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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 16, 2023

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(critical theory) that in fact is rarely taught below the graduate level...

To succeed on the pilot AP African American Studies test, students will have to understand the concept of intersectionality, a way of looking at discrimination through overlapping racial and gender identities, and know that while it was written about by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw—a leading thinker on critical race theory

Those absolute scumfuck liars. What else can you possibly say about the CRT gaslighting campaign at this point?

the history of the reparations movement and Black Lives Matter activism

Oh boy, I wonder what the "research" on those will be about.

in-depth lessons on the Black Panther Party’s free breakfast and medical programs, often seen as taboo topics to cover in class because critics historically smeared the group as violent and communist.

Of fucking course.

And just quoting them is banworthy, apparently. Looks like I was on the list.

Your comment is almost all heat.

I even happen to be in complete agreement with you that critical theorists, with the assistance of corporate media, are 100% gaslighting the American public on these matters. I share your anger about that. But the point of this space is not to vent our anger at one another or at our outgroups. There are times and places for that sort of thing, but this is the space where we try to have difficult discussions with people who disagree with us.

And you were just warned about this, not long after a ban of a day, and a ban of a week. You've got to cool down. This time you get two weeks to do it.

the history of the reparations movement

Gates, the guy speaking:

The enemy of individuality is groupthink, Gates says, and here he holds everyone accountable. Recently, he has enraged many of his colleagues in the African-American studies field—especially those campaigning for government reparations for slavery—by insistently reminding them, as he did in a New York Times op-ed last year, that the folks who captured and sold blacks into slavery in the first place were also Africans, working for profit. "People wanted to kill me, man," Gates says of the reaction to that op-ed. "Black people were so angry at me. But we need to get some distance from the binary opposition we were raised in: evil white people and good black people. The world just isn't like that."

It's rather even handed. He doesn't support the reparation movement!

I wonder when AP History classes on Nazism start covering Winterhilfswerk.

in-depth lessons on the Black Panther Party’s free breakfast and medical programs, often seen as taboo topics to cover in class because critics historically smeared the group as violent and communist.

Plenty of violent groups do good things for people in the 'hood. It gets them good publicity and a small core of supporters. Saddam Hussein created public welfare programs.

And Al Capone set up a soup kitchen precisely to repair his public image. That the Black Panthers were "smeared" as being violent and Communist is nonsense, they were Marxist-Leninist in ideology. As to violence, well - that's one of those 'six of one and half a dozen of the other' questions, but certainly they didn't think the struggle would be won by handing out flowers.

To add on to this, my understanding is that these supporters, esp. if geographically clustered well, enables the coverup of activities and other forms of support that allow the organisation to exist stably.

Some of it does make sense when one considers that many such societies started as kinship or mutual-aid organisations. It does seem like a pretty central modus operandi for underworld groups.