My Blog Week: October 24 to October 30

A Word on the Week

What Comes After Awareness? (3)

Glenn Youngkin, the Republican candidate for Virginia governor, has pledged, if he wins, to ban Critical Race Theory on his first day in office. Awareness that this is a tactic, a dishonorable and racist tactic, is not lacking; professional commentators and members of the public alike are calling out the lies Youngkin’s campaign is using to make the issue a dividing point among voters. But this honed propaganda is more than just idiocy, to inspire headshaking. If a decisive percentage of advantaged voters, those who can get to the polls easily on Tuesday, are driven to fear CRT, Youngkin as governor won’t have to do anything but make another false claim—that a terrible outcome has been prevented.

Even the shorthanding of a name to initials lends itself to this campaign to motivate a hate crime. That, truly, is how the equation adds up. People are asked to fear CRT, while no responsibility is required of them to understand it. They are absolved from understanding, because CRT is represented as a stealth indoctrination, which Democrats have already introduced into school curriculums. Outrages, being flamed by alleged evidence (written material taken out of context), whisk genuinely indoctrinated adults beyond the seeking of substance for their beliefs, not just because of the artificial emergency, but also because once the nefariousness of your enemies is mentally established (a barrage of alarm and distraction creates a sense the base value at some point had been determined, but no one has time to argue, in this state of emergency!), you accept that nothing your enemy says is true.

If (for the converted) nothing said about CRT is true, than the frustrated academics trying to explain how it never has been taught in Virginia schools, and no one is threatened by the teaching of it, are wasting energy. The extension of this belief, that Black Americans want CRT taught in schools, that they are the force behind the enemy elite who have the power to impose this, that none of the people promoting CRT will tell the truth about what they’re doing or plan to do, is to assume any or every Black person is harboring secrets associated with CRT, and is potentially dangerous. 

Black Americans don’t need white Americans developing greater and more polarized fear fantasies, when the GOP has worked steadily to make killing someone legally acceptable if the killer “feels fear”. The efficiency with which a real and complex thing can be turned into a token, to engender hysteria and defeat reason, should be the lesson for all of us. Anyone is in peril of their life if all that’s needed to deputize a bounty hunter, is the equating of a stranger with an ideology, and the recasting of an ideology as a faceless demon.