James Lindsay breaks down Social Justice Theory for K-12 education | Cylinder Radio #27

hello and welcome to the next episode the next lesson of cylinder radio I'm your host William Roush I am a high school teacher and I'm very excited for my episode today today I have on James Lindsay he's a PhD mathematician and he is best known for the grievant studies hoax papers essentially he is an expert on social justice theory and this is social justice is something that's come up it comes up in a lot of the episodes of this podcast and James has been called the Rosetta Stone of social justice theories so to really understand what social justice theory is what social justice privilege race studies all that kind of stuff is I reached out to James and he is gracious enough to come on this podcast so so thank you for being here yeah I'm really happy to be here happy to talk to some teachers yeah so that that's what that's what we're doing here so the essentially let's talk about where education especially K through 12 education and teaching social justice kind of kind of intersect so two episodes ago I had on Mandy Manning and we had a great conversation about the education system and right away I was thinking about going into unions or about you know just the Industrial Revolution model that you know it's like bells and things like that and it went down the road right away of teaching white supremacy and yeah so and I was a little caught off guard she was you know she even like apologized a little bit like sorry this is just really pressing and she is a wonderful educator she really cares she teaches refugee children and just you can see that she cares deeply so this is in the forefront of kind of her mind Mandy Manning is 2008 National Teacher of the Year in 2017 national teacher is Sydney Chaffee I think I say her name right and on her website it says social justice belongs in the classroom this is the pinnacle of what we are promoting in high school education the bed teachers are ones who teach social justice so let's learn about what social justice social justice education truly is so James thank you for being here do you want to UM just dive into what what makes you such an expert why are why are you if I could have one person on this podcast to explain social justice education with social justice literature it would be you well I appreciate that that I appreciate that why so let me talk glowingly about myself and not be awkward about it whatsoever are you just super woke is that what it is that's what it is yeah I'm like the most woke no so as you mentioned that I was maybe best well known for the the grievance studies folks papers that project that we did so what we did with that just really briefly was that we wrote a bunch of academic papers towards social justice oriented journals to see if we could make bad arguments with bad ethics and AD methods and crazy data and all this other stuff that shouldn't be able to be published and get them accepted by these significant journals in or even less significant bits of them were accepted by very significant journals that cover topics like gender studies ethnic studies critical race Theory queer theory sexuality studies at fad studies disability study and you can just go on and on anything that's kind of like critical something studies was in our purview and so we spent a year or so doing that got familiar enough with the arguments to be able to use them faithfully to the concepts and arguments being put forth in that literature and we're able to write these papers which then validated that we knew what we were talking about by being published in the academic literature from that point which would have been October of last year or even really we kind of stopped writing new papers in August of last year so almost 12 months ago Helen and I so there had two partners in crime in this this endeavor which would be Helen Clarke Rose who's a editor of Aereo magazine that lives in the UK and London and Peter Berg Ocean who's a professor of philosophy at Portland State University so Helen and I since this all came out had already kind of decided to start on a book or she had and I was going to help her with it and then this has just become more consuming and I'm now a part of the project to explain where social justice theory came from how its evolved how it gets put into practice and so she and I continued reading the papers reading the books in great detail analyzing the arguments figuring out essentially the kind of currents within what might be deemed social justice theory over the last 50 years and with a focus on the last 30 and then even even more on the last 10 so we've spent another year just completely immersed in the literature and trying to find a way to bridge the gap because everybody recognizes it has really technical jargon it speaks in a very particular way it says certain things that people feel like this is something I want to go along with but then there's this kind of weird feeling like it might have meant something slightly different than what I thought I was agreeing to and so we're trying to figure out ways to explain what's going on in plain language when we spend a year since the previous year of digging into it to learn it at research level we've spent a further year really trying to dig in to understanding it to the point where we can explain it in plain language to help people understand what's going on so like I guess like what's the harm in teaching about privilege and race and gender should we be teaching about race and generous studying race and gender shouldn't are these important topics yes and so the point of our project which is that to write these fake hoax papers to expose the low standards in those disciplines or the corruption really the political corruption of those disciplines is what we were hoping to expose was not to just throw a pie in the face of gender studies or race studies or anything like that it's not to say we shouldn't study gender it's not to say we shouldn't study issues around racism it's in fact to say that we should study those and we should do so rigorously it was to make a call for reform because we figured that those topics are of high importance or of high socio cultural and even political salience right now and they matter if you have people who are being discriminated against or on the wrong of a disenfranchisement or something like that there is a need to look into that and to sort out what those problems are to understand them as clearly as possible and to start searching for viable potential solutions test those and the ones that work refine them and put them into practice and the ones that fail to jettison those and what we saw in the literature is that that is not what was happening we were not seeing the level of rigor that one should expect we were not seeing the kind of careful thoughtful approach to trying to get the answers right we were seeing a theoretical model that had taken over and that the theoretical model not only does it lack the attendant rigor having replaced it with a kind of a network of rules of what is correct to say or think and what isn't but it also openly challenges the value of rigor there there are many calls to say that that to demand rigor or to use reason over say emotion as a tool is itself an act of racism so that that was more than a little bit alarming for us so our purpose wasn't to shame these things out of existence but rather to make a very public call to say that these these disciplines need to be reformed because these problems do have basis in reality they do matter they're important and what we we ultimately come down to is that how you approach difficult problems like this matters if you're getting something wrong or worse if you're even getting certain elements backwards or if you're using a theoretical approach that looks good on paper but doesn't work in reality then chances are even in the short term you might be doing more harm than good but certainly in the long term the old saying is reality bats last and if you're if you're on you know the path that's not kind of checking itself against reality but is just kind of going off and if self referential theory it's very easy to get things wrong yeah I mean before we circle back to actually what this looks like in a high school classroom or middle school elementary school classroom I think it's really important to recognize that data and university studies and peer-reviewed papers are essentially what we what we build reality on and my first podcast was with gangsta Sonia who's a transgendered activist and he quoted that 27 percent of the population is LGBT and I was like well I don't know if that and he said well yeah that's from the Williams Institute and I was like okay well I don't know what that is so look at that later and then I went into well even if it's 1% but you know people need to have their rights protected because it's America blah blah but you know latching wins this dude is an LGBT think-tank so they you can structure data to support whatever you want and now because we all have the internet we just go on our phone we can pull this like lack of a better term this [ __ ] data the these from these papers from all over the place but you know you when I was talking to Mandy she said just look at the data just look at the data you know black kids are treated much worse for equal you know offenses in the classroom and it's hard because what you guys did what the grievance papers really messed me up because I go oh well now if I can't trust academic papers peer-reviewed studies then then what is reality yeah that's that's actually the crisis that we were pointing at is our belief was that there is a crisis of trust in that literature that people weren't aware of and so we wanted to expose that and and ultimately get to where we could explain how this happened and I mean maybe we're not the best people they're professionals that work in different disciplines you'd be the best people to figure out the next step solutions once things start to reform but anyway we can make a call for reform and point out the need for reform and that's what we were we're hoping to be able to do the thing is that you're pointing out with with data is that data are subject to a lot of methodological concerns as any rigorous scientist will tell you and I don't want to step way outside of my lane I'm I have a bachelor's degree in physics but I'm not by any means rigorous scientist but I do understand enough of the philosophy of science understand that the methods that you use to obtain the data the definitions that you use for the the data itself what qualifies as a hit in in this category or a miss or a hit in that other category all matters is that one a very kind of famous example I mean even President Obama when he was in office put it into action is there's a very famous study about sexual assault and rape on college campuses that returned something between one and four and one and five college students is subjected to some kind of a sexual assault or rape I forget which word they actually used but then later looking at the definitions that were used it was a very inclusive broad definition that most people wouldn't recognize that included you know things like touching somebody's arm sometimes without being invited to or you know some weird you know some jerk touching somebody's butt and I can see that that's a problem but to categorize that as a full-out sexual assault or a rape isn't what most people are recognized by the word other studies that have used other methods that I don't know but I assume are more rigorous have said that the real number is not something we should ignore it's something like one out of 41 or 1 out of 45 women but that's a gigantic difference from one at a four or one out of five it's a factor of ten different so when you make definitions that aren't accurate till to the phenomenon that you're trying to study or if you use poor sampling methods or if you use poor statistical analysis any of those can lead you to get to conclusions you can look at the data and if you don't understand how that data was gathered how it was what the definitions of the data actually are how that data was analyzed then you're gonna get yourself in trouble one of the things one of the papers we wrote in fact we were trying to see what would happen because is this difference between what they call quantitative data which uses statistics and numbers and all of us to understand it and it's considered to be much more firm and rigorous and then there's qualitative data which is interviews and things textual analysis and things like that that can be very effective but is also pretty squishy or it's more squishy in many cases so we write a paper to say to show that we were gonna use statistics on this data because that we gathered and the point was that the statistics returned no result no statistically significant result of any type and then we were going to say but so there's no statistically significant quantitative result however the qualitative result shows the following and just overturn the fact that the statistic said there was nothing there and see what they did with it and what they told us to do was they told us that the the inclusion of the quantitative data altogether was a waste of time and just to use narratives and so when you're when you're one of your journals is telling you to throw I mean this isn't of course a very significant journal when one of the journals is when you have a culture and academic culture that's telling you that if you don't get the result you want ignore the data and just run on the narrative then you have a problem when several of our papers did that kind of thing we had another paper that was supposed to about trans experiences in the workplace and we deliberately cooked it up to where it was based off of interviews of trans people who said they didn't have any problems and so the point of the paper was that we were going to theorize why they had problems anyway and they just weren't seeing the problems they were having in it because they've been brainwashed so even if the narrative doesn't line up so if the data doesn't line up don't worry about the the narrative doesn't line up don't worry about it right and another of our papers intentionally used viciously cherry-picked data it claimed to have had 10,000 minutes of recorded conversations that were being analyzed for their content and then it only focused on you know a very small amount of the material that painted the picture that the researcher would have clearly wanted to start with started out wanting to prove and so when you have a situation like that somebody can say look at the data but if if that data hasn't been rigorously gathered analyzed defined and so on it can be very misleading that's why you have back in that was it Benjamin Disraeli back in the day this said there are three kinds of lies and maybe it's not Benjamin Disraeli but I think it was that these three kinds of lies lies damned lies and statistics and and that does even get into stuff like sampling bias if you're not using you know rigorous set as the methods to pick your sample I mean there's all kinds of biases that have to come in and what we saw was that a lot of times people who have approached coming a lot of the stuffs coming out of what's called a theoretical humanities they don't have a background in science they're gonna go back a lot of them don't have a background in social science or their theoretical sociologists is kind of the hard you know rigorous end of their field and that's all theoretical and so they're drawing sociological conclusions without using the attendant sociological rigor and so there is a crisis of trust there so look at the data well what does that mean well if you're teaching if you're teaching social science at a university though then that you kind of by definition you become a social scientist right I mean depends I mean it depends on what you mean by social scientists because what we call gender studies in the United States is called gender sociology in in Sweden so you have all these theoretical sociologists and then you have people like in gender studies who aren't even technically in under the purview of sociology they're in it is a discipline within the humanities that arose out of literary theory it was English majors it was not scientists who cooked this up and they started looking at socially relevant topics I would encourage all of your listeners if they can take takes about 15 minutes or 20 minutes to read through it to just go to the Wikipedia entry for cultural studies and read it just top to bottom it doesn't take that long it's a bit detailed but what what's amazing I just read it recently I've been meaning to read it for like a year and I just read it about a month ago and it shocked me because you think ok cultural studies we're gonna study culture there's gonna be different methods bah blah blah and what it says is cultural studies and it's like political project political project political project political project all the way down it's the whole thing was cooked up to me a political project from the beginning and so what we wanted to point out was that when your politics lead your research you're not going to get rigorous results you can only have politics be your political conclusions we down stream of research if you want it to be rigorous so that was our big concern and I think that's what we've exposed is going on there yeah I'm just going back to when you said that that sexual assault study I remember christina hoff sommers was talking about it and it's not one out of five it's more like one out of 40 because there were yeah I'd like to say those questions like how you've been no other questions where were you sexually assaulted I believe but it was like how did you get drunk and then regret have sex and regret morning stuff right but what I think is really important this goes for like statistics on police and the minorities all that stuff is 1 out of 40 is terrible like it's not good really bad that we need to we can we need to fix that and focus on that it doesn't need to be fake it's like there's enough bad stuff out there that we can focus on when it comes to race and gender and discrimination that we don't need to inflate it to to make it seem worse like I just think that I think it becomes counterintuitive well becomes counterproductive to think about it yeah well you know if the problem is 1 out of 40 let's just say there's some problem whatever happens to being is 1 out of 40 people are are victims of this problem that's in some sense an emergency now suppose that you start treating it as though it's 1 out of 4 so that's your resources are being directed toward 36 bogus cases or maybe they're not even being treated as bogus and you're wasting even more resources and ginning up you know time and effort going into solving those and and at what what cost how much damage are you doing to people you're teaching young women in that case maybe to start interpreting things as a very traumatic incident that maybe wasn't as it's like you're right it's almost I mean this is why Greg Lee can off and Haven Haight called in in their book the coddling of the American mind called what you see coming out of these kinds of these these initiatives a reverse cognitive behavioral therapy I have friends who are in therapy for you know real severe trauma and when they've showed some of these things these initiatives - there's - they're psychologists the psychologists start getting angry and freaking out and saying this is like first of all the kind of thing only a very highly trained psychologist under very careful conditions should be introducing to deal with if it's going to be related to something traumatic it's reverse cognitive behavioral therapies teaching people is called trauma salience and getting them aware making them think that they've had traumas and maybe they haven't or to focus on their traumas that they have had and exaggerate their importance rather than figuring out how to how to work around those and then in addition it's being administered in a classroom setting by non-professionals so you're not sitting down one-on-one with somebody you've spent weeks or months getting to know very carefully before you start introducing you know digging into their trauma and you're doing it instead in a classroom of 30 or 50 students possibly you don't know who you're to use the word correctly triggering you don't know what you're digging into you don't know what your honor thing and it's really irresponsible and this is why kind of one of my big mantras about what's going on is it's not like oh we need to get rid of gender studies we need gender studies right because method matters um you can't go you know one out of four sounds like this total panic and everybody has to dedicate a lot of resources to it but the other down you you're gonna misdirect resources you're not actually gonna solve the problem you're gonna create new problems and then in the end you also gonna drastically diminish your credibility the next time you know the next time you're like well sexual assault on campus is really important and now all of a sudden you've discredited yourself because you blew it out by a factor of ten and people are gonna say well how do we know you're not blowing it out high factor can against the same crisis of trust you're experiencing now it's just a complete disaster not to approach these things rigorously if you want to solve problems you've got to try to get them right yeah so I am I'm deep in this world I mean I you know study this stuff I try to get through reading these newspapers and things like that like that is that it I'm in it do you hear me do my mic off okay you're good okay but so when it when the host papers was was kind of released and I heard about you guys you know maybe on Rogan or something like that or on Brett Weinstein YouTube or something like that I was like huh oh my gosh this is awesome it was almost like when in the 90s for I think a lot of the black community especially like South Central LA when Rodney King beating came out I'm like see we told you we weren't lying cops are beating the crap out of us day in and day out who finally evidence this is right this is so good and then what happened was the cops weren't charged bathing and they're like oh this doesn't matter oh this doesn't matter and I and I brought up these papers with so many colleagues and people who are you know very progressive and it's startling how this the way it can just go from one to another out like well the journals that they got accepted to work great journals or well it's not fair because of this or but like there's just so many reasons to just find holes in it that it it doesn't matter right now that was really frustrating for me because I thought that this was a starting off point of like let's study this stuff better just like he said like let's do this right but it doesn't seem to matter so getting into back into the classroom so why this matters for high school teachers okay I think teachers by Nature and I can speak for my peeps is is we our psychological temperament I'm guessing is is something that's very empathetic very open very like caring loving etc so we're going to assume that if we hear about people who are discriminate against and downtrodden and all this stuff and we're going to say oh my gosh I need to help them and we just we don't question it you know I've asked colleagues like the doubt question I've heard you guys talk about is like would you rather cure racism or find truth and they say many of them say cure racism so yeah this this thing it comes up all the time and so my question is like so one example like teaching privilege is the basketball or step forward move and I did this a couple years ago you line up all the kids and then you say if you have two parents in the household take a step forward if you have this that's guys take a step back buh buh buh Allah and at the end you shoot a basketball and you say well you guys are have a lot of privilege and you guys don't so like essentially what is the harm in teaching that what is the harm in teaching kimberlé crenshaw an intersectionality what is the harm of teaching white fragility and romney Angela like isn't like that's I think the most important thing that I want to hear your take on it this isn't easy but I think and for you know teachers listening right so you asked about like ya may not realize the us for kind of separate questions at the same time I shot out of a cannon sorry no no you're good you're good and so the step forward step back game which we actually put in one of our papers we're familiar with how this this this operates you know I'm not a psychologist so I don't want to speak to the psychology but I do understand that you know this whole relative privation thing where you start getting jealous of one another you know I I don't understand how making that more salient to people who are already kind of in this especially young people who are in this kind of you know they get their little competitions they've got their you know they're trying to make friendships it's adolescence it's awkward maybe it's even childhood it's awkward and it's like to make them aware of their betters it's you know what are you achieving and then in in many cases what I've been told from other school systems I don't know if this has happened in any of yours people write to me a lot though and it's like you know you'll play that game or whatever and everybody use if it's Anna basketball court for example anybody in front of the half-court line now goes to a special camp to be explained to how they're so privileged and they need to change what they're doing in the people who are behind the half-court line go get taught about how racism and other forms of privilege are holding them down and so now what do you do I mean you're just inflaming that even further you know you're teaching people different curriculum and one group you're giving them to try to like break it down to two field these are kids right you're trying to give them to essentially feel guilty about things that they probably didn't have anything to do with I don't know that they get to pick how many parents are going to be in their household and then on the other hand you're you're teaching people that you know their peers in the entire system in which their peers came from can can be problematic and that leads into what's the harm of teaching critical race Theory intersectionality kimberlé crenshaw and we'll come back to Robin the ends a little white fragility because it's a little bit different so with the problem there is and what people don't understand this is what we've spent the last year learning and its really been a revelation for us and it's made it much easier to understand us that this isn't a thing where these ideas have the normal meanings everybody kind of attaches to them and that they they think that like okay somebody's gone woke they have this factor wrong they have that fact wrong they have seven or ten or a hundred facts wrong and you can straighten them out if you can correct those points but it's not how this works this is a totally different world of you so to understand critical race Theory let's just focus on the one to make it simpler is extremely important to to understand what's going on here and you have to under I mean the word race we can actually kind of just presume people more or less understand there is some challenge there because you know biologists talk about population groups and then races are grouped according to kind of fuzzy categories that are low resolution and they're not that good and they change over time so it's a social construction validly seen and so we kind of understand the word race we don't have to dwell on that the words critical in theory in the core critical race they're the term quarter very sorry are actually important to understand both of those are technical terms critical actually is a method it was developed in the Frankfurt School I mean this is going way back now this is in the 30s it was developed in the Frankfurt School which was a Marxist project you have your theorists if you want to start naming names like Max Horkheimer he came up with the concept of critical theory you had Mark Hughes Adorno Hamas you had these kind of philosophers and what they were actually trying to do was answer the question how Marx got it wrong Marx thought well the revolutions going to have the Communist revolution is going to happen naturally when people get sick of capitalism when capitalism goes far enough Marx actually turned out to be a big fan of capitalism because he wanted to go far enough to make the revolution happen it's an odd way to save as a fan of it but it's kind of true but that didn't happen so men this school the Frankfurt School evolves trying to answer that question why isn't it happening and what they realized was that people weren't aware of their oppression under capitalism as they saw it so they developed a method called the critical method which they said is different from traditional theorizing the point of traditional theorizing according to Max Horkheimer was to understand the world the point of theory is to point out the problems in the system whether you understand it or not so that people will want to overthrow it so it's a direct call to the Revel a revolution of the system so anywhere you see the word critical and I know I sound like I might be wearing a tinfoil hat instead of headphones right now but that's actually the roots of that word are that critical means that you are going to start your job is to pick at an existing system to find its problems such that people will want to overthrow it or reject it to make people feel unwelcome or that system is utterly failing so you're talking to this isn't like let us find the problem so we can fix them lalala this is we are going to make people hate the system so they want to break it and erect something new from the ashes that's critical jumping into it with that agenda yes that's a starting point and again if you don't believe me just look it up I mean that's really what the root of it is and this got adapted by the postmodern theorists and the postmodern theorists kind of expanded it from capitalism versus we'll just capital picking at capitalism to kind of every walk of society where any where oppression can live a lot of how I got into education was in the 70s I think 74 or something like that maybe 71 Paulo Freire II picked it up and wrote a book about critical pedagogy I think it's called critical pedagogy just got expanded on the 1990s by bell hooks with teaching to transgress so it was like if you want to make education be about social justice you have to transgress the boundaries you have to make people uncomfortable about their their identity and this but particularly you mentioned kimberlé crenshaw she's the in a sense the founding mother there's her PhD mentor Derek Bell would have been the founding father of critical race theory and kimberlé crenshaw said that it was explicitly the point was to take the the the critical method and use it in a postmodern context that's that's just trying to take apart how things are used in language how things are represented images symbols discourses how things are spoken about and to use those to use the critical method on those power dynamics between racial categories so to put social significance in to racial racial categories on purpose to increase the social significance of I am black or I am Latino or I am Asian or I am white or whatever although probably not so happy about the fact that I am white its increased and to do that for the purpose of doing identity politics so this is what critical race theory is for now theory itself is yet another thing theory is a capital T proper noun theory is the view of the world that oppression is is underlying and real and it's mediated through how we produce knowledge and justify concepts and agree that we will and will not speak about things in some sense if he trace it back to the way Michel Foucault the great post mister dr. postmodernist kind of blew it up and and defined it the idea that he had was that comes down to bait basically to like people can say stuff and some people are going to be considered legitimate and some people are gonna be considered crazy at the most course understanding and so that which is considered legitimate became the concern when it's spoken and Foucault said that's the seat of all power and so theory is this political project that literally exists to understand that knowledge is a local provincial thing to a given culture there's no access to objective reality there's no such thing as objective truths there's no possibility except by accident that two cultures would agree upon some fact about there's some truth about the world and there's no way to compare one cultural point to another they're actually epistemic lis islands that are separated from one another and then the politics comes in by saying that this generates oppression and that oppression needs to be identified and dismantled using critical methods so when you have critical race Theory the fundamental assumption and again and I'm happy to provide the link for this so you can show just Robyn D'Angelo Heather Bruce and a handful of other educators a very influential conference a few years ago in Puget Sound talked about the the underlying tenet of critical race theory and they start with the assumption that racism is every we're in racism as always racism is permanent racism is imminent it is there one of the statements they make is the question is not did racism happen the question instead because of course it did the question instead is how did racism manifests in this situation so if you're going to adopt critical race Theory you're going to start with the assumption that racism and white supremacy are operating there and the critical point is the critical part is our job is to find it pointed out and flame it and make people mad about it so they want to get rid of it so that's actually what you're importing it is a worldview that accepts as a fundamental premise that white supremacy and racism exist are imminent or in our crisis that can only be fixed by overthrowing the entire system that's kind of its own emergency when you understand what they're actually talking about I know I sound like a nutjob saying it but I can provide sources for all of this very easily um okay I believe you could okay here here's I think I'm coming on something here uh-huh you just laid it all out uh-huh okay I could picture all of my very progressive teachers just glazing over as you explained in detail why this is a problem what you you take this stuff too seriously James you take this too serious I talked to I talked to someone who is the chief of curriculum for a major major social studies website quick for education and in the conversation they told me like oh it's kind of like Foucault and you know I think intersectionality post Mars it modernism it's just like a thought exercise it's just kind of cool to think about mm-hmm like you just broke down all of these details all of these specifics you read this stuff you spent hours and hours and hours reading kimberlé crenshaw and Robyn D'Angelo and Foucault and all of these and I think what is happening is many educators many people who buy into this have not they have not and they just assumed it this is change yeah no no you're talking about my just my head hurts just know racism exists James - stop with all that right information okay it just exists how can you how can you possibly believe it doesn't exist you're explaining but but do you see what this is where I see a big disconnect I see a big disconnect in when I say explain this to me you do and then I go I don't know I don't know what you're talking maybe it helps if we cover an analogy that will step out of their progressive bubble so I grew up and I still live in the southeast I'm not unfamiliar with I wasn't ever a Southern Baptist but I'm not unfamiliar with Southern Baptist theology so if the Southern Baptist theology begins with the premise that God exists and God created the world exactly perfectly and then it is sin into the world and there's a fall and the way that they see that in the way that they explain that geologically is that they say that we live sort of in two worlds at once there's the high spiritual world in the low mundane world that we live in and the way that they theologizing is the spiritual world is in a sense the real thing and then the mundane world is that where we live is actually subordinate to that and so they have this absolute conviction that God exists God is perfect God created the world in exactly perfect form and they can start you know they can say as many theologians as you want going all the way back to you you know the second and maybe even first century to back all this up and then when they start doing that the impulse from the outside is to say you know I just know God exists I don't need all of these details and all of this but when these people especially the ones who are pastors the ones who are theologians ones are deeply invested in when they approach the world they legitimately would approach the world that way so they meet somebody who say doesn't believe in God or doesn't believe in what the theology that they believe in so I think even maybe a Catholic and the the reaction literally begins with something like well okay so all in all is grounded in God and you don't believe in God or don't believe in God correctly so how is it that you can claim to know anything okay so when you're outside of that you're like what you know it's just absolutely confusing because for them all knowledge is grounded in God the worldly things you know in the world in fact the worldly philosophies are considered a distraction and a temptation in the confusion and all knowledge comes from the theology of God which is rooted in Scripture and everything is subordinate to that so if you don't have connection to the source which they say is mediated through the sacrifice of Christ if you don't have connection to that source then you absolutely can't actually have knowledge and this is what you know nobody can understand this but you actually have to spend time understanding it of theology to figure out where they're coming from then be able to talk across that boundary this is the same thing that's happening rather than believing that the world has begun with God it's that the social system that we live in was born out of white supremacy you see this in that 16:19 project from the start at the new york times at the founding premise the entire fundamental operation not the americas original sin but they were foundation of American society is slavery and racism and white supremacy and the view from that position is because privilege and power are self-justifying and they create the knowledge producing system not intentionally necessarily but to exclude the perspectives outside of that which is dominant they don't have any mechanism to correct from within so if they started white supremacists they're always going to be white supremacists because there's no means from within to correct it and the revolution hasn't come yet and this can be if you want to look at Christy Datsuns 2014 paper where she compares it's about a tracking epistemic oppression she compares this to the Plato's cave an allegory and expands it but she this is actually what's described by Christi Dodson who's a feminist black feminist epistemologists who has massive influence right now on pedagogy so on education theory and her review is that this is an element of what's called a third order epistemic oppression which is what she calls which means that the epistemic resources are not available within the system to be able to correct it Audrey Lord more famously phrased this that the Masters tools cannot dismantle the Masters house and a 1979 essay so this is a concept that's been floating around these circles for four decades from Audrey Lord if not before her from anybody and I mean even what Audrey Lords exact statement there in there was besides the Masters tool sentence is so famous is that if you're going to speak from a position of a racist patriarchy how is that possibly going to dismantle patriarchy because you're speaking from within the problematic system as Christie Dodson would phrase it which doesn't contain the set of epistemic resources necessary to create change within that system while it continues to marginalize and exclude other perspectives which would be the emotional responses the lived experience and so on that you saw often hear people appeal to so what I would tell people who want to just put their hand to their head and say this is too complicated it's not really like that is yes it really is like that this is an entire worldview this is a worldview that was born in the postmodern conception that drew upon the previous critical approach to fuel what it was doing to try to despair about how power works in the world that's what the post modernists were ultimately doing they were despairing about how power works in the world and corrupts it is an entire worldview that begins in it the parallels even to religion are insane privilege actually is almost a perfect parallel to the Calvinist concept of total depravity total depravity for those who don't know as a is a theological point that says that human beings are corrupted by the want to sin and it's total because it touches every part of their life well the fear privilege is theorized as when you have privilege you act in subtle and and sometimes overt ways to to preserve that privilege and to work in its best interest or in your own selfish interest so you have concepts like Alison Bailey this is in a paper about education it was published in Hypatia which is a very significant feminist Journal it's very much paid attention to she called it privileged preserving epistemic pushback when people are challenged on their point of privilege they tend to push back because they don't want to engage Robyn D'Angelo is probably the queen of this but there are a dozen other theorists Charles Mills with the racial contract barbara Applebaum with white ignorant and color talk Jose Medina with active ignorance become in a perfect circle right challenge it because and if you challenge that proves me right that's who might forget Allah T Y fragility is the perfect set up like like you see in Kafka's novel to trial where Joseph Kay's accused of things and when he denies it it's his denial is taken as proof of his guilt so Robin D'Angelo's concept of white fragility you don't have to read very far into her paper I the book you do have to get a little bit more into I guess but in their 2011 paper titled white fragility where she originated this concept it's the first paragraph you can see it that if you are confronted with the fact that you are participating in a white supremacist system which critical race theory assumes from the bottom it starts with that assumption and looks for proof everywhere that's the project there that's the worldview is it's there we just have to find it and make it more clear but if you get confronted with this and you disagree you become emotional you go away you you lock down and sit in silence you try to ignore it you take any of these approaches then you failed to engage with the material because you don't have another quote the racial stamina to do your anti-racism work as you need to and this she called white fragility which she said is born out of the everyday experience of privileges that white people are one of the points I mentioned before in that critical race pedagogy talk from a few years ago with D'Angelo and some others again was that anything that white people are comfortable in a white supremacist or racist system so anything that maintains or perpetuates white comfort must be suspect I mean these are the premises that are that are underlined us so with with white fragility you have one option which is to agree and if you don't agree and enthusiastically agree and choose to do volunteer to do the anti-racism work that's prescribed in the method prescribed then you're just exhibiting fragility and you actually are proving that you need the work done it's there's no escape except to agree you see this again in Barbara Applebaum who I mentioned in her book being white being good which is about complicity with racism whether intentional or not she mentions it the only form of legitimate disagreement with social justice work is to ask questions until you understand it so that you can agree that's not disagreement though right it's asking clarifying questions it would be intent to agree so when you've got a system that first of all assumes the thing it's looking for at the bottom which is what critical race Theory does and then uses methods to where there's absolutely no path through this except to say that it's correct what you're dealing with at this point we talked about rigor a few minutes ago this isn't even a lack of rigor this is a this is something way beyond a lack of pricker it is it's a it's the same kind of worldview you see in Scientology right yeah okay so it's a little hard not to your kids I mean just what's a little harm right there you go so that's that's exactly what I was gonna get to and that I think is really important because you know about the 16:19 project I talked to some colleagues about that and one of the responses I got was like well I don't agree with all of it but you know it's it's bringing awareness you know I'm very least we're just we're it opens a conversation and that's something that gets said a lot you know it opens a conversation and we should be talking about this and yeah we should be talking about it it's good to have a conversation but it's the it's the foundation again when you take it seriously would you I have never seen a real like debate or conversation I guess I could call a debate between you know the people you mentioned and you know the people who are more critical of it you won't you Helen Peter you know Jordan Peterson Sam Harris whatever it's yeah theoretically not against the rules and in fact right on the edge refuses to do it for example why is it theoretically against the rules because this is a worldview that is interested in understanding how discourses perpetuate oppression so if say you were one of these scholars and I invited you to have a debate with me the only way you can possibly have a debate is by putting a putt making a platform with me where I get to say my piece about it which means I get to promote the discourses that they don't want to have promoted so they by volunteering to have a debate with me or theoretically being complicit and remember our apple bombs book was titled about complicity was titled you know being white being good so you have this idea that being complicit in perpetuating the discourses is actually not allowed so you're not going to see this debated it's again I don't mean to draw and I mean this is actually kind of my expertise but so I will go there but I don't want to draw an unfair analogy but the truth is that this is a faith system that it's an operation where nothing you're not allowed to disagree with it and again what happens if you challenge these ideas what do you get called you could call a racist if you think the 16:19 project opens a conversation good yeah it does and we should have conversations in a liberal system if you want to forward the idea for example that historically the United States was founded at Jamestown even on slavery then that's a question in a debate to be had but who's going to be able to answer that is gonna be rigorous historians you're gonna look into the thing I got one coming on here in two weeks yeah good and I know him well so yeah oh there they're trashing the same as far as I can tell and so what happens is that becomes part of that dialogue so the conversation started the conversation continues but then when you say well one of two things well the reason that those people are actually speaking from a racist perspective that doesn't want to engage with the material that would be what Alison Bailey and Robyn D'Angelo and so on would Jose Medina I could just name these people that's what the the state of theory for the last ten years most of which is bent toward the classroom says about this is that well you know they just don't want to engage with the new evidence that's found and then on the other hand the thing they'll say is well by by using more more traditional instead of rigorous they'll say more traditional historiographical methods they're just working from a dominant paradigm that excludes alternative knowledge --is so you can't say it's wrong you're either wrong you've morally wrong for saying it's wrong or you're tied up in a system that refuses to listen there's your Christy Dotson's third order epistemic oppression it's literally baked together so that it can't possibly be wrong and so to start a conversation that can't have anything but one conclusion is not to start a conversation it's to proselytize yeah so um okay now just to kind of like wrap this all up hopefully in like a nice bow is um each state has different standards in California it's become mandatory to teach LGBT you know history but in Texas they don't even have on the state standards Jim Crow yes a is for Alamo you know it's one of those things where there's like you know there are as individual standards I don't think that this issue is is a major issue in all of the nation's high schools but I do think it's being promoted at the top education universities so like Columbia School of Graduate School of Education Oh every one of them yeah so there and then like I said the National Teachers of the year the ones who are up for teachers of the year which are the what we strive to be so it becomes that the schools I think in Texas they should teach Jim Crow I think that's pretty important but sure but there's you know there is something like these states are just backwards they'll get there eventually is kind of the aim so to get back to the question you know what I thought about it was yes you mentions people at the New York Board the state New York State Board of Regents has taken this up so it means it's going to be core standard curriculum across the board not K through 12 like K through postgraduate because the New York State Board of Education rules everything in New York sorry New York State Board of Regents is in control of everything of state education so you know Texas is on the one extreme I don't know California is somewhere toward another extreme I just saw another thing about your Board of Education voting on an initiative for it and then New York is kind of going like all the way you know so it's it's spreading yeah I mean they went all the way with birth certificates I mean that's and that's to show where this ends up where now in New York if people don't know you got a birthday vu can write male/female or X and just this is so new like maybe maybe it's healthy to not give your child a gender from birth maybe but there's no significant backing to say that's true to the point where it should be policy I think is just something to put out there but as far as division goes there's some stories I talked to fellow teachers from different schools around the country actually and you know stories like I have one of the godfathers to my my youngest son is gay and he got married and his sister was the efficient and she is a high school teacher and she a lot of the the she's had a couple of experiences she's Asian she's um South Korean but she uh but one of the things was she gave a black girl and s and the girl claimed racism mm-hmm and so she had to go to a hearing and all that kind of stuff cuz all you have to do is say it's racism and became a big thing and uh prove now that it wasn't right because theory operates yeah and she said like well I had to show like well here's your paper here's where you get beer and good thing is she's like very meticulous about keeping records and stuff like that no stereotype but the but the other thing was the rainbow uh all the teachers were putting a little rainbow sticker on their school IDs and they said I won't say her name but they said no do you want to put one on your school ID and she's like no I don't want I feel like well why not I don't know I just don't feel like the need to broadcast that I know that I support gay people and and she was kind of became a pariah around the school for a while of like you know you're a homophobe you're not supporting this and she had to be like look I married my gay brother like what are you talking about but again she didn't support it so there is a division element of this that if you don't tow the line then you are racist you get called all those things I think that is a one of the major harms of this sure yeah I mean that's extremely stressful and ostracizing it's also totalitarian but it's the reason where that comes from is that what I was talking about is you've got to speak into the right discourses this is a worldview that cares about what discourses are being spoke into and of course they blurred the boundaries as to what constitutes a text a text can be something that's spoken it can even be a physical location like a coffee shop can be read as a text and look for the problematics so the discourse that they were trying to promote the alternative LGBT discourse would be that you're wearing the the rainbow and to not participate in a discourse by its absence indicates that you are speaking into a discourse and separate from that now the reason doesn't matter intention is clearly theorized out all that matters is impact so that ties back to the other story that you told from the same kind of the same situation which is this black student who claimed racism one of the theoretical points is that intention doesn't matter only impact matters so and the the ultimate arbiter of the truth is lived experience that is the postmodern understanding of knowledge is that one's lived experience subjective experience is the only thing that you can say arbitrates truth and every person gets their own truth we all have our own truth but then truths are also located within experiences of oppression so say there's a black experience and all black people share that experience in common so there's a black truth that goes with that so it does create the the situation where somebody can in you know the impact I feel rape racially discriminated against her this is a racist act I experienced racism there's no possible way to discuss it or argue against that our luckily there was you know enough record-keeping to where it could be defended against but eventually there won't be because experience will will rule over all and this manifests you don't want to talk about what the harms are I mean though there's some obvious harms here but who's getting cheated in their education here so I had somebody I have people reach out to me all the time it's somebody reach out to me a black guy who had completed her master's of Fine Arts and his deal with his MFA was that nobody was critiquing his writing because nobody wanted to be called racist and so he even realized this was happening and started doing things that were really broken on purpose and nobody would critique his writing and nobody would correct it they just give him you know a survey's or whatever and then when they would have you know it's creative writing or whatever was this field and I'll play writing or something but when they would have kind of like group sessions which they often do in creative writing environments where peer evaluation of your writing there would be the if there's gonna be any criticism given which there usually wasn't even though he was intentionally doing like broken plot devices and just nonsense and there would be this long preamble about how them this isn't coming from a racial perspective and doesn't anything new would you raise them just let me acknowledge my privilege as a white person before I go you know the whole thing and it was just so tedious to even be able to get told you know you left out a comma or whatever it happened to be and so his his complaint to me was my skills never improved nobody ever challenged me so who are you eating so if you're worried if your concern is this is what I was saying before about method matters if you think that there's a problem with with racism in the school or whatever or racial disparities in culture which there are some then you want to find a method that actually can solve the problem and it's all too easy to pick the wrong method and cheat the very people you're trying to help by being too nice to them you know in therapy you talk and like couples a lot of times or with drug addiction you talk about people who are supportive and then you talk about people who are enablers there's a difference between being supportive and being helpful and then there's a line where you cross where you know you're heroin addicted husband or whatever and you're buying everything for him and you're taking care of the messes that they make you're always cleaning up after the disaster so that they have they never have to face the consequences of their actions at some point there's tipping into enablement rather than doing something is genuinely helpful and so if your impulse is to help as you said most teachers are and I think most people are I mean I've even talked at this point I've talked to a lot of people there's some very profound profoundly deep conservatives in the stereotype of them of course is that they're callous and they don't care and that's the threat of deep conservatism is callousness and even they care much more once you scratch beneath the surface they care much more than anybody anybody would think and they don't want to see these problems in society but the way that you're going to approach them does matter if you have to do the best you can to get them right and having a hysterical theory that begins with the whole school is a white supremacist system and if we call any kit any black kid out on you know their math mistakes and that's racist that's a major problem because that kids not going to get better No Child Left Behind of the big joke you know of that this is like diss on stare and look trial Left Behind on steroids the joke of that was no child gets ahead but this isn't as is theorized correctly to give credit to this you know kind of literature they point out repeatedly that when you come up with some system like this it's supposed to benefit anybody or everybody or they could hurt anybody everybody climate change is a big one that could hurt everybody then the people who get hurt the most are the people who have the fewest resources so the people who need the help the most by a bad method are gonna get screwed the most when you apply it so if you want to help do something that it's rigorous not something that's like a moral panic yeah there was a yell study about how people who are more left-leaning use different vocabulary they use like dumb down vocabulary burn people of color and you know it goes back to that I think was nutsi into lab anti fragile idea like you know you just bubble wrapping for people like we're educators come speaking the teachers now we're educators we need to keep high standards if you believe in discrimination you believe that this stuff is out there which it is that you know like how making things easier lowering the bar is not it you have to support them if they're not coming in with the necessary skills that's our job that's we're getting paid for we gotta give them those skills and I help them to be able to jump on hurdles that are equal to everyone else is not doing them any or it's not doing them any favors it's critically hurting them yeah actually it is it's vandalizing them it's it's under challenging them and it it doesn't help it's it's a well intended mistake I mean the saying is the road to hell is I intentions for a reason and I mean I get the impulse but you know there's all kinds of problems with it this is why again the call was for more rigor and in the research that's backing and going into this stuff and to you know try to use carefully determined methods that can actually look at the real problems with carefully examine and analyze data and then start to perform you know within the context of the profession I don't mean like we're gonna do something like you know Tuskegee thing or whatever but some kind of an experiment to see you know okay and what kind of outcomes to happen in these situations will happen I know there's some of that that's occurring and people would be able to refute this by pointing well here's this and here's that and some of that's gonna be rigorous and some of it's not and the problem is it's very difficult to tell what's what which is why again the field at the academic level so your pre-service education schools teacher education schools are as you mentioned completely enough with theory now that you it's hard to tell what's legitimate and what's not so that has to get cleaned up upstream and then that you know the better materials have to be given to teachers with the message is is if you want to help the how you help matters because you can really screw somebody up by doing it well intended and wrong that doesn't make you a bad person because you're trying to help you have the right I don't believe that there's a you know that I don't believe it's all impact I think the impact and intent both matter in terms of weighing things out ethically and you can be a good person who's making bad decisions and then the call to you is to correct not to is to do something you know try to make it better not to just jump on you know some some bandwagon or whatever that's it's running wild or I mean just think about it for a minute do you really think the entire system is white supremacists rather than you know some fringe of people are actually white supremacists and we should probably focus on those people as the group that they are developed counter-arguments to what they have and make sure that that stays printed and you know marginalized or do you wanna do you want to take the assumption that you know basically the entire population is white supremacists I mean what are you doing yes so too cuz you can talk I could talk to you all night about this but the take up your night is a look don't teach nonsense teachers don't teach nonsense even if it's well into you can't teach nonsense okay ghosts don't screw up I don't want to steal your thunder go girl oh no no I'm sorry it's just well just real quick in that I want to hand it back to you but the but even if it's well intentioned you are supporting an idea that is put forth by people who will not defend it they will not defend it in any kind of rigorous way they won't go up against you guys to hammer out the peer-review system has been shown to be corrupted why would you teach something that has not given push back your lifting know these people are lifting weights in no gravity it's don't teach nonsense that's the importance studying race is not nonsense studying gender is not nonsense these are important things that need to be studied but the way it's being done is you we are educators let's learn this I don't know how to like red pill I hate that Candace Owens took that yeah but uh but uh but I don't want a red pill anybody know um I guess I'd be yellow if we went to three traditional colors okay like yeah let's look teachers we are we are should be lifelong learners we say that we want our students to be lifelong learners the work that that you guys have done is it's intense it's a lot okay but let's let's do a little bit of a deep dive go go do some research going with a critical eye I loved when Heather Heying talking I'm sure she's not the only one but she says something along lines of like when you have a hypothesis try to prove it wrong not try to prove it right because it holds up to that then you got something there yeah and I love that and I think that we need to try this and as much as you might want to believe that that this is true cuz it's kind of wrapped up nicely or as much as you don't want to put forth this effort because it's frustrating and you have the backfire effect and you have this you know worldview that's that it's very hard to get challenged look we have a job here as teachers this is a very important job I take my job very seriously I love it I have a lot of fun but I don't think this is something that should we should be taken lightly I don't think that this is something that we should just just taken a frivolous manner we need to dive into this and I hope that peeps educators listening will go out and just go hmm all right it's probably nonsense but but with what James and Will are talking about but let's all play with this a little bit I don't know but that's kind of my big push for my fellow teachers out there is just look into it but why would you teach something that is not held up to any kind of real scrutiny like just think about that for a minute we don't we say we're teaching things that are based in data we always go to data we go to science we're educators this is not this is not and that doesn't mean that we you have to risk being called a racist and a sexist and a homophobe but we're not it's the opposite we want to really understand race and how it plays out in America we want to understand gender and how it plays out and trans the trans experience and all that kinda stuff we want to know that but we have to do it honestly and we have to do it in a way that is not going to lead to a lot of the stuff that we're seeing now in society and policy and stuff like that this is a cruiser like I use the word but it's a critical time for our country right now and let's let's try to keep the education system honest and let's keep it rigorous and let's keep it something that we can we can use to actually solve problems not make problems worse okay that's the energy there that was so good I didn't want to say some silly little thing they had was I mean I even thought it was so good I thought of another thing I wanted to say in the middle of it it's just there's like you're you're on a roll I love it I love that energy one smaller thing though that I do recall of the like two or three things I thought I might say one smaller thing there is that you know you want to keep your eye on the ball there's a big push to insert social justice with another subject so I run into this a lot social justice in math education I was a math teacher a number years ago so I kind of you know I'm appalled by seeing this the purpose of the math classes to teach mathematics and when you're introducing another variable now that's class time that's not going to teaching mathematics and you know mathematics is a hard subject to learn a lot of students struggle with it it takes a lot of time and so I mean I always wanted to get a t-shirt that says math is hard you know and last because my PhDs in that but this is my personality but it is hard and so if you're going to start taking up class time like these things start recommending to journaling about social justice issues and having class discussions or social justice issues not about how to use math to sort them out or whatever but literally about the issues they came up as the example you know you've you've lost part of your path and education is actually as you said it is it is crucially important oh I remember the other big one of those in saying so this is it ties right in how perfect and so when you look at this from the critical perspective any and then you're using the word critical you know have to apologize every time you say this is a critical time that's okay that's a critical asset that's okay you know those are those are okay uses of it this is critical thinking that's actually okay to it's not the same thing as this specific critical method and the fundament this is what your your educators out there should start to reflect on critical methods like critical race theory begin critical pedagogy in general begins with this sentence and you have to decide whether or not you agree with it or whether you think it's a good idea and that sentence is education is a political act if you think that your role as an educator is inherently political I would strongly urge you to go back and reflect upon what the hell you think you're doing because you're an activist now and you mentioned Heather huiying one of the things that Heather Hank pointed out to me last late last September right before we went public is that there's an inherent tension between activism and education because education is by its very nature and open-ended questioning a question asking process it requires you not to know the answers activism requires that you already know the answers you already know what the truth is and you're gonna put it into action so if you maybe you do agree that education is a political act but you've got to be able to mount a reasonable defense of that before you're going to put it into into practice and if you're an educator who thinks the education should be about learning and that maybe the politics is best left out of it and then if you've flipped it over and it was a conservative politics that was taking over or if they're putting creationism back into the schools which is a religious right I think you'd be really worried about the idea that you would say education is a political act that's an emergency or hair's on fire so when it's the politics you agree with the the the the the need to reflect isn't less it's double and so think about that critical approaches start with the statement and this is again look it up I'm not making this up that education is a political act if you believe that that's what you're doing I really encourage you to reflect upon that and if you believe that's not what education should be about I encourage you you wanna thought about opening a conversation there's a conversation to open with your fellow educators is education of political action it'd be a political act those are some hard questions that we should be grappling or there I think educators should be grappling with because that's at the heart of this whole thing whether we want to talk about worldviews and what you're importing into the school or moral panics or separating kids and screwing them up psychologically possibly because you're using backwards therapy and an unregulated situation all of those things are one level another level is just the deep bare bones of Education is the point of Education to politically instill some view and kids so part of what I'm doing here and I talk to you about this earlier on the phone is this is a bit of a bad signal if what we're talking about here if you've seen this you're a teacher then a metaphor I'm using is forming Voltron yeah this idea that we are going to and I've talked to a couple there are high school teachers out there that have seen this that have felt with they've given push back have felt like being ostracized by their by their colleagues in their school and people who have gotten a lot of trouble and stuff like that is please reach out to me I'm on Instagram because that's the one that is most used as so far social media goes between young people and teachers and that's my kind of target so it's at will roost WI ll re you SCH or cylinder radio at gmail.com just want to put that out there but James thank you for doing this where can people find you your stuff what you're all about I'm mostly I'm active on Twitter where I don't take myself seriously at all I take my work seriously but I don't take myself seriously so it's half kind of like really good points about what we're talking about in half like comedy and don't get too offended by it I hope it is somewhat adult humor sometimes but maybe don't send your okay but at any rate let me add to what you just said about the bad signal before I mean because I mean you can find me there that's where you can find me Twitter at conceptual James everything spelled the way it normally is no funny characters it takes up all the characters so I couldn't put anything in there like an underscore at conceptual James you can find me there but let me add to that bad signal thing because this is a big deal this is actually super important um the only way you're going to be able to deal with this problem in education if you believe it's a problem in education is by forming a movement you are going to have to get together and there are gonna be a few things you need to do the first thing is half of you're probably gonna more than after you're gonna feel gas lit like this isn't really a problem every time you talk to somebody they're like it's not a big deal this isn't really happening it's just you know people doing the right thing you're gonna feel weird and gas lit you're gonna feel unable to speak you're gonna be you don't even probably know where you can start to have these conversations with other educators you probably don't realize how many of your fellow educators think similarly to you because nobody's willing to be the one to speak out so if you can kind of gather around I mean wills putting his neck out here if you can gather around that you can start to talk to each other and as I say you'll find your legs you'll realize that there's a so there are other people who think like you you're not going crazy you are not going crazy this really is a completely weird thing that's taking over kind of everywhere we're talking about education but I see it and wha I see it medicine I see it in the academy I see it in the Southern Baptist Convention is falling prey I mean this is everywhere it's in everything faith every profession you see that Google you see it in major corporations people getting fired you see the NFL good putting social justice in is like it's one of its agendas Gillette's doing that commercial lost eight billion dollars I know there's not exactly what happened but you know it's funny to let I'll ask about that one on Twitter a lot there's it's everywhere and so you're probably feeling like you're going crazy and you're not but you need people who see it too who are willing to speak about it be able to speak with so forming a network where you guys can reach out to each other and understand each other and realize you're not alone you're not crazy is key you can find your legs you can start to gather resources I will be my team and I are working to produce these resources were under a book deadline until the end of this month but then we're going to start producing more resources where you can start to understand what's happening and you know we're gonna aggregate those things in one place which I don't know where that'll be yet but we'll let you know when it would exist and so you can start to learn what's going on work with each other and you're gonna have to try to build a movement around that and when you have enough people you have a critical mass of people who are confident to be able to speak and realize that you can support one another then you can start speaking out about it and doing so from a position of strength instead of his seeming hysteria so this bad signal bill of Ultron thing is super important and realize that like I said it's not just happening it is very happening in education but it's not just happening in education it's happening in other walks of life famously in some knitting club called Ravelry online there's lots of hiking clubs reach out to me all the time governments have reached out to me actual governments it's it's everywhere and there are a lot of people right now out there who are like am I going crazy and you're not you just got to start you know finding this kind of work and if you find this try to support other people who are speaking about it because that supports necessary I'm not necessarily even saying financial support if you I never give well money I'm not asking for it for myself but um reach out and send that email like hey I appreciate that you did this hey I want to be a part of this you know - you know I want to help that kind of stuff is even just the thank you for doing this from an anonymous account is a big deal but because it's so pervasive so reach out try to gather together and try to start communicating with one another and start trying to build a movement with an education if you want to see this go there's you're not going to be able to do it as individual so you've actually got to start building a counter movement this is a well-organized thing that's been operating on it schools of Education since 1970s and we're just seeing the the fruit coming to bear on the tree that was planted 40 years ago so definitely try to organize and get in touch with one another and support each other thank you James yeah I actually have something I'm working on that will help this be organized I can't talk about it yet but good you don't keep me in the loop okay all right James um thank you so much for doing this man sincerely thank you you know trying to get this cylinder to flush out all sides if someone was doing mom and presents something that about critical race Theory come on let's I want to talk about it yeah but Allah logo too by the way I love that analogy that you know the shadow from one direction shadow from the other direction then we flushed it out well thank you thank you sincerely and I hope to keep in touch with you in the future absolutely please do all right man

Channel: Will Reusch

Views: 32,312

Keywords: grievance studies hoax papers, boghossian, james lindsay, jordan peterson, social justice education, teacher podcast, hoax papers, science, dog park, joe rogan experience, rubin report

Id: 5yD29n8tTfo

Length: 76min 54sec (4614 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 30 2019