Critical Race Hysteria, MSNBC Agita, and Elon's Icarus Syndrome

Good afternoon, and welcome back to The Daily Courant, our members-only guidebook to the most important news from our talented Puck journalists.
 
Today, we bring you Baratunde Thurston's stirring reflection on the root causes of the recent hysteria over “critical race theory,” and why true patriotism requires an honest accounting of American history: the good, the bad, the beautiful, and the ugly.

Plus, below the fold, Dylan Byers examines the fallout inside the MSNBC newsroom as Brian Williams joins Rachel Maddow in stepping away from primetime. 

Keep an eye out for the next episode of our podcast, The Powers That Be, hitting RSS feeds overnight. And thanks again to the Inner Circle members who joined us this afternoon for an enlivening conversation with Byers and Matt Belloni about Zuck, Hollywood, and the metaverse. If you'd like to upgrade your membership, simply reply to this email to join our next Inner Circle event.

My Mother, America: Or Critical Race Theory in 2021

White backlashes against racial progress are as American as genetically-modified apple pie. But critical race theory has unleashed a new torrent of grievances. I can’t solve everyone’s problems, but I think I can suggest a more useful way to frame the debate.

I am not a parent, but I have been a child, and I have friends who are parents, and I know for sure that no parent really knows what they are doing, and that the job is hard. Covid made the job harder, and I have so much empathy for the added stress that parents are facing in this moment. But there’s something disturbing happening with parenting in this country. Many white parents are losing their ever-loving minds over “Critical Race Theory,” something that many of them cannot define.

I’ll share a partial definition from the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, which I find to be a credible source on the matter. C.R.T. is “an academic and legal framework that denotes that systemic racism is part of American society,” and critically (see what I did there?), that racism isn’t merely a matter of individual actions and biases but something deliberately embedded in our legal, economic, and social systems. Many of the disparate outcomes we see in health, wealth, and justice are the result of that system’s design, the one that made it hard for Black people to build wealth through homeownership by, for example, systematically denying home loans to us for generations—a fact so egregious that the Fair Housing Act had to be created to correct it, in 1968, and one that remains still unresolved. 

C.R.T. is academic jargon. It’s not used in everyday conversations by anyone I know involved in bending the arc of this nation toward liberty and justice for all. It’s certainly not taught in K-12 schools. But it’s become a catch-all phrase that serves as mind-numbing kryptonite for a lot of white parents who project their fears of what any acknowledgement of racism might mean for their worldview. While some parents understand that an honest teaching of history requires us to explain our failures alongside our victories, another group refuses to face those facts and chooses to interpret C.R.T. as something more like “catastrophic racial tyranny.” 

This last group, by and large, is flooding school board meetings and threatening teachers. They are screaming on social media. They are voting for candidates who promise them that they’ll never let a godless, un-American teacher fill their kids’ minds with hatred or guilt or shame for their identity. These parents have been whipped into a frenzy by demagogues like Tucker Carlson and institutions like Hillsdale College that tell them their children are being indoctrinated by “cultural marxism,” which they also can’t define, and that the schools must be stopped. 

It’s true that the world as white parents know it has been changing, slowly at first and then suddenly faster. In the nationwide reckoning that followed the murder of George Floyd, progressive notions like diversity, equity, and inclusion—sanitized for the C-suite as D.E.I.—found more profound applications. Across the country, institutions began to grapple with what it would mean to take those professed ideals more seriously. The term “critical race theory” became a stand-in for a constellation of incremental but meaningful changes in the culture, encompassing everything from the proliferation of D.E.I. training in businesses to the skepticism of standardized testing and whitewashed history textbooks in schools.

But I think what’s underlying the backlash today is actually less specific, and more elemental...

FOUR STORIES WE'RE TALKING ABOUT