples where the confederates are made out like evil people? Or is the bias entirely one sided?

Revisionist history makes it extremely difficult to determine actual truth of an event. If we revise historical accounts one should provide primary sources showing why the original "history" was wrong.

It does seem like that particular text book was bias but I would have to see if they provided a counterpoint to it and it was just showing the broader two sides of the story.

I'm not aware of any school textbooks in which confederates in general are made out to be evil people. That is not to say that certain evil acts aren't called out in history books. Like the Andersonville Prison or Fort Pillow Massacre. History is history and those things actually happened.

The point about history is that it is an actual rigorous social science with established rules for historical evidence and methods to avoid bias. Actual legitimate historians meticulously document their sources. And are mercilessly called out by their colleagues if they don't, or do so poorly. But that is not what happens with school history textbooks where actual rigorous history is set aside in the pursuit of political objectives and mythmaking. It's not just about race and the south. Some of the stuff being taught about the pioneers, westward expansion and white settlement in the west is just as biased in Oregon and Washington state history books. Not because of overt obvious lies, but because of the stories they choose to tell, and which they choose to leave out.

In any event, my larger point is that the current fuss about CRT being taught in the public schools is a completely made-up red herring. It is not being taught in the public schools. That does not mean, however, that there is no bias in what is taught in the public schools. There is plenty of bias in our current school curriculums across the country. But it tends to be in the other direction.

[Falco Underhill]

Okay Ken, but a simple link would have worked just fine.

Well, do you agree or disagree that biased history is being taught to middle school students in Louisiana? If you aren't convinced we can move on to Mississippi

I'm not saying there's no way to improve upon it to address ethnic concerns - I'm sure there is - but it wasn't entirely without value either. Portraying the sinners with their faults and their humanity too is important. How they moved on from where they were, as the people they were, is an interesting lesson (to me, anyway.)

I've never seen a history textbook tell a civil war era story like that but then I'm not from Louisiana (or anywhere in the south.) In fact, I didn't know they still told personal stories like that anymore at all.

As I recall, my history books mostly described economic problems, competing interests, whose rights were being stepped on, how they fought to get rights secured, and which parties were responsible for doing what in the "historical process." Not that they used the words "historical process" in the text but this seems to be the basic model for describing "political movements" nowadays. No "value judgments" of course - just the "facts."