Senate Unanimously Approves a Bill to Make Juneteenth a Public Holiday
npr.org
npr.org
Change to things that actually matter is supposed to be slow and difficult in Government. Otherwise there would be constant change as either side managed to seize power, and our legal system would be completely unpredictable.
This is mostly only true of presidential systems, and a particular affliction of ours. Parliamentary systems are not like this, nor is there constant instability from too much change.
Looks like Kwanzaa was bigger until 2018 when Juneteenth first started getting promoted.
That said, I'm from the upper midwest. Views on Juneteenth are probably different, particularly in certain other parts of the country.
If the American system were actually intended to operate as you describe, that intent would have been put into the Constitution.
One representative for every 50k citizens. Clearly the building isnt big enough to hold all those representatives. Force them to work remote and live near their people.
Manchin is taking the heat for holding this up, but the problem is broader than that: There are a handful of Dems (at least) whose sponsors also don't want this bill to pass, so I'm not holding my breath for any reform happening in this area.
And where are Biden and Schumer? They are pretty quiet on this whole situation.
This seems like an iffy proposal. Changing most judicial nominations to simple majority has had a significant impact on the judiciary. Eliminating the filibuster for potentially short-lived gains while handing opposition a nearly blank check for future legislative victories seems like a long-term problem. It seems likely to exacerbate political tensions rather than relieve them.
One can argue that the deliberate nature of the Senate is inimical to justice and therefore has to change, but when the pendulum swings in the other direction it may prove to move too rapidly to injustice.
The Senate should be made more democratic now. If the Senate flips in the future due to the will of the people, we will blow up that bridge when we get to it.
Is this a higher priority than reducing political tension/violence?
Or is it worth increasing the likelihood of political tension/violence by eliminating the filibuster?
> The Senate should be made more democratic now. If the Senate flips in the future due to the will of the people, we will blow up that bridge when we get to it.
This seems short-sighted. What does it even mean? How would it solve any problems if the opposition could undo the work in a matter of a few years?
If you're interested, I highly recommend the youtube channel Religion for Breakfast's series on American Civic Religion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x49n90lWi0s .
Was there really no better name for this day?
That said, "Emancipation Day" has also been historically used.
Reflect on why you dislike this holiday and the difference between its name and "Christmas". Language is fluid and will survive. It's fine. This is a bad take.
Do you have any evidence that both sides are equally guilty? This is the sort of thing that "everyone knows is true", but they "know" it because it allows them to express resignation and cynicism and get general agreement without offending anyone. It's like talking about the weather. But unlike talking about the weather it has the pernicious effect of dampening democratic action and rewarding the guilty. If a referee refuses to apply the rules of the game, throwing up his hands instead and saying "they all just foul each other all the time", how long do you think the game will have any rules? In a democracy the voters are the ultimate referees.
In this particular case, in the US, one side very much wants to fix the flaws in their democracy. Why? Well, in part because it's the right thing to do and in part because they are the ones disadvantaged by the flaws in the current system. If given the chance to vote the Democrats will pass a bill of sweeping electoral reforms with the net effect of equalizing voting power and thus giving themselves a better chance of winning elections. But Republicans will filibuster this legislation, so it won't happen. If by some miracle the filibuster is abandoned, not one will vote for it. On this issue the two sides are diametrically opposed, not equally guilty, whatever you think of the merits of their positions.
But the latter never draws the votes in congress, so that should tell us how meaningless this vote truly was.
So this year, for instance, the calendar would go July 4 (Independence Day, Thursday) - July 1 (Friday) - July 2 (Saturday) - July 3 (Sunday) - July 5 (Monday).
[1]: https://kitchener.ctvnews.ca/canada-day-2015-13-places-to-ce...
Besides, I don't think MLK's birthday is that significant anyway. Nobody celebrates his birth, do they? Sure, celebrate the date of one of the Selma marches, or of the I Have A Dream speech, or the date of his death.... But in my opinion, it's sufficient to set aside a day to remember him - it doesn't have to be the one day he was statistically most likely to have eaten cake with his family.
The Bible says Jesus was born 6 months after John the Baptist. John the Baptist was born within a two week period based of the schedule of John's father priestly duties. Since we do not know the exact year Jesus was born one option is that John was born in June. (His birthday is traditionally celebrated on June 24th.) Six months after that would be December. The idea we know for a fact that Jesus' birthday was not December 25th is just plain wrong.
No, I mean we go in and edit Wikipedia.
Christmas is barely the last hold out for holidays where the people who need time off to vote (retail, food service, other low wage high hour jobs) get at-least a bit of time off and that is being eaten into each year.
Do you really think a federal holiday for voting would do anything but start a whole new round of election day door busters that make it even harder for these people to vote?
A voter holiday is a waste of political capital that doesn't help the people who would need it. Pushing for the voting booths to be open all month long and to allow no justification mail in ballots are the kind of valuable reform we can push for rather than a symbolic holiday that would be ultimately worthless.
But your conclusion feels like the right call. A weird 180 imo.
"Election Sale, come in and vote for savings today only!" "We're open late, stop by after you cast your ballot for saaaaavings!"
Things like early or mail in voting are far more effective ways to enable those people to vote.
Which is my point.
And the idea of making election day a national holiday is a baby step, one capable of getting the ball rolling on real change, like extended voting windows and unrestricted mailed ballots.
Gotta start somewhere.
What will be enough? If you make Election Day a federal holiday as important as Christmas do you still need to have such a large voting window and unrestricted mail in ballots? Even now, as is, most people have a two week window to cast a ballot before Election Day. And plenty of options for mail in if they can’t vote in person.
No idea, honestly. But if we don't start taking any steps at all, we're stuck with a very ugly gremlin of a situation we're already keenly familiar with.
Make serving as as working the polls equivalent to jury duty. All employers must give the days off if employee wants to work the polls.
Avoid Monday and Friday so that workers won't take a 3 day weekend.
Similarly, avoid Tuesday and Thursday so that workers don't take a vacation day for a 4 day weekend - even though fewer workers would do this, it would still be a massive hit on productivity, and workers would more likely to travel and thus be outside their electoral areas
Hence, midweek
Now, presumably American elections are cheaper per capita, but it’s not like the money isn’t available. Cut down on the f35 habit a bit and have some proper elections.
(I’m sure money isn’t the only problem, but clearly US elections are done on the cheap)
And for those people we have early voting and postal voting too.
I never quite understand why voting is such a controversial topic in the US. In many countries (I'm sure Australia is not alone in this) it is a boring thing that just works. You might not always like the outcome, but the process itself rarely becomes the topic of discussion.
I think one thing that helps in Australia is that federal elections are completely controlled and run by the federal government. For federal elections, we don't have each state doing its own thing. Local government has no role to play in elections either. (Even local government elections are actually run by the state governments.)
Addendum: I must point out when I say "controlled and run by the federal government", they are run by an independent and non-partisan federal agency, politicians don't have direct control over them. Likewise, each state has an independent and non-partisan agency to run state and local elections
For, your eight dead relatives happen to be the average number of votes by the dead in a whole election[1], since votes by the dead have never actually been recorded in significant numbers, and certainly not in recent accusations [2][3][4]. Hell of a coincidence that it's all your dead relatives.
You are not, in fact, responding in good faith.
[1]https://ballotpedia.org/Votes_cast_in_the_names_of_deceased_... [2]https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2020-54874120 [3]https://apnews.com/article/ap-fact-check-donald-trump-georgi... [4]https://www.factcheck.org/2020/11/thin-allegations-of-dead-p...
Compare to "requiring ID will eliminate fraud": No. It eliminates some types of fraud, some of the time. It doesn't fix someone hacking a system and changing votes. It doesn't prevent someone creating fake IDs to vote. It also disenfranchises people who are unable or unwilling to get government ID in time to present it at the polls.
They know that a lack of voter ID, mass mail-in balloting, ballot harvesting, lack of chain of custody of ballots, lack of ability to observe the counting of ballots, etc. are all terrible security practices. They practically guarantee fraud in elections.
If you told the average HN reader to secure his banking information like we secure the vote, she would think you're out of your mind. But somehow, a complete lack of ballot security is just dandy. It's almost like some people feel that any means necessary to win is okay.
Who is proposing we eliminate the chain of custody for ballots? Who's actually called for that. Who has said "no observation of ballot counting" as opposed to "everyone who feels like it can come in and wander freely to investigate". Ballot harvesting has at least 3 different definitions, some of which are fine (put your ballots somewhere other than a polling place, and officials collect them) others are dubious (give some person you trust your ballot, have them deliver it to the polls). And if these things are "guaranteeing" election fraud, show me where it happened on such scale as to matter (and not some dude who did something he shouldn't but got caught and therefor disproves your point about how bad the security is).
There's bad faith arguing and then there's this.
But democracy's approval rating has been dropping for a while, so that's probably not the death blow it would have been. Democracy doesn't seem to be sacred anymore.
The number of people saying it's essential (rating a 10/10 on importance) to live in a democracy seems to have peaked for people born in the 50s in Europe and has been dropping for birth cohorts since the 30s. [Figure 1 in the source]
Source: https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/0...
Additionally, about 15-20% of people in the US (depending on age) seem to think democracy is a bad way to run a country [Figure 2 in previous source]
Even this pew article, which is relatively rosy on democracy, finds that ~40% of the US would be fine with leaving policy making to experts. The question specifically mentions excluding elected officials. [4th chart in next source]. We could probably debate on the merits of technocracy, but it's a very different thing than democracy.
Source: https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2017/10/16/democracy-wide...
Those did not flip nearly as hard as polls had projected.
It creates a system where on political party is pretty much guaranteed to win certain districts and they’re aren’t a ton of competitive races. Part of the problem is an electorate that would “vote for a bag of rocks” if it belonged to the right party.
Ahahahaha. Have you tried dealing with American bureaucracy? None of it is frictionless, it’s all horribly inefficient and fragmented, and one party is steadfastly committed to keeping it that way, and the other party only vaguely recognizes how big of a problem it is. Voting needs to be made easier, but making it compulsory would not automatically do that.
edit: besides which, voting already takes me only about 5 minutes. The problem is that that experience, which I have as a wealthy white person in a liberal suburb of a blue state, is not universal.
I don’t really know about the US’s ghoulish pantomime that is government, but at least here, the understanding that one can be fined for not voting comes with the societal expectation that the roadblocks to doing so will be cleared as much as possible by them, across the board, to everyone. That way, people who fail to vote fail to do so by their own choice and thus the fine is not farcical. Australia’s government understands and honours that.
I’m also somewhat worried in this political climate that such a measure could start another civil war, for one thing, and that at minimum there would need to be federal military intervention to enforce it in southern states, as in the 1960s. The Supreme Court would also need to be packed, because the justices currently holding the majority would never support it (they gutted the Voting Rights Act with no pretense of legal argument eight years ago merely because it was an ideological goal).
Not quite: the other party is committed to keeping it that way, too, but is also content to let the first party be the fall-guy for its efforts.
The two parties both play for the same team. They're in a big club you might say, and we're not in it (apologies to Carlin for my poor rendition of his skit).
A segment which comprises, by simple math, a full 15% of retail, customer service, and hospitality workers, who in turn make up a very large portion of the working poor, one of the least-well-represented interest groups in the US.
Which is why that early and postal voting is so important.
Questions around the math aside, in Australia for federal elections the polling booths are open from 08:00 through to 18:00 - and the process to hop in and vote is typically fast, at least compared to what we see on the news for USA elections.
In either case, it means the number of people who can't get to a polling booth during those 10 hours on the Saturday is relatively tiny. And, as you and parent noted, early / postal voting is a convenient, non-contentious, trusted option.
The process is typically fast in the US as well, but the edge cases are what get into the news. The USA also has a population 13x larger, so we should expect any given issue to occur about 13x as often in the USA as in AUS.
Nitpick: "13x as much", not "13x as often".
For us Australians, I suspect that invites a huge range of questions, including how long are people normally waiting that they need water, and why would a nominally capitalist society legislate against selling libations and comestibles under these very specific conditions.
Nothing is stopping voters from drinking their own water and eating their own snacks in line.
I applaud laws that limit "gift giving" at the polls. The polls should not be a place where your vote is swayed by a gift.
If a partisan group started giving voters free food or beverages at a polling place, that would be illegal.
That sufficient number of people (to warrant passing such legislation) would be swayed on the topic of who to vote for, to disregard their experience and opinions built up over the past several years, in return for a $2 bottle of water to quench a mild thirst, seems inconceivable. I wonder if there's perhaps other reasons at play there.
I guess it may be interesting to look at whether there's any common features at all of all the state legislatures that have passed such laws this year.
I shouldn't have used Biden/Trump in my example, because where freebies really sway votes is not the POTUS, but in the dozens of other positions and issues on the ballot.
In Maryland this last election the ballot was like 4 pages long and took me many hours of prep work to determine who I wanted to vote for board of education, representatives in congress, etc. If you haven't done the prep work and only came to vote for the president, your vote in the other areas is up for grabs. That's why people at the polls try to stuff your hands with brochures and freebies that have names on them - anything to make their preferred candidate's name pop into your mind while you are filling out the ballot.
The what?! That sounds absolutely awful.
We have partisan people outside the front gates at schools etc for our polling booths, with a 'how to vote' but they tend to be very well behaved, and aren't allowed on the property, so it's a small and mild gauntlet.
At federal election time we have only two pieces of paper to fill out. A small green piece for (upper house) senate with 5-10 candidates, and a (ridiculously) large white sheet with ~130 names on it sorted in to about 40 columns for the (lower) house of representatives. Party / independent status is listed under each name on the former, and at the top of the columns on the latter.
The voting rules have relaxed slightly - several years ago for the lower house you could opt for one or more column headings with a numeric preference OR every person under the column headings. Even that typically took you less than ten minutes, and for most people the time consuming bit was to work out which fringe parties to put at the very end of your preferences.
IIRC now you can fill in as many preferences as you like below the column headings - until you get bored, basically. Either way this is a mechanism to let you select where your spill over preferences go to, rather than allowing your first preference to 'sell off' your votes, if it looks like they aren't going to obtain a seat. Ie. force your cascading preferences, rather than pass that decision onto your first preference.
Interestingly in the last federal election here a good 25% of the population did not vote for either of the two major parties (both of which are somewhere to the right of center, gung-ho on being all-in on fossil fuel, etc). That group of people is trending upwards the last several elections, so there's some small optimism that we may escape the end-game of a viciously partisan two-party system here.
In any case we have no other votes to cast at these events. (I recall a federal referendum about 20 years ago that was tied in to an election, but that would have been a 'yes or no' option on a separate, very small, piece of paper - with a LOT of public discussion preceding it, as it was the ol' chestnut of whether Australia should remove itself from the British Commonwealth and become a republic.)
Every aspect of the voting experience in the USA really does seem to be designed to be as hostile to the citizenry as possible.
Sounds like you may have interpreted @umvi's comment to mean they took "many hours" to fill out the ballot [on election day]. So, you gave a rundown of your ballot's mechanics as an example of how a ballot can be designed in a way that doesn't take "many hours" to complete.
I guess the argument is that because it's a weekday, you want to aggregate many into the one event.
An Act enabling the County to borrow money and issue bonds in an amount not exceeding $38,134,000 to finance the design, construction, reconstruction, extension, acquisition, improvement, enlargement, alteration, renovation, relocation, rehabilitation or repair of Public Safety Facilities (including Fire Department Facilities), as defined therein.
I think very few people actually bother to research such questions. They just either reflexively tick Yes or No.
Researching a better answer requires a lot of questions. Does the county actually need to repair its Public Safety Facilities? What new construction do they plan? Have they been spending their money well in the past?
Answering all that would take a fair bit of time. And there were a dozen items like that.
By making it mandatory:
1. everyone has to accept that voting has to be accessible.
2. it's pretty hard to contest the results of a vote when you know "everyone had their say".
In the US the variations around accessibility can significantly affect voter turnout.
Unlike Australia, New Zealand doesn't have compulsory voting. And yet, I am led to believe that the process of voting is just as boring in New Zealand as it is in Australia. And one could make the same point about a number of other countries – Canada, the UK, Ireland, much of Western Europe.
So the reason that these countries to have far less controversy over the voting process than the US does must be something other than the question of optional-vs-mandatory voting.
I'm not certain how mail-in ballots are counted currently, but it is certainly possible to have the ballots be in a sleeve, and the ballot itself only be exposed to the machine reading it. Put the ballot 'inserters' under camera if needed. It seems like a simple problem to solve.
Another commenter mentioned that a real issue is that the counting of ballots isn't transparent, which is true. When I vote, all I know is that the ballot scanner increments its 'scanned ballot' count. I can't verify that it actually voted for who I voted for, and they're closed source, so I have to rely on someone else's word that they are.
Maybe this is finally a use for blockchain? lol
In general, sacrificing this important principle was acceptable if the alternative was to disenfranchise the voter (eg, they are overseas.) Now it seems there are many who want to just throw it away in the name of making voting “more accessible” in general. This is a pretty bad stance imo unless you assume it is cost-free, which it isn’t.
Literally all of this is invalidated by a mail in voting system. You cannot be sure the proper person got the ballot, you cannot be sure the person filled it out without it being seen by others or coerced, and you cannot be sure the ballot wasn’t intercepted somewhere along the line and modified. The entire system hinges upon a signature verification process which is automated and obviously needs to avoid false positives more than false negatives, given the risk of disfranchisement. We should expect the signature check to be a poor mechanism to block hijacked ballots, anyone with a bit of sense can see why we should expect it to allow most signatures through.
What we should expect under a mass mail in voting system is fairly obvious, given the means, motive, and opportunities it uniquely affords people in highly contested elections.
It has been interesting to watch smart people (not you) who were warning about these risks years ago be forced to stop agreeing with them because of the political implications that would likely come if we had verified examples of these weaknesses being exploited.
Are you sure about that? This past election wasn't exactly very healthy.
Be careful with removing all the pageantry around elections. Symbolism is very important and singular day election days play into that. So does filling in a paper ballot, and going to a polling place with your fellow citizens.
Imagine you created an app, wherein you enter your preference (Dem or GOP) and the app goes and proceeds to vote for you automatically anytime there's an election. Would that improve democracy or alienate people from it?
What elections were?
We have a rigged two party system. Layer conservatives and liberals stacking the system on top of that and you have an unhealthy democracy pretty much guaranteed. Given the corrupt nature of the leaders of the US, and the corrupt nature of the voters as well if we're being fair, the US has a remarkably smooth functioning system. It's definitely breaking down and showing its cracks, but given the breadth and scale of the assault it's been under for about the past 40 or 50 years, you have to be impressed at how it has held up.
Everyone deserves access to public services. Everyone needs a government ID.
"Elections should be held on April 16th- the day after we pay our income taxes. That is one of the few things that might discourage politicians from being big spenders." - Thomas Sowell
I could go on, but I digress.
It's not saying that all spending is bad. The point is to have some pushback so it's not so wastefully spent. Some efficiency would be welcome by all, I think.
That’s a silly thing to think when observably many are benefiting from that waste and inefficiency.
> What a trite and overly simplistic idea. First is the idea that Government spending is bad. Second is the idea that Government spending is controlled directly by taxes. Third is the idea that a majority of people actually pay any income tax at the end of the year. Fourth is the idea that people understand their taxes. Fifth is the idea that it is income taxes are the only taxes.
And sixth is the idea that it's even necessary. Pretty much my entire adult life has been major tax cut after major tax cut, one useful starved government program after another (the Strategic National Stockpile anyone?), and a ballooning deficit.
This is the reason why we have to file tax papers. State & federal can calculate taxes for majority of the people but don't because a group "" want people to suffer and revolt against income tax.
All politicians wants to cut spending but just not for the area they represent.
According to this ProPublica report, that is.
https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-f...
You will have a big sale at Macy's and people will go shopping or vacation.
We need 2-4 weeks of early voting & mail in ballots for everyone.
This may be a case of preemptive optimization.
On paper it seems okay: polls generally open early enough or close late enough that a person can vote before or after work. Except that is so often the requirement for people that polls in some places are backed up for hours during those times, making the choice between losing money if you're an hourly worker to take extra time to vote or have to skip all together if you have a family to care for and can't wait hours to vote.
Voting should be made as easy as possible. It will always take an extra detour from your daily routine but it should never require a trade off between losing money or caring for your family or any other disincentive.
[Edit: I am not saying that Juneteeth won't get special treatment. See my nested commented in this thread.]
State governments may or may not recognize a given federal public holiday.
Corner stores and restaurants don’t close.
The only exception to this would be companies (and schools) that will use Juneteenth as an education day instead of giving the day off. (I hope companies don't do that. If I want to get educated I have books and the Internet)
True, though Juneteenth may be different here. It could be considered the most basic signal of whether a company cares about Diversity & Inclusion. Of course this itself would be meaningless, but perhaps eventually the lack of this holiday may say something about that employer.
P.S.: The big tech company I work for has more federal holidays off, but Columbus Day and Veterans Day are not among them.
So, please consider me a data point of 1 which does not fit your paradigm.
So one way companies will not give any more time off is by just saying "feel free to use one of your floating holidays on Juneteenth".
I realise this is semantics but it seemed strange to me.
All I was trying to say was I’m fine with it if this is understood to be how things are done in the US, but it’s not correct use of the terms unanimous or approved, certainly in the way they are used in day to day English.
If you do not vocalize objection, you are counted as consenting.
And you can certainly give consent to something you would not approve. It's semantics, yes, but the definitions seem to align also.
And it is worth noting that it took more than 150 years for something so obviously correct and worthy to be commemorated. We don't even celebrate the end of the Civil War. Some people still earnestly call it the War of Northern Aggression. These things all mean something.
The 14 representatives who voted "nay" to the celebration of the end of slavery came from exactly the usual suspects.
So, again, yes.
Some things are both virtuous, and worth signalling to others.
...but I would argue that modern society is currently obsessed with signaling, and not at all discussing real change.
There's a wide spectrum of signalling between the extremes of "Hitting the Like button Really Really Hard", and "Creating a new Federal Holiday".
I wouldn't argue that this signal is productive, per se. Very few people honor the intent of Federal holidays anyway. But the signal is powerful, and I've learned that powerful signals do make an impact on psychology.
The whole concept of America, quite honestly, is one of symbols and signals. We can never live up to our mythology, but we can make sure the things we aim for are as honorable as possible. That's meaningful.
[0] https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/20/politics/republicans-voted-no...
I don't really like that one kind of assault is punished more than another even if the physical harm is identical, although I can see why some people would.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E1G2lyeWYAYSQnn?format=jpg&name=...
Even more importantly, however... children will now grow up having the day off and learning about it in class. That's where the real, permanent progress happens!
What are most prisoners forced to do?
I use "forced" in quotation marks, because although prisoners are no longer forced chain-gang style, these jobs can be a prisoner's only source of money, which is required to purchase communication with the outside world.
An article about this: https://truthout.org/articles/unpaid-labor-in-texas-prisons-...
https://ccnmtl.columbia.edu/projects/caseconsortium/casestud...
Same with housing segregation and the Equal Credit Opportunity Act's exceptions: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/1691
Just like the 13th still allows slavery for prisoners, the ECOA still allows discrimination if the person can't afford the home, incentivizing the system to make housing as expensive as possible: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OEHRENWBSHNO
I'm not sure I understand what you mean. Are you saying that you will sell your house to someone who can't afford it, possibly for a much reduced price?
What you wrote in this post is entirely different from what you wrote in your prior post.
Of course the work doesn't stop with public gestures, but what we publicly celebrate shows us what we collectively value.
I hope that popular culture uses the opportunity to discuss Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation. What a great moment (right in the middle of a lot of terrible moments).
They also usually learn about holidays in school.
I already know what Juneteenth is.
What is a "public holiday", legally? Is is the same as "federal holiday"? What is a "federal holiday"?
Is Flag Day a federal holiday? Public holiday?
Days off for federal bureaucrats, and that's about it.
Flag Day is a National Holiday but doesn't count as a Federal Holiday
Seems like companies are not obliged to honor this holiday. Personally I think national holidays are probably having a positive impact, because it will give almost all folks an opportunity to rest, maybe do a small vacation, so they’ll come back and be more productive or have spent some savings to boost the economy.
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_annual_leave...
But since the article talks about historical accuracy, it should be noted that slavery had not ended on June 19th - slaves in some border states had to wait till December for their freedom.
Mind-boggling propaganda.
Also, it's not 6 states banning CRT, it's 20 states now.
(CRT is calling white children oppressors, and black children victims. Neither is accurate or helpful. CRT is derived from Marxist Critical Theory. Since the US doesn't have a class struggle, racism has been inserted to make it a racism struggle.)
This is just incorrect. Critical Theory is a product of the Frankfurt School. They were explicitly applying Marxist thought to twentieth century politics, and wanted to understand why Marxism wasn't successful in the west.
This is a basic matter of record, not some wing-nut attempt to slander. Critical Theory is reworked Marxism to try to apply it to the modern West.
Perhaps a more accurate way to frame this is that both CRT and Marxism are separate instances of a collectivist way of thinking that tries to categorize people into groups based on their perceived power, where what informs that categorization is low dimensional (e.g merely class or merely race+gender). In that sense they're similar ideologies.
If i’m wrong, i’ll donate $10 to NPR.
ETA: unsurprisingly, my money was safe. But at least they linked to the Juneteenth bill. That’s rare enough. I think it should be considered a bare minimum in modern reporting to link to the original sources.
For example, one question you should be asking is, why does the article contain a quote only from one side of the aisle? I think a lot of people are likely to conclude that only one side thought it was important, and that's not so - there was strong bipartisan support for this bill.
> the theory that racism is not merely the product of prejudice, but that racism is embedded in American society and its legal systems in order to uphold the supremacy of white persons.
CRT by this definition is an objective historical fact. The effect of white supremacy on the legal system can be seen from the end of reconstruction, to Jim Crow laws, to government officials allying with the Klan, to the modern-day carceral state. All of these topics were covered in my public school education.
If you want to argue that some works of CRT are flawed, that’s one thing, but substituting the objective historical facts of critical race theory with nationalist propaganda, as these CRT bans explicitly aim to do, is irresponsible and a disservice to the public education system. As NPR correctly points out, it “limit[s] teaching a historically accurate picture of U.S. history”.
[1]: http://www.fldoe.org/core/fileparse.php/19958/urlt/7-4.pdf
https://legiscan.com/TX/text/HB3979/2021
That's its full text. You can read it, it's short.
Some highlights are that the bill mandates (that's mandates - not prevents) that Texan schoolchildren are educated about:
* "the history of Native Americans;"
* "the history of white supremacy, including but not limited to the institution of slavery, the eugenics movement, and the Ku Klux Klan, and the ways in which it is morally wrong;"
* "the history and importance of the civil right movement"
* "the history and importance of the women's suffrage movement"
* The Indian Removal Act
* the Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 and 1850;
* Brown v. Board of Education;
* The Underground Railroad
The bill also mandates that Texan schoolchildren learn about such historical figures as MLK, Frederick Douglass, Sally Hemings and Cesar Chavez, to name but a few.
So tell me: who wants to prevent a "historically accurate picture of the United States" from being taught in schools - those who support a bill that requires children to be taught about the history of slavery, Indian genocide, the civil rights movement and white supremacy, or those who oppose such a bill?
And I've only talked about what what the bill requires. What does it prevent? What does HB3979 ban from Texan classroom? Again, I encourage you to read the whole thing yourself, but I know that most people don't click through to the source, so I'll quote again.
Some of the things that HB3979 bans from being taught to Texan schoolchildren include that:
* "an individual, by virtue of the individual's race or sex, bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex;"
* "an individual should be discriminated against or receive adverse treatment solely or partly because of the individual's race;"
* "an individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of the individual's race or sex;"
Similar wording appears in most of the anti-CRT bills working their way through state legislatures.
You need to understand this: critical race theorists want to teach the above. They oppose these bills (and lie about their contents) because they want to discriminate on the basis of race, make people feel discomfort, guilt and anguish based on their race, hold entire races collectively responsible for the actions of individual members of that race, and engage in racial stereotyping and scapegoating. The sooner you realise this, the sooner you'll be able to make sense of our current moment.
NPR is usually a more balanced news source, but that last paragraph takes a definite one-sided stance in the phrase "a historically accurate picture" in reference to critical race theory. Critical race theory is not about historic accuracy (non-normative fact), it's a very normative activist perspective.
That being said, I'm strongly against any form of the law restricting what ideas can be taught, even wildly wrong and dangerous ones.
It's good, but not balanced.
There are very few places that are, and everyone is covering 'different things' it's like there is no accepted version of reality anymore.
Black people don't need Juneteenth holidays.
They need respect from the nation's institutions and they need to present and articulate their case for reparations in an emphatic and uncompromising manner.
This is made more ironic when in the line above you criticize white people for dictating what Black people need.
If you say “As a black person, I feel uncomfortable with a majority white Senate granting a holiday when I don’t feel respected by government institutions or feel like the need for reparations is being respected” it gives space for people who disagree with you to still hear your opinions.