IS IT TOO MUCH TO ASK FOR INTELLECTUAL CONSISTENCY?

Through the past year or two of controversy over the content of common school curricula, whenever a school board meeting turned unpleasant, the news reporting might include a bit of clarification, or perhaps spin, to the effect that "critical race theory" was an abstruse topic for law school, or perhaps for a graduate seminar in philosophy or political science, and it certainly was not being injected into third grade.

Until it was.  There's a new law in Iowa.  I'm not crazy about its scope.  Note, though, how an academician addresses it.

Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds signed a bill into law June 8 that will prohibit teaching critical race theory and “divisive concepts” in K-12 and higher education, in school curricula, and in mandatory diversity, equity, and inclusion training.

Venise Berry, the University of Iowa African American Studies department chair, said critical race theory is misunderstood. She said critical race theory highlights certain elements that are tied to race that are critical and important for Americans to pay attention to.

“Teaching critical race theory is not about telling white students they’re racist,” Berry said. “It’s about helping all students understand the environment that we live in and experience in this system. That it’s positive, in relation to race, but also its negative in relation to race.”

A source with experience doing diversity training notes that an example of an entrepreneur's slave suggesting a process improvement is an illustration of critical race theory in action, as the entrepreneur gets all the benefits of the improvement and the slave has no property rights thereto.  That's certainly a shortcoming of the property rights in a feudal economy.  The example, however, is one that can be offered to a youngster as an appeal to his sense of fairness.  I think that's what the professor is getting at.

Other scholars would suggest that the forbidden practices under the Iowa law aren't in use.

Leslie Schwalm, chair of the Department of Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies at the UI, said as someone who teaches about systemic racism and the history of institutionalized racism, the prohibited “divisive concepts” are irrelevant to her course curricula.

“No one teaches that members of a race or sex are inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive,” Schwalm said. “In fact, one of the things that critical race theory helps us understand is that racism isn’t about individual acts of discrimination, but rather about the system.”

Perhaps not in her class.  It's not too much of a stretch, though, to the Canon Wars in which an advocate of the "inclusive" curriculum might say "It is beyond debate to suggest that a person who has lived in that system has learned racist ways of behavior.  He/she simply has."  I'm paraphrasing from an article I read some thirty years ago.

The intellectual stances of the critical studies types might be more defensible if they rested on a consistent set of arguments.