Tag: critical race theory
Ron DeSantis Does Not Seem to Be Enjoying Himself
On Saturday afternoon, with just over six weeks to go until the Iowa caucuses, Ron DeSantis told a story about how he once bravely stood up to the Special Olympics.
He was speaking atop a small platform in a partitioned-off section of a former roller rink in Newton, Iowa, dubbed “the Thunderdome.” The anecdote, like so many, had something to do with the tyranny of vaccine mandates. DeSantis said he had met a family at the Iowa State Fair,
Critical Race Theory Doesn’t Empower Students
We need education about prejudice and discrimination that empowers young minority children, rather than flattening them into an attitude of victimhood.
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11 Reader Views on Affirmative Action
“Affirmative action was always destined to be a Pyrrhic victory at best,” one reader argues.
Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.
This is the second batch of reader responses to the Supreme Court’s affirmative-action decision. Batch one is here.
Replies have
America’s Crisis of the Intellectual
In 2017, I was trying to write How to Be an Antiracist. Words came onto the page slower than ever. On some days, no words came at all. Clearly, I was in crisis.
I don’t believe in writer’s block. When words aren’t flowing onto the page, I know why: I haven’t researched enough, organized the material enough, thought enough to exhume clarity, meticulously outlined my thoughts enough. I haven’t prepared myself to write.
But no matter how much I
Why There Was No Racial Reckoning
MEMPHIS, Tenn.—If the summer of 2020 was, for many Americans, a breaking point, then the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd presented the nation’s leadership class with a crossroads. Would they radically rethink American policing, or would they retreat to the safety of piecemeal reform, earnestly applying Band-Aids over bullet wounds? Two and a half years later, Tyre Nichols is dead, and the choice they made is clear.
It’s not that nothing was done. Some departments vowed
Can I Teach Faulkner in DeSantis’s Florida?
In my senior Southern Literature class, I’m about to teach Go Down, Moses, William Faulkner’s great novel about how racism has warped America. I ask my students to think about the stories Faulkner tells: the dispossession of the Chickasaw people, the enslaved woman who drowns herself in despair, and the white family struggling to accept that the admired patriarch who built their Mississippi cotton kingdom also raped his own daughter. Here at Florida State University, in the capital city
The Importance of Dissent in Wartime
This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.
Question of the Week
While covering Donald Trump, multiple journalistic outlets published articles questioning his mental fitness. In Pennsylvania, Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman is running for the Senate while recovering from a stroke, stoking debate between critics who say he
In Kari Lake, Trumpism Has Found Its Leading Lady
As election returns rolled in on the evening of November 3, 2020, a local news host in Phoenix was starring in an intensely awkward broadcast. The Fox 10 anchor Kari Lake was refusing to call Arizona for Joe Biden—even though her network had already done so. “If [voters] wake up tomorrow or two days later and it flips,” she insisted, her pendant earrings swinging, “there’s distrust in the system.” Lake’s co-anchor, John Hook, lost patience. “Well, we’re taking our
The Real Reason Democrats Are Losing Ground on Education
This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.
Question of the Week
Should America go “all in” on public schools, or should parents have the ability to direct the tax dollars that fund their child’s education to the public or private school of their choice? Please share your
The Danger More Republicans Should Be Talking About
The day after Glenn Youngkin won the Virginia governor’s race last November, a Wall Street Journal headline declared: “Youngkin Makes the GOP the Parents’ Party.” Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio exulted in this new party line on Twitter: “The Republican Party is the party of parents.”
Polling data showed this new branding to be as misleading as the GOP’s framing of critical race theory. In a September Fox News poll, white respondents opposed the teaching of critical race