The right will of course, as they always do, jump on an opening to pound it into submission,,ie Defund the Police...But that doesn't mean that wokeness is not becoming a problem....
Cancel Culture, is another and the right shows their guilt most prominently with Liz Cheney but she is hardly the only example and there are many repubs who are now retiring rather than fight it or become victims of it..
We are at the point both sides are guilty as charged and the sides will defend their positions and point to the other as the worst offender...
Wokeness is just another catch phrase thrown around and it can join many others...Carville and others point out a problem for the left....Should it be discarded because its not convenient..Because its to admit some fault,,,
I submit it is to be listened to and do a little self reflection and not dismissed as overblown and just a new strategy by the other side, then continue on as if there is no problem at all..
The stakes are to high are they not Faug, and isn't self reflection a good exercise for any and all?,,dems too?...
Carville points out some other things dems may consider about message, but wokeness was the point of your post...
"Labeling everything as "woke" is becoming as common and disingenuous (as many don't even know what it means) a tactic for conservatives as Trump's "fake news." Don't like it? It's fake news. Don't like it? It's woke. Mar. 17, 2021, at 1:38 PM Why Attacking ‘Cancel Culture’ And ‘Woke’ People Is Becoming The GOP’s New Political Strategy"
James Carville on the state of Democratic politics.
By Sean Illing@seanillingsean.illing@vox.com Apr 27, 2021, 8:30am EDT
James Carville. Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg via Getty Images
I called James Carville hoping to get his thoughts on President Joe Biden’s first 100 days in office.
He obliged — then, one question in, brushed aside the exercise to talk instead about why the Democrats might be poised to squander their political advantage against a damaged GOP.
His failure to cooperate may have been for the best since the first 100 days ritual can sometimes lead to dull, dutiful analysis. What Carville offered up instead was a blunt critique of his own party even after a successful 2020 election cycle — a sequel of sorts to his fulminations during last year’s Democratic primaries .. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/2/7/21123518/trump-2020-election-democratic-party-james-carville . The longtime Democratic strategist is mostly pleased with Biden, but it’s where much of the party seems to be going that has him worried.
“Wokeness is a problem,” he told me, “and we all know it.” According to Carville, Democrats are in power for now, but they also only narrowly defeated Donald Trump, “a world-historical buffoon,” and they lost congressional seats and failed to pick up state legislatures. The reason is simple: They’ve got a “messaging problem.”
A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.
Sean Illing
What do you make of Biden’s first 100 days?
James Carville
Honestly, if we’re just talking about Biden, it’s very difficult to find something to complain about. And to me his biggest attribute is that he’s not into “faculty lounge” politics.
Sean Illing
“Faculty lounge” politics?
James Carville
You ever get the sense that people in faculty lounges in fancy colleges use a different language than ordinary people? They come up with a word like “Latinx” that no one else uses. Or they use a phrase like “communities of color.” I don’t know anyone who speaks like that. I don’t know anyone who lives in a “community of color.” I know lots of white and Black and brown people and they all live in ... neighborhoods.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with these phrases. But this is not how people talk. This is not how voters talk. And doing it anyway is a signal that you’re talking one language and the people you want to vote for you are speaking another language. This stuff is harmless in one sense, but in another sense it’s not. - "“Imagine if it was a bunch of nonwhite people who stormed the Capitol. Imagine how Republicans would exploit that and make every news cycle about how the Dems are responsible for it.”" - Sean Illing
Is the problem the language or the fact that there are lots of voters who just don’t want to hear about race and racial injustice?
James Carville
We have to talk about race. We should talk about racial injustice. What I’m saying is, we need to do it without using jargon-y language that’s unrecognizable to most people — including most Black people, by the way — because it signals that you’re trying to talk around them. This “too cool for school” shit doesn’t work, and we have to stop it.
There may be a group within the Democratic Party that likes this, but it ain’t the majority. And beyond that, if Democrats want power, they have to win in a country where 18 percent of the population controls 52 percent of the Senate seats. That’s a fact. That’s not changing. That’s what this whole damn thing is about.
Sean Illing
Sounds like you got a problem with “wokeness,” James.
James Carville
Wokeness is a problem and everyone knows it. It’s hard to talk to anybody today — and I talk to lots of people in the Democratic Party — who doesn’t say this. But they don’t want to say it out loud.
Sean Illing
Why not?
James Carville
Because they’ll get clobbered or canceled. And look, part of the problem is that lots of Democrats will say that we have to listen to everybody and we have to include every perspective, or that we don’t have to run a ruthless messaging campaign. Well, you kinda do. It really matters.
I always tell people that we’ve got to stop speaking Hebrew and start speaking Yiddish. We have to speak the way regular people speak, the way voters speak. It ain’t complicated. That’s how you connect and persuade. And we have to stop allowing ourselves to be defined from the outside.
Sean Illing
What does that mean?
James Carville
Take someone like Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She’s obviously very bright. She knows how to draw a headline. In my opinion, some of her political aspirations are impractical and probably not going to happen. But that’s probably the worst thing that you can say about her.
Now take someone like Marjorie Taylor Greene, the new Republican congresswoman from Georgia. She’s absolutely loonier than a tune. We all know it. And yet, for some reason, the Democrats pay a bigger political price for AOC than Republicans pay for Greene. That’s the problem in a nutshell. And it’s ridiculous because AOC and Greene are not comparable in any way.
Sean Illing
I hear versions of this argument about language and perception all the time, James. It’s an old problem. What’s the solution?
James Carville
That’s why I’m doing this interview. Lots of smart people are going to read it, and hopefully they can figure out that which I can’t. But if you’re asking me, I think it’s because large parts of the country view us as an urban, coastal, arrogant party, and a lot gets passed through that filter. That’s a real thing. I don’t give a damn what anyone thinks about it — it’s a real phenomenon, and it’s damaging to the party brand.
Sean Illing
Part of the issue is that Republicans are going to paint the Dems as cop-hating, fetus-destroying Stalinists no matter what they say or do. So, yeah, I agree that Democrats should be smart and not say dumb, alienating things, but I’m also not sure how much control they have over how they’re perceived by half the country, especially when that half lives in an alternate media reality.
James Carville
Right, but we can’t say, “Republicans are going to call us socialists no matter what, so let’s just run as out-and-out socialists.” That’s not the smartest thing to do. And maybe tweeting that we should abolish the police isn’t the smartest thing to do because almost fucking no one wants to do that.
Here’s the deal: No matter how you look at the map, the only way Democrats can hold power is to build on their coalition, and that will have to include more rural white voters from across the country. Democrats are never going to win a majority of these voters. That’s the reality. But the difference between getting beat 80 to 20 and 72 to 28 is all the difference in the world.
So they just have to lose by less — that’s all.
Sean Illing
So what do you want the Democrats to do differently besides not having people peddle politically toxic ideas like abolishing the police? How do they change the conversation so that Republicans aren’t defining them by their least popular expressions?
You’re a strategist, James. I want to know what you’d advise them to do. You don’t have any complaints about Biden because he’s getting stuff done. He’s putting money in people’s pockets. But the Democratic Party is a big coalition and you’re always going to have people promoting unpopular ideas, right? Whereas the Republican Party is more homogenous, and that lends itself to a tighter, more controlled message.
James Carville
Tell me this: How is it we have all this talk about Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Matt Gaetz (R-FL) and we don’t talk about Dennis Hastert, the longest-serving Republican speaker of the House in Congress? If Hastert was a Democrat who we knew had a history of molesting kids and was actually sent to prison in 2016, he’d still be on Fox News every fucking night. The Republicans would never shut the hell up about it.
So when Jim Jordan was pulling all these stunts with Anthony Fauci [Fauci was speaking at a congressional hearing about ending coronavirus precautions], why didn’t someone jump in and say, “Let me tell you something, Jim, if Fauci knew what you knew, if he knew that a doctor was molesting young people, he would’ve gone to the medical board yesterday. So you can go ahead and shut the fuck up.” [Ed. note: Jordan denies knowing about the allegations of abuse when he was an assistant coach at Ohio State University.] I love that Congresswoman Maxine Waters told Jordan to “shut your mouth,” but that’s what I really wish a Democrat would say, and I wish they’d keep saying it over and over again.
Can I step back for a second and give you an example of the broader problem?
Sean Illing
Sure.
James Carville
Look at Florida. You now have Democrats saying Florida is a lost cause. Really? In 2018 in Florida, giving felons the right to vote got 64 percent. In 2020, a $15 minimum wage, which we have no chance of passing [federally], got 67 percent. Has anyone in the Democratic Party said maybe there’s nothing wrong with the state of Florida? Maybe the problem is the kind of campaigns we’re running?
If you gave me an environment in which the majority of voters wanted to expand the franchise to felons and raise the minimum wage, I should be able to win that. It’s certainly not a political environment I’m destined to lose in. But in Miami-Dade, all they talked about was defunding the police and Kamala Harris being the most liberal senator in the US Senate. And if you look all across the Rio Grande Valley, we lost all kinds of solidly blue voters. And the faculty lounge bullshit is a big part of it.
Sean Illing
If you’re a Democrat, you could look at the state of play and say, “We’re winning. We won the White House. We won Congress. We have power. It ain’t perfect, but it ain’t a disaster either.”
James Carville
We won the White House against a world-historical buffoon. And we came within 42,000 votes of losing. We lost congressional seats. We didn’t pick up state legislatures. So let’s not have an argument about whether or not we’re off-key in our messaging. We are. And we’re off because there’s too much jargon and there’s too much esoterica and it turns people off.
Sean Illing
Not to beat a dead horse, but Democrats and Republicans are dealing with very different constituencies. Democrats have a big tent, they have to win different kinds of voters and that means making different kinds of appeals. Republicans can get away with shit that Democrats cannot.
James Carville
Yeah, that’s a problem. We can only do what we can do. People always say to me, “Why don’t Democrats just lie like Republicans?” Because if they did, our voters wouldn’t stand for it. But I’m not saying we need to lie like they do. I’m saying, why not go after Gaetz and Jordan and link them to Hastert and the Republican Party over and over and over again? We have to take these small opportunities to define ourselves and the other side every damn time. And we don’t do it. We just don’t do it. - "“Democrats are never going to win a majority of these voters. ... But the difference between getting beat 80 to 20 and 72 to 28 is all the difference in the world”" - Sean Illing
Republicans aren’t just more comfortable lying, they’re more comfortable with slogans and sound bites, and that’s partly why they’re more effective at defining themselves and the Democrats.
James Carville
Let me give you my favorite example of metropolitan, overeducated arrogance. Take the climate problem. Do you realize that climate is the only major social or political movement that I can think of that refuses to use emotion? Where’s the identifiable song? Where’s the bumper sticker? Where’s the slogan? Where’s the flag? Where’s the logo?
We don’t have it because with faculty politics what you do is appeal to reason. You don’t need the sloganeering and sound bites. That’s for simple people. All you need are those timetables and temperature charts, and from that, everyone will just get it.
That’s not how the world works; that’s not how people work. And Republicans are way more disciplined about taking a thing and branding it. Elites will roll their eyes at that, but I’d ask, “How’s that working out for you?” Most people agree with us on health care and minimum wage and Roe v. Wade and even on the climate.
So why can’t we leverage that?
Sean Illing
What would you have Biden do to counter some of these messaging problems?
James Carville
I’d have him pick up a phone. I’d have someone in the White House pick up the phone. And when someone in the party starts this jargon shit, I’d call them and say, “We’re only a vote away. Our approval rating is 60 percent. We got a chance to pick up seats in 2022, and if you did this, it would be very helpful to us.”
Sean Illing
Are you sure those calls aren’t happening already?
James Carville
Maybe they are, but they need to be more effective. And we need more of them.
Sean Illing
There’s a philosophy on the left right now, which says the Democrats should pass everything they possibly can, no matter the costs, and trust that the voters will reward them on the back end.
Where do you land on that?
James Carville
First of all, the Democratic Party can’t be more liberal than Sen. Joe Manchin. That’s the fact. We don’t have the votes. But I’ll say this, two of the most consequential political events in recent memory happened on the same day in January: the insurrection at the US Capitol and the Democrats winning those two seats in Georgia. Can’t overstate that.
But the Democrats can’t fuck it up. They have to make the Republicans own that insurrection every day. They have to pound it. They have to call bookers on cable news shows. They have to get people to write op-eds. There will be all kinds of investigations and stories dripping out for god knows how long, and the Democrats should spend every day tying all of it to the Republican Party. They can’t sit back and wait for it to happen.
Hell, just imagine if it was a bunch of nonwhite people who stormed the Capitol. Imagine how Republicans would exploit that and make every news cycle about how the Dems are responsible for it. Every political debate would be about that. The Republicans would bludgeon the Democrats with it forever.
So whatever you think Republicans would do to us in that scenario, that’s exactly what the hell we need to do them.
"Labeling everything as "woke" is becoming as common and disingenuous (as many don't even know what it means) a tactic for conservatives as Trump's "fake news." Don't like it? It's fake news. Don't like it? It's woke. Why Attacking ‘Cancel Culture’ And ‘Woke’ People Is Becoming The GOP’s New Political Strategy"
January 12, 2021 HUMAN RIGHTS
by Janel George
In September 2020, President Trump issued an executive order excluding from federal contracts any diversity and inclusion training interpreted as containing “Divisive Concepts,” “Race or Sex Stereotyping,” and “Race or Sex Scapegoating.” Among the content considered “divisive” is Critical Race Theory (CRT). In response, the African American Policy Forum, led by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, launched the #TruthBeTold campaign to expose the harm that the order poses. Reports indicate that over 300 diversity and inclusion trainings have been canceled as a result of the order. And over 120 civil rights organizations and allies signed a letter condemning the executive order. The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF), the National Urban League (NUL), and the National Fair Housing Alliance filed a federal lawsuit alleging that the executive order violates the guarantees of free speech, equal protection, and due process. So, exactly what is CRT, why is it under attack, and what does it mean for the civil rights lawyer?
CRT is not a diversity and inclusion “training” but a practice of interrogating the role of race and racism in society that emerged in the legal academy and spread to other fields of scholarship. Crenshaw—who coined the term “CRT”—notes that CRT is not a noun, but a verb. It cannot be confined to a static and narrow definition but is considered to be an evolving and malleable practice. It critiques how the social construction of race and institutionalized racism perpetuate a racial caste system that relegates people of color to the bottom tiers. CRT also recognizes that race intersects with other identities, including sexuality, gender identity, and others. CRT recognizes that racism is not a bygone relic of the past. Instead, it acknowledges that the legacy of slavery, segregation, and the imposition of second-class citizenship on Black Americans and other people of color continue to permeate the social fabric of this nation.
Critical Race Theory recognizes that racism is not a bygone relic of the past. NEONBRAND ON UNSPLASH & FREEPIK
Principles of the CRT Practice
While recognizing the evolving and malleable nature of CRT, scholar Khiara Bridges outlines a few key tenets of CRT, including:
* Recognition that race is not biologically real but is socially constructed and socially significant. It recognizes that science (as demonstrated in the Human Genome Project) refutes the idea of biological racial differences. According to scholars Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, race is the product of social thought and is not connected to biological reality.
* Acknowledgement that racism is a normal feature of society and is embedded within systems and institutions, like the legal system, that replicate racial inequality. This dismisses the idea that racist incidents are aberrations but instead are manifestations of structural and systemic racism.
* Rejection of popular understandings about racism, such as arguments that confine racism to a few “bad apples.” CRT recognizes that racism is codified in law, embedded in structures, and woven into public policy. CRT rejects claims of meritocracy or “colorblindness.” CRT recognizes that it is the systemic nature of racism that bears primary responsibility for reproducing racial inequality.
* Recognition of the relevance of people’s everyday lives to scholarship. This includes embracing the lived experiences of people of color, including those preserved through storytelling, and rejecting deficit-informed research that excludes the epistemologies of people of color.
CRT does not define racism in the traditional manner as solely the consequence of discrete irrational bad acts perpetrated by individuals but is usually the unintended (but often foreseeable) consequence of choices. It exposes the ways that racism is often cloaked in terminology regarding “mainstream,” “normal,” or “traditional” values or “neutral” policies, principles, or practices. And, as scholar Tara Yosso asserts, CRT can be an approach used to theorize, examine, and challenge the ways which race and racism implicitly and explicitly impact social structures, practices, and discourses. CRT observes that scholarship that ignores race is not demonstrating “neutrality” but adherence to the existing racial hierarchy. For the civil rights lawyer, this can be a particularly powerful approach for examining race in society. Particularly because CRT has recently come under fire, understanding CRT and some of its primary tenets is vital for the civil rights lawyer who seeks to eradicate racial inequality in this country.
The originators of CRT include Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Cheryl Harris, Richard Delgado, Patricia Williams, Gloria Ladson-Billings, Tara Yosso, among others. CRT transcends a Black/white racial binary and recognizes that racism has impacted the experiences of various people of color, including Latinx, Native Americans, and Asian Americans. As a result, different branches, including LatCrit, TribalCrit, and AsianCRT have emerged from CRT. These different branches seek to examine specific experiences of oppression. CRT challenges white privilege and exposes deficit-informed research that ignores, and often omits, the scholarship of people of color. CRT began in the legal academy in the 1970s and grew in the 1980s and 1990s. It persists as a field of inquiry in the legal field and in other areas of scholarship. Mari Matsudi described CRT as the work of progressive legal scholars seeking to address the role of racism in the law and the work to eliminate it and other configurations of subordination.
[Noted CRT began more than 40 years ago. Why now has it just become a tool of the conservative right to knock more open and inquiring minds on the head.]
CRT grew from Critical Legal Studies (CLS), which argued that the law was not objective or apolitical. CLS was a significant departure from earlier conceptions of the law (and other fields of scholarship) as objective, neutral, principled, and dissociated from social or political considerations. Like proponents of CLS, critical race theorists recognized that the law could be complicit in maintaining an unjust social order. Where critical race theorists departed from CLS was in the recognition of how race and racial inequality were reproduced through the law.Further, CRT scholars did not share the approach of destabilizing social injustice by destabilizing the law.Many CRT scholars had witnessed how the law could be used to help secure and protect civil rights. Therefore, critical race theorists recognized that, while the law could be used to deepen racial inequality, it also held potential as a tool for emancipation and for securing racial equality.
Foundational questions that underlie CRT and the law include: How does the law construct race?; How has the law protected racism and upheld racial hierarchies?; How does the law reproduce racial inequality?; and How can the law be used to dismantle race, racism, and racial inequality?
In the field of education, Daniel Solórzano has identified tenets of CRT that, in addition to the impact of race and racism and the challenge to the dominant ideology of the objectivity of scholarship, include a commitment to social justice; centering the experiential knowledge of people of color; and using multiple approaches from a variety of disciplines to analyze racism within both historical and contemporary contexts, such as women’s studies, sociology, history, law, psychology, film, theater, and other fields.
Some of the most compelling demonstrations of how racism has been replicated through systems is within the education system. Many can recall images of troops escorting nine Black students to integrate Little Rock Central High School. Or Ruby Bridges being escorted into a New Orleans Elementary School by armed guards six years after the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated racially segregated education in Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Those moments are just snapshots of the intersection of racism, the law, and the education system. This article provides just a snapshot of CRT, and the following explanation is a glimpse of the application of CRT in education. But the explanation below seeks to capture how CRT applies to the education system, particularly in addressing how racial inequality persists in the post–civil rights era.
Education and CRT
Segregated schooling is a particularly profound and timely demonstration of the persistence of systemic racism in education. For example, Brown is often couched in terms of American exceptionalism. But Gloria Ladson-Billings and other CRT originators in the field of education recognize that Brown was the culmination of over a century of legal challenges to segregated schooling and second-class citizenship and far from a natural occurrence or inevitable result of racial progress. The late Harvard Law Professor Derrick Bell, in Brown v. Board of Education and the Interest-Convergence Dilemma, noted that the Fourteenth Amendment alone could not effectively promote racial equality for Black people where such a remedy threatened the superior social status of wealthy white people. Further, Bell noted that Brown was decided the way it was because of what he termed “interest convergence,” which is the recognition that the interests of Black people in achieving racial equality will be accommodated only when it converges with the interests of white people.
Therefore, Brown’s legal invalidation of racial segregation in education held some benefits for white policymakers as well as for Black students. Chief among these, Bell argued, was not the moral imperative of ending legal segregation but restoring the credibility of America’s image abroad. As the nation waged a Cold War, it became increasingly difficult for the country to justify its racial caste system, Bell observed. Further, the Brown ruling was limited in its relief, and the persistence of racial inequality following the civil rights era implicates the law in maintaining racial inequality. For example, the Supreme Court failed to outline a specific remedy to achieve integrated education. As Ladson-Billings notes in Landing on the Wrong Note: The Price We Paid for Brown of Brown II decided in 1955, it can be seen as a combination of flawed compromises that combined a denouncement of legal segregation with a limited and unworkable remedy. It took years of subsequent litigation over the ensuing decades until the Court finally mandated that school districts act to uproot all vestiges of segregation “root and branch.”
A particular limitation of legal efforts to address racial inequality has been the inability of many legal mandates to reach the covert and insidious nature of de facto racism. This has proved that eradicating racial inequality in education is not merely an exercise in ending legal segregation. For example, achieving racial balance, as Bell asserted, did not obviate the need to address other systemic practices that perpetuate racial inequality within diverse schools, such as the loss of Black faculty and administrators, many of whom lost their jobs in the wake of Brown as retribution for aiding school desegregation efforts. Bell observed that changing demographic patterns, white flight, and the reluctance of the courts to urge the necessary degree of social reform rendered further progress in Brown virtually impossible.
The limitations of legal interventions have led to current manifestations of racial inequality in education, including:
* The predominance of curriculum that excludes the history and lived experiences of Americans of color and imposes a dominant white narrative of history;
* Deficit-oriented instruction that characterizes students of color as in need of remediation;
* Narrow assessments, the results of which are used to confirm narratives about the ineducability of children of color;
* School discipline policies that disproportionately impact students of color and compromise their educational outcomes (such as dress code policies prohibiting natural Black hairstyles);
* School funding inequities, including the persistent underfunding of property-poor districts, many of which are composed primarily of children of color; and
* The persistence of racially segregated education.
School funding inequities are exemplified in many racially and socioeconomically isolated districts, such as Detroit’s public schools. In 1940, shortly before Verda Bradley arrived in Detroit, Black Americans comprised 9.2 percent of the city’s population. Over 30 years later, when her children went to school, Black Americans comprised 44.5 percent of the city’s population. The ratio of Black students to white students was 58 to 41 in 1967. Seeking to desegregate the city’s schools, Bradley and other parents who were represented by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People alleged that Michigan maintained a racially segregated public school system through policies that isolated Black students within the city’s public schools. Due to racially discriminatory housing practices, Black families were excluded from the surrounding suburbs populated by white families that fled the city to avoid integrating the schools. However, in Milliken v. Bradley, the Supreme Court rejected a desegregation plan that encompassed Detroit’s public schools and the surrounding all-white suburbs. In exempting the surrounding suburban districts from the desegregation plan, the Court held that they were not required to be part of the desegregation plan because district lines had not been drawn with “racist intent” and the surrounding suburbs were not responsible for the segregation within the city’s schools. The Court left Detroit to desegregate within itself. In his prescient dissent, Thurgood Marshall observed, “The Detroit-only plan has no hope of achieving actual desegregation. . . . Instead, Negro children will continue to attend all-Negro schools. The very evil that Brown was aimed at will not be cured but will be perpetuated.”
Consequently, in 2000, the ratio of Black students to white students in Detroit’s public schools was 91 to 4. The city’s racially isolated public schools are also profoundly under-resourced. Recent litigation—Gary B. v. Whitmer—brought on behalf of students in Detroit’s public schools illuminates the state of the schools in the decades following Milliken. In their complaint, the plaintiffs describe deteriorating facilities that lack heat and are infested with vermin. They describe the absence of qualified educators that resulted in a middle schooler serving as a substitute teacher. But students like the Gary B. plaintiffs (and students in similarly racially isolated and under-resourced districts) are left with little recourse given that the Supreme Court held in 1973’s San Antonio v. Rodriguez that there is no federal right to education.
Instead, the Gary B. plaintiffs brought a novel claim alleging that they were entitled to a minimum level of education that enabled them to achieve at least a basic level of literacy. The decision of the Court of Appeals in favor of the plaintiffs was ultimately set aside, and the state of Michigan reached a settlement with the plaintiffs. However, from a CRT perspective, the case is instructive about how the law can reproduce racial inequality. By rejecting a desegregation plan that sought to transcend the racial divisions imposed by discriminatory housing practices, the Court essentially foreclosed the possibility of implementing a workable desegregation strategy, and racial and economic inequality persisted unabated. CRT recognizes the inevitability of the segregated and under-resourced schools at issue in the Gary B. litigation, given Milliken’s indifference to the nature of covert discrimination decades earlier.
CRT and a Call to Action for Civil Rights Lawyers
The example of application of CRT to education in the case of Milliken illustrates how CRT recognizes the role of the law in perpetuating racial inequality. Employing a CRT framework necessitates interrogation of systems and structures in which we function. The Milliken example also implicates the impact of discriminatory housing policies and school financing systems in perpetuating racially isolated and under-resourced schools in Detroit and recognizes that education policy does not operate in a vacuum.
Another important consideration is that many of our nation’s systems and structures—including the legal system—were created when people of color were denied full participation in American society. Therefore, as many critical race theorists have noted, CRT calls for a radical reordering of society and a reckoning with the structures and systems that intersect to perpetuate racial inequality.
For civil rights lawyers, this necessitates an examination of the legal system and the ways it reproduces racial injustice. It also necessitates a rethinking of interpersonal interactions, including the role of the civil rights lawyer. It means a centering of the stories and voices of those who are impacted by the laws, systems, and structures that so many civil rights advocates work to improve. It requires the abandonment of a deficit approach that perceives those impacted by unjust laws and policies as deficient, defective, or helpless.Instead, we ought to recognize that these individuals have stories, histories, and knowledge that are worth acknowledging, learning about, and centering. Particularly in devising legal and policy interventions to address racial inequality, CRT calls for considering unintended consequences of proposed remedies, addressing intersecting policies and structures, and acting intentionally to ensure that harm is not further replicated by the legal system. Most of all, CRT demands challenging the status quo of racial inequality that has persisted for far too long in this nation and exploring how the law and lawyers can help to finally upend it.
Like any other approach, CRT can be misunderstood and misapplied. It has been distorted and attacked. And it continues to change and evolve. The hope in CRT is in its recognition that the same policies, structures, and scholarship that can function to disenfranchise and oppress so many also holds the potential to emancipate and empower many. It provides a lens through which the civil rights lawyer can imagine a more just nation.
CPAC Agenda Shows Trump Still Controls the Republican Party
"Labeling everything as "woke" is becoming as common and disingenuous (as many don't even know what it means) a tactic for conservatives as Trump's "fake news." Don't like it? It's fake news. Don't like it? It's woke."
A key upcoming conservative event features a list of participants – and notable absentees – that displays the former president’s continued grasp over the Republican Party.
By Susan Milligan July 9, 2021, at 6:00 a.m. U.S. News & World Report
Former President Donald Trump walks out to speak during the final day of the Conservative Political Action Conference, on Feb. 28, in Orlando, Fla.(Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post/Getty Images)
They lost the White House, control of the U.S. Senate and failed to gain back control of the House. But conservatives are partying like it's 2019.
Donald Trump – no longer president, not yet a candidate – will be the headline speaker this weekend at the Conservative Political Action Conference meeting in Dallas .. https://cpac.conservative.org/agenda/ . Also speaking will be his son Donald Trump Jr. and a slew of Trump loyalists, including former Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, Rep. Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina, Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado and former Trump medical adviser Ronny Jackson of Texas.
[Noted all from the worst of the lot.]
Not scheduled to appear? Conservatives like Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah and Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, both of whom voted against Trump during the 45th president's impeachment and Senate trial. Nor are there announced appearances by those who might be mulling a 2024 run, such as former Vice President Mike Pence or former Trump Cabinet members Mike Pompeo and Nikki Haley.
It's an awkward situation for Republicans as the party seeks to reposition itself for 2022 and 2024. On paper, the GOP should be optimistic: Redistricting, retirements and historical trends suggest Republicans have an excellent chance of taking back control of the House next year and a real chance, too, to flip the 50-50 Senate. With political observers skeptical that the now-popular, but 78-year-old, President Joe Biden will seek reelection in 2024, the next presidential campaign could be an open race, giving Republicans an advantage.
But as long as Trump – embattled legally but still very popular with a critical part of the GOP base – refuses to step aside, the future of the party and its hopeful leaders is in limbo.
"A lot of folks in large part are waiting to see what the former president does," says Matt Terrill, a partner at Firehouse Strategies and former consultant to the Republican Party of Florida. "You can be a potential candidate out there running. But at the end of the day, they're waiting out there on the sidelines and waiting to see what the former president does."
And with Trump, the wait-out is a bit more complicated, experts say. Trump's legal problems – his eponymous company is under criminal indictment in New York – could complicate a second run at the presidency. Further, Trump is known for his intolerance of those who cross him or challenge him, meaning would-be contenders have to make sure they don't make too many waves if they dip a toe into the political waters.
Haley, for example, criticized Trump after the Jan. 6 insurrection attempt on the Capitol, telling a Republican National Committee meeting that the president's actions would "be judged harshly by history."
Two weeks ago, Haley was in first-caucuses state Iowa, delivering an address to the Republican Party of Iowa's Lincoln Dinner, a forum for would-be presidential contenders. But at that dinner, she praised Trump and said she would not run if the former president decided to try to get his old job back.
Pence would seem to be the heir apparent, if Trump indeed announces he will step aside. The former vice president has been a consistent social conservative popular with the religious right and was a loyal – and mostly quiet – ally of Trump's when the two governed together.
But Pence angered Trump ultra-loyalists when he rejected calls to refuse to participate in the certification of Biden's win in Congress. = "What will happen when Trump turns on (Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis)? ... That's going to come." - Months after Capitol rioters, some hauling a gallows, shouted "hang Pence!" the vice president was booed and called a "traitor" at the Faith and Freedom Coalition conference in Florida last month. He won't face that problem at CPAC, where Pence is not scheduled to appear with his former running mate.
Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, a perennial CPAC favorite who typically gets the joint jumping with a passionate address? He's skipping the event in his home state this weekend, citing family obligations.
[Read jockeying for a position.]
Then there's Pompeo, Trump's former secretary of state. He won't be at CPAC but the Kansan is scheduled to be the headline speaker at the end of the month at the Silver Elephant Dinner, the South Carolina Republican Party's annual fundraiser and an important stop for candidates in this early primary state.
Pompeo is trying hard to straddle the line between setting himself up as Trump's GOP successor without alienating Trump's base or even other, more Trump-skeptic parts of the party.
"It's a unique position for people like Pompeo, to occupy the same lane as Trump without appearing to share the same lane as Trump," says Nathaniel Birkhead, a political science professor at Kansas State University.
"The bench is small. It's very small," Birkhead says of the potential GOP field. And since Birkhead doesn't "see Trumpism falling apart in the next two to four years," there isn't a lot of room for anyone who hasn't been consistently defensive and protective of Trump, he says.
On the sidelines but still very much in the public eye is Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. Trump hasn't remarked on the public praise Biden gave DeSantis – who similarly had kind words for the man who beat Trump in 2020 – when the governor and sitting president huddled with Florida officials to address the deadly condominium collapse in Surfside.
DeSantis pleased a certain segment of the party when he refused to shut down Florida in the midst of the pandemic, citing the impact on the economy. He has since battled with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the cruise industry over whether vacation cruisers should have to show proof of vaccinations against COVID-19 before boarding.
DeSantis may have some issues in a national campaign because of questions about his handling of the pandemic, says Michael Binder, associate political science professor at the University of North Florida.
More importantly, "The question is, what will happen when Trump turns on him?" Binder says. "Something like that's going to come, especially if Trump views this guy as potentially overtaking him." A CPAC straw poll held in February had Trump in the lead – but DeSantis led when the former president and fellow Florida resident was taken out of the running.
Trump has been back to his old self – holding rallies, raising money and suing people and companies that cross him, as he did recently with a lawsuit against Facebook and Twitter for suspending his account. But that can only take the former president so far, says Dave Woodard, a former Clemson University political scientist and GOP consultant in the Palmetto State.
"Trump may be jumping around," but that does not necessarily amount to anything more than some "raw political power," Woodard says.
"He still has his (loyal) group, but that's going to shrink and shrink and shrink," Woodard predicts.
At CPAC this weekend, however, it's still the Trump Show.
A history of “wokeness” Absolute clarification of what "woke" originally meant. Step right up! If you have any minuscule of doubt about wokeness this is the article for you!! LOL Seriously, you'll understand how the right has dishonestly mutilated the original meaning of the word to distract from an important social concern. Toss the social in the trash . It's all political man!!!
A history of “wokeness”
Stay woke: How a Black activist watchword got co-opted in the culture war.
By Aja Romano @ajaromano Oct 9, 2020, 10:00am EDT
Before 2014, the call to “stay woke” was, for many people, unheard of. The idea behind it was common within Black communities at that point — the notion that staying “woke” and alert to the deceptions of other people was a basic survival tactic. But in 2014, following the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, “stay woke” suddenly became the cautionary watchword of Black Lives Matter activists on the streets, used in a chilling and specific context: keeping watch for police brutality and unjust police tactics.
In the six years since Brown’s death, “woke” has evolved into a single-word summation of leftist political ideology, centered on social justice politics and critical race theory. This framing of “woke” is bipartisan: It’s used as a shorthand for political progressiveness by the left, and as a denigration of leftist culture by the right.
On the right, “woke” — like its cousin “canceled” — bespeaks “political correctness” gone awry, and the term itself is usually used sarcastically. At the Republican National Convention in August, right-wing Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) scolded “woketopians,” grouping them together with socialists and Biden supporters, as though the definition of a “woketopian” was self-evident.
[...]
“Wokeness” may be a religion, a cause for weary exhaustion, or both
Despite critics’ attempts to turn “woke” into a laughable or problematic concept, many people continue to use “woke” unironically. Chloé S. Valdary, founder of the “compassionate anti-racism” program Theory of Enchantment, told me she still sees Black communities primarily using the phrase to mean staying alert to systemic injustice “all the time, especially on Instagram.”
“In some posts they’ve used it to mean staying alert against police brutality,” she said. “In others, they use it as a catchall term to signal their objection to ‘whiteness,’ broadly defined.”
“I associate it with much more than Black Lives Matter and police injustice,” Prior told me. Like many people, she said, her earliest awareness of the term coincided with the activism surrounding the Ferguson protests. But she added that she now sees “stay woke” as a cry against systemic racism in general. "“People today who identify as woke see themselves as having been awakened to a new set of ideas, value systems, and knowledge”"
Both Valdary and Prior also acknowledged that across the political spectrum in 2020, “woke” seems to represent a consciously progressive mindset — but that concept is loaded with irony and cynicism. Even on the left, the idea of being “woke” can be a double-edged sword, often used to suggest an aggressive, performative take on progressive politics that only makes things worse.
For instance, consider how the phrase “woke discourse” gets used on social media: The “discourse” can be about a zillion different things, but attaching “woke” to it usually denotes a perception of embittered exhaustion at progressive semantics and arguments.
You'll see "woke" also has a number of meanings within the black community, but none even close to the change of meaning conservatives have abused it with.
"Labeling everything as "woke" is becoming as common and disingenuous (as many don't even know what it means) a tactic for conservatives as Trump's "fake news." Don't like it? It's fake news. Don't like it? It's woke. Mar. 17, 2021, at 1:38 PM Why Attacking ‘Cancel Culture’ And ‘Woke’ People Is Becoming The GOP’s New Political Strategy"
DeSantis faces pushback in Florida as voters tire of war on woke
MAY, 2021 -- "Labeling everything as "woke" is becoming as common and disingenuous (as many don't even know what it means) a tactic for conservatives as Trump's "fake news." Don't like it? It's fake news. Don't like it? It's woke. Mar. 17, 2021, at 1:38 PM Why Attacking ‘Cancel Culture’ And ‘Woke’ People Is Becoming The GOP’s New Political Strategy"
Conservative lawmakers rejected a host of new culture wars proposals in the legislature
By Lori Rozsa March 9, 2024 at 6:00 a.m. EST
People celebrate the Gay Days at Disney World on June 3 in Lake Buena Vista, Fla. (Thomas Simonetti for The Washington Post)
The bill banning rainbow flags from public buildings in Florida sounded like a sure bet.
State Rep. David Borrero (R), the legislation’s sponsor, argued that it was needed to prevent schoolchildren from being “subliminally indoctrinated.” That rationale echoed other measures championed by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) as part of his “war on woke.”
But instead of sailing through the Republican-dominated legislature, the DeSantis-backed bill died a quick legislative death, making it only as far as one subcommittee.
It wasn’t the only culture war proposal from conservative lawmakers to end up in the bill graveyard during the session that ended Friday. One rejected bill would have banned the removal of Confederate monuments. Another would have required transgender people to use their sex assigned at birth on driver's licenses — something the state Department of Motor Vehicles is already mandating. A third proposed forbidding local and state government officials from using transgender people’s pronouns.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) delivers remarks in Lake Buena Vista on Feb. 22. (Joe Burbank/Orlando Sentinel/AP)
Some of those ideas have come up in the past and may surface again next year. But the fact that the bills failed, even with public support from DeSantis, marks a change from the days when the GOP supermajority in Tallahassee passed nearly everything the governor asked for.
Florida has firmly cemented itself in recent years as ground zero for the nation’s culture wars. The Sunshine State is the birthplace of conservative parental rights group Moms for Liberty, the original law restricting LGBTQ+ discussion in classrooms, one of the strictest abortion laws in the country and legislation that has led to the banning of more books than in any other state in America.
But the pushback is growing.
Parents and others have organized and protested schoolbook bans. Abortion rights advocates gathered enough signatures to put the issue on the ballot in Florida in November. A bill that would have established “fetal personhood” stalled before it could reach a full vote.
Even the governor recently admitted the state might have gone too far in trying to remove certain books from school shelves, suggesting laws on book challenges should be “tweaked” to prevent “bad actors” from having too much influence.
Democrats and other DeSantis critics say the laws that the governor has pushed will continue to shape public life in Florida for years to come, and they don’t expect the Republican supermajority in the state House to suddenly abandon conservative causes. But they do sense a shift.
“When his presidential race ended, I think that a lot of his influence and power died at the same time,” said state Sen. Shevrin Jones, a South Florida Democrat. “And I think that people in Florida and across the country, including Republicans, are starting to see that the culture wars are getting us nowhere.”
GOP voter registration numbers continued to surpass Democrats, but the party lost two local races they were expected to win: the mayor’s office in Jacksonville, and a closely contested special election to replace a Republican state representative near Orlando.
The legislative seat flipped blue in January when Democrat Tom Keen defeated his Republican rival, a conservative school board member who raised more than twice as much money and promised to fight “the woke agenda.” Keen campaigned on lowering property insurance rates and protecting access to abortion.
People prepare for an event featuring DeSantis in Derry, N.H., in January. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)
DeSantis, who was largely absent from the state while he campaigned for the GOP presidential nomination, has urged lawmakers to “stay the course.” But his doomed presidential bid changed political calculations in and out of the state.
Many lawmakers credit Republican Senate President Kathleen Passidomo for some of the shift. Passidomo stopped several culture war bills from progressing in the Senate, including one that would have punished local officials who oversaw the removal of Confederate monuments.
DeSantis strongly supported the bill, arguing that it is problematic to apply a “hyper-woke 21st-century test” to historical figures.
Among the public speakers who supported the monuments bill at a Senate hearing was a man who said he wanted to protect Confederate statues to “push White culture, white supremacy.”
Crews begin the process of removing the “Women of the Southland” monument in Jacksonville, Fla., on Dec. 27. (Bob Self/Florida Times-Union/AP/AP)
Democrats walked out of the hearing, while Republicans on the committee — some of whom visibly recoiled at the white-supremacy remarks — approved the bill. But Passidomo refused to bring it to the full Senate.
“I'm not going to bring a bill to the floor that is so abhorrent to everybody,” she said.
The Senate president also rejected most of the 10 bill priorities the state Republican Party outlined in a legislative wish list, saying the party didn’t dictate what lawmakers should do.
DeSantis did not respond to a request for comment but said Friday at an end-of-session news conference that he was satisfied with what was passed by the legislature this year. Sponsors of the bills protecting monuments and outlawing rainbow flags also did not respond to requests for comment.
DeSantis did see some of his priorities pass. The legislature approved a law that the governor pushed prohibiting sleeping in public. And a ban on “woke meat” — food products cultivated in a lab from animal cells — easily got the green light from Republican lawmakers.
“You need meat, okay? Like, we’re going to have fake meat? That doesn’t work,” he said at a news conference in February, rejecting arguments that banning it could stifle innovation.
Demonstrators in Tallahassee protest DeSantis’s plan to eliminate Advanced Placement courses on African American studies in high schools on Feb. 15. (Joshua Lott/The Washington Post)
Even DeSantis’s budget requests faced pushback this year. The governor wanted an additional $5 million for his controversial migrant relocation program, but lawmakers only agreed to current spending levels. He also tried to add $57 million toward the recently reestablished Florida State Guard. Legislators signed off on a lower amount — $18.5 million, and added a requirement for detailed spending reports from the agency.
“What we saw this session was that bills that were either DeSantis ideas or retreads from last year really didn’t get anywhere,” said the state House’s minority leader, Fentrice Driskell. “I think in large part it’s because DeSantis has lost steam. He lost on the national stage, and that emboldened the Republicans in the legislature to feel like they don’t have to go along to get along with this guy anymore.”
Tired of woke
Parents in Miami-Dade County founded Moms for Libros last year as an antidote to Moms for Liberty, the Florida-based group promoted by DeSantis.
The founders of Moms for Libros — Moms for Books — say they got together to battle what they see as censorship in schools. Their ranks have grown in the past year, and they say their messages — promoted in English, Spanish and Haitian Creole — are resonating even with parents who initially supported DeSantis’s education bills.
“A lot of the conservative Cuban American parents I talk to say they thought it was just about keeping sex out of schools,” said Vanessa Brito, co-founder of Moms For Libros. “But when they learn what was really happening, like when they heard that a book about Celia Cruz was taken off the shelves, they are very concerned. Having the government come in and tell you that your kids can’t have a book about Celia Cruz, that caused an uproar.”
The book, “Celia Cruz, Queen of Salsa,” was temporarily removed from Duval County schools last year.
Linda Mobley hangs her head in prayer at Antioch Missionary Baptist Church in Miami Gardens, Fla., on Aug. 10. She's holding a book that could be banned under the state's new curriculum standards. (D.A. Varela/Miami Herald/AP)
Brito said she talks to parents who are starting to object to the state’s growing list of rules and laws pertaining to education. In one incident that made international headlines .. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13090657/Florida-permission-slip-black-author-book-reading.html , a Miami-area school required students to get parental permission to attend an “extracurricular activity” that included a talk by Florida historian Marvin Dunn, a Black scholar who has chronicled racist incidents in state history.
“Republican, Democrat, independent, people just don’t want books banned in our country. So it was just a collection of bad ideas that imploded on DeSantis,” Dunn said. “And now he’s actively trying to back off of these policies that have caused so much confusion in the state and in the education system at all levels.”
School officials said they were only following the new laws; DeSantis said they were being “absurd” and told them to “knock it off.”
“The vagueness of the laws have led to full-blown censorship, and people now see that happening in real time,” said Brito, who voted for DeSantis the first time he ran for governor in 2018. “And from what I’ve seen, they’re getting tired of ‘woke this, woke that.’”
The governor has also seen his “anti-woke” agenda challenged in court. In addition to the recent ruling on the “Stop Woke Act,” federal judges have halted enforcement of a law DeSantis signed last year that targeted drag shows. A different court declared that a rule from the state health agency that would ban Medicaid payments for gender-affirming care is unconstitutional.
[INSERT: This book about Trump voters goes for the jugular In ‘White Rural Rage,’ Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman examine why so many remain loyal to a party that does little to help them [...] It’s not that the authors discredit legitimate grievances. They dutifully document how the country — the modern world — has abandoned rural America. People who live there are demonstrably worse off than their urban and suburban cousins. Good health care, good jobs, good schools and even good WiFi are scarce; drug addiction, gun suicide and crime are plentiful (yes, Oklahoma does have a higher violent crime rate than New York or California). P - But what Schaller and Waldman also document, scrupulously, is how much outsize power rural White voters have but squander on “culture war trinkets.” Wyoming has two senators for not quite 600,000 people; California’s two serve around 39 million. The way our democracy is set up — not just its lopsided Senate but also its thumb-on-the-scale electoral college — rural Americans could be its biggest beneficiaries, if not its drivers. They are not. They are not even its biggest fans, in Schaller and Waldman’s telling. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=173996054 ... and ... They see themselves as victims. He plays on that by claiming to be on their side and that he is their savior. They believe him. He has said he is their "retribution", meaning through him they are able to get revenge. And at least some experts say revenge is the motivation for people to vote against their own interests. P - "It's only because he gave them permission to hate. He hates the same people they do and it's like a drug to them. Finally a kindred spirit." P - Remember we often wondered why people vote against their own best interests. Then we saw some which went to explaining it. See: P - Att: B402 -- Opinion | What the Science of Addiction Tells Us About Trump https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=173985298]
Marvin Dunn leads a tour discussing race and discrimination in Florida’s history on Jan. 8, 2023, in Rosewood, Fla. (Zack Wittman for The Washington Post)
DeSantis did nonetheless score a legal victory when a federal appeals panel sided with him over the Walt Disney Co. in January in regards to the state takeover of the entertainment giant’s special taxing district. But even with that win, the consequences of the feud have been far reaching, with the company canceling plans to build a $1 billion employee campus in Florida.
Pocketbook worries mount
Since his return from the campaign trail, DeSantis has been flying around the state holding news conferences several times a week. He’s talked about congressional term limits, making retail theft a felony and cracking down on rowdy spring breakers. He’s also sent more state law enforcement officers to the southern border in Texas and ordered the release of grand jury records from the Jeffrey Epstein case.
Political analyst Susan MacManus said voters in Florida are paying more attention to pocketbook issues than culture war laws, and state lawmakers — most of whom are up for reelection this year — need to pay attention. Republicans who may have been following DeSantis’s lead on laws that target the LGBTQ+ community and Black history are hearing different concerns when they return to their districts.
“There’s a concern I’m hearing more and more from people, and in the media, that Florida is becoming too expensive,” said MacManus, professor emeritus at the University of South Florida. “We’re seeing stories on the nightly news about people moving out of the state because the cost of living is too high here.”
With homeowners and auto insurance costs that are more than triple that of other states, MacManus said Republican and Democratic voters have more pressing concerns than culture wars.
A new housing development in Zephyrhills, Fla., on June 23. (Tina Russell for The Washington Post)
“These legislators are coming back and, and their families and friends are saying they should be doing something that is going help us,” MacManus said. “The woke things may be interesting to some Republicans, but there are bigger issues.”
Mike Fasano, a lifelong Republican who served in the House and Senate for 18 years and is now the Pasco County tax collector, said most culture war issues are not on the minds of families struggling to pay rising property and auto insurance costs.
“I don’t think families, whether they’re Republican or Democratic or independent, are sitting at the breakfast table talking about which books should be banned,” Fasano said. “They’re talking about how they’re going to pay their rent or mortgage and the electric bill and the premium on their homeowners insurance.”
Lori Rozsa is a reporter based in Florida who covers the state for The Washington Post. She is a former correspondent for People magazine and a former reporter and bureau chief for the Miami
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