Are anti-CRT laws unconstitutional? Probably, but then again there is this Supreme Court...

 

In an episode I mentioned once or twice before, I recall in a college classroom, completely out of the blue, a very pale, a very blonde white female student suddenly blurt out that although she wasn’t a racist, she would never marry a black man, and then insisted again she wasn’t a racist. She must have been thinking about this for some time and it disturbed her “conscience.” The other people in the class just sat there in bemused silence, like WTF was that about? This was in a southern state, with a “culture” in which anti-miscegenation laws may be illegal, but you knew that certain societal norms were not to be taken lightly.

This white female student should have taken “comfort” in the fact that she existed in a culture that gave her “cover” and kept her silly mouth shut and people would never even question why she would only marry a white man. But now, she had to introduce the question of where that fine line is crossed between making decisions based on race, and racism. Now, if someone in “liberal” Seattle had made the same commentary, that line would likely be assumed to be “crossed.”

Does this kind of thing figure into that white bogeyman "critical race theory"? I imagine it does, since white folks may say one thing but think another. Of course there are some people who think nothing of being openly insensitive and egotistical, such as the lone Asian-American student in the same class who "one-upped" the other student by suggesting that "smart" students like himself were more deserving to be allowed an education, which elicited a noticeable amount of hisses from even some white students. 

So what is bringing about this memory? I purchased this book last week, which was published in 2017 but has found new life since the movie based on it came out:

 

Now, I came upon this little tidbit from a recent article in Vanity Fair:

In at least one Oklahoma high school, copies of Killers were purchased for an 11th-grade English class, only to sit unread after HB 1775 became law. An English teacher at the school, Debra Thoreson, felt it would be a professional risk to introduce discussions about race that are central to the story. “As soon as that passed,” she told The Oklahoman, “I realized I would be setting myself up for House Bill 1775 to take away my license.”

Is she serious? What the hell is this HB 1775? Vanity Fair goes on

The broad language in the law, adopted in 2021 and similar to other CRT-type bills around the country, decrees that it is illegal in Oklahoma—the site of the 1920s Osage Indian murders chronicled in Killers—to “make part of any Course offered in a public school…discriminatory principles” such as, for instance, the notion that “an individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously”; or the idea that “any individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex.”

I suspect that there will be an unspoken "exception" for "women's studies" courses in schools, because those are designed to make males feel like violent, worthless sexist pigs.

Anyways,  perhaps it is not “coincidental” that this law was passed the year the documentary Tulsa Burning: The 1921 Race Massacre came out, which chronicles the destruction of the Greenwood district and murder of hundreds of black men in Tulsa, a segregated by relatively prosperous black community, which clearly excited the envy of some whites. The violence was touched off when a 17-year-old white female elevator operator "explained" that the reason she was alone in an elevator with 19-year-old black male was because he had accosted her.  After this…

 

…left this…

 

…more than 10,000 residents were left homeless and their businesses destroyed. It was decades later that the city of Tulsa decided to make “amends,” providing “reparations” for the survivors that were still alive, and making the incident required study in schools in 2002. But in the wake of HB 1775 we learn that white nationalist groups like “Moms for Liberty”  protested its continued teaching. The Oklahoma website The Frontier tells us that one teacher, before teaching it, “sends parents an email a week in advance so they can access her lessons and opt to have their children sit out of parts they aren’t comfortable with.”

So what is the "point" of teaching the lesson if people choose to remain ignorant of the past and how it informs the present? The Frontier goes on to note that “Two years after the passage of HB 1775, educators say a chilling effect has fallen on classrooms in teaching on complicated subjects like the Tulsa Race Massacre. The law includes an exception for material in state educational standards like the massacre, but four teachers told The Frontier they avoid some topics because they fear punishment. Putnam City North High School government teacher Aaron Baker has the eight prohibited concepts printed and pasted on the wall of his classroom to help him avoid violating the law.” 

Baker thought the law had no “teeth” until the State Board of Education “downgraded the accreditation status of Tulsa and Mustang Public Schools for violating the law”—leaving teachers “petrified to teach complex historical topics.”

Lawmakers responsible for the law have been remarkably “reticent” about suggesting racism was a motivating factor in the Tulsa riot: “Oklahoma State Superintendent Ryan Walters drew international backlash when he said he supports instruction on the Tulsa Race Massacre, but he doesn’t think students should learn that the event is linked to inherent racism."

Rep. Sherrie Conley, who is also one of the authors of HB 1775, asserted that “if there’s a historical consensus that the Tulsa Race Massacre was caused by racism, then teachers should feel safe to teach it without violating the law. She said students should be able to feel upset about what they learn regarding the destruction of the Greenwood district, but teachers shouldn’t tell white students to feel guilty about it.”

Conley goes on to give her opinion on that matter thus: “Conley told The Frontier she thinks the Tulsa Race Massacre was motivated by race but hesitates to say the perpetrators were racist. It’s just a terrible tragedy in our state, and whether or not it was actually racism that caused the thoughts of the people that started it — we can try to speculate but to know for sure, I don’t think that we can.” Some people can live with their hypocrisy, and let's remember what "ignited" the incident in the first place.

One former student recognized what was really behind all of this: “If we don’t learn about history, we are doomed to repeat it. Some people are out there spouting some nasty, hateful rhetoric, and maybe they want it repeated. But most of us don’t.” Like Donald Trump and his MAGAmainiacs, anyone?

OK, so we covered Native Americans and blacks. How about Asians? I suppose talking about the Japanese internment can be discussed as long as it is made “clear” that there was a perfectly “defensible” reason for it—that they were all potential spies and subversives. Muslims also more or less fall into that category of “potentiality” and “questionable allegiance.”

Meanwhile, in this country Hispanics are the group anyone can say anything negative about and feel “justified” in doing so. In states that would ban, for CRT purposes, historical discussions of the La Matanza period, when Texas Rangers were accused of murdering Hispanics into the thousands on any pretext, or the repatriation of U.S. citizens to Mexico during the Great Depression—it's all “justified” by the on-going stereotypes of “mestizos” and indigenous people because, well, they just looked “dirty,” “diseased” and “lazy” when they are not "stealing" jobs...

 

 

...when these people are doing the "dirty work" in this country. Frankly, when a teacher says anything about Hispanics in schools in anti-CRT states that the right-wing element feels perfectly free to say, they are probably violating the law.  After all, current immigration law is clearly motivated by racism...

 

 

...by ignorant people...

 

...who refuse to admit their culpability for the violence that is happening in Mexico and Central America...

 

...and even those legally in the country and/or are native-born citizens are being left off the boat both by society and the media:

We should be reminded of the laws that banned the teaching of evolution in schools, most famously the 1925 Tennessee law known as the Butler Act, which banned the teaching of “any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.” It led to the famous Scopes Monkey Trial, which the ACLU hoped to test the law when a substitute teacher named John Scopes allowed himself to be the “test” subject. 

Famed attorney Clarence Darrow made star prosecution witness William Jennings Bryan look foolish with his fumbling efforts to explain the logic of creationism, and correctly argued that the law was an unconstitutional violation of the Establishment Clause. But then again, this was about "state's rights," not the rights of the individual.

Although Scopes was found “guilty” of teaching evolution and many states took this “victory” as license to pass similar laws, in 1968 the Supreme Court ruled in Epperson v. Arkansas that “evolution-banning statutes” were “products of fundamentalist sectarian conviction” and thus unconstitutional. Not to be deterred, religious zealots came up with “creation science” to teach as an “alternative” to evolution, but this was also ruled by the Supreme Court to be an unconstitutional promotion of religion in schools in the Edwards v. Aguillard case.

Are anti-CRT laws also unconstitutional? The American Bar Association suggests that they are. In defining CRT as “an analytic framework that illuminates the manner in which racism and inequality are embedded within society and its structures” the “anti-CRT legislative movement targets discussion of racism and bias in the public school system while chilling free speech in violation of the First Amendment.”

It is not coincidental that the anti-CRT laws emerged in the wake of the George Floyd protests; after all, it was hard to justify his killing by a white police officer and could only be “explained” by racism. This in effect gave protesters an “upper hand” in the morality of the case over the “law and order” crowd. Further, Republicans feared that cases like this would also energize voters against those politicians whose racial insensitivities were a matter of public record. 

This in turn led to laws (such as Florida's) banning large-scale protests to minimize publicity of such cases, and then to pass voter suppression laws directly targeting those "energized" Democratic voters, which were given additional support by the far-right Supreme Court’s Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee ruling.

Back in the 1950s during the “Red Scare,” the Smith Act—which made it unlawful to advocate for or organize the overthrow of the U.S. government—was used in California to convict members of the Communist Party of the United States. In taking the case to the Supreme Court, the accused argued that they only advocated “passive” resistance and change within the constitutional framework; they did not advocate an active “overthrow” of the government—such as what we saw on January 6 and from those who did advocate for violent overthrow (you know, Trump).

In 1957, in throwing out the convictions, Justice John Harlan’s majority opinion ruled that simple advocacy and teaching was not prohibited if it was “divorced from any effort to instigate action to that end (the forcible overthrow of the government).” The court decided if teaching was without “evil intent,” a simple abstract doctrine was not to be construed as advocating violence. 

Of course there was nothing “abstract” in the call to violence in the run-up to January 6, when a few Republican lawmakers and far-right activists actively called upon Trump supporters to march on the Capitol and take “action” as Trump himself pressed his allies in Congress to overturn the election (and most in the House did, like the current Speaker).  We are now learning that he was behaving like a rabid soccer fan cheering on the rioters as he was watched the “game” on television. The hypocrisy of the right is mind-numbing.

Anti-CRT laws should be taken to court because they are very likely unconstitutional. The problem, unfortunately, is that with the present makeup of the Supreme Court, what it deems “constitutional” or not is not necessarily what the “framers” wanted despite some of the justices devotion to "originalism," but rather their own cultural biases. The framers certainly did not desire to take away rights or free speech or inhibit an informed populace, as the anti-CRT laws seem designed to do. 

I personally believe that the best way to teach CRT is by not making it “gradable” in primary or high schools, just discussion periods where students can make moral judgments on their own, or not, just to keep "controversy" to a minimum. The past may be the "past," but some "kids" need more "learning" than what they are getting from their Fox News-watching parents. But this would likely go way over the heads of some of these justices.

Packers just couldn't make any "plays" in the second half in loss to Vikings

 

Last Monday night the Vikings “shocked” the 49ers 22-17, with Kirk Cousins throwing close to 400 yards. Going into Green Bay, this was going to be either a “let down” game, or a “confidence booster,” as if they needed one playing this Packer team.

The game started predictably enough, with the Vikings taking a 10-0 lead before the Packers managed to kick a field goal as time ran out in the first half. Jordan Love took a few shots downfield to no avail early, finishing the half with just 70 yards passing. Unfortunately the third quarter did not go according to "script," as this time it was the Vikings who scored two touchdowns—one following a Love interception—to take a 24-3 lead. Not looking good at all, as the Packers had nearly as many penalties as first downs.

Still, it was not all not according to the precedent, as the Packers found themselves on a first-and-goal at the Viking one-yard line, but it took four plays before Love managed to get the ball to Doubs to make it 24-10. But then came the Vikings right back before a couple sacks and a blocked field goal attempt appeared to bring new life to Packers.

But, you know, this is the Jordan Love-led Packers. In the fourth quarter down to the Vikings 10-yard line, it was three straight incomplete passes and a loss on downs. But then Cousins limped off the field with an apparent no-contact ankle injury and in came some guy you never heard of named Jaren Hall who promptly was the subject of a sack/fumble and suddenly the Packers were back in business again.

But this Packer team couldn’t even muster a field goal—that is to say if they preferred not to. The Packers found themselves in another fourth down situation, and despite a good effort running down the field, Love just couldn’t quite make it. Hall actually completed a pass for a first down, and the Packers used their last timeout at the 4:23 mark left in the game. After the Vikings punted away as their offense was now non-existent with Cousins out, it was a matter if the Packers could take advantage of a Vikings defense uncertain if it had enough left in the tank.

Not to worry; this is, after all, a team with Jordan Love at quarterback; this guy is more likely to throw an uncatchable ball into double coverage when he needed to make those good decisions...

 

 

...while missing that wide open receiver:

 

A couple of good throws to Reed and Wicks got the ball down to the Viking 34, but for the third straight possession, it was a loss on downs; Love helped by misfiring on seven of his last 9 passes. So much for “performing” under “pressure” when the opposing quarterback is a back-up who is obligingly handing the ball back to you and daring you to do something with it.

Not much else to say about another awful home loss, 24-10. Again, who knows if things will improve with Love at quarterback. Last year Watson and Doubs were emerging stars; this year Love can’t take advantage of their skills because he just can’t make those accurate throws (Aaron Rodgers tended to just throw away balls rather than chance an interception). Watson and Doubs were targeted 17 times and managed just 7 catches for just 51 yards. Remember when Watson came off the injury list and scored multiple touchdowns in multiple games last year, including one on an end-around? Why are we not seeing that this year? Need we ask?

The Packers of course didn’t run the ball worth a damn, but then again they did better than Vikings, who only averaged 2 yards per attempt. The offensive line wasn’t great, but neither was the Vikings. Fans and commentators were complaining that the Packers were playing too “conservative” in the first half, but my thought on the matter was that Matt LaFleur feels that Love is the kind of quarterback who if you press him too early and not allow him to get in some “practice” throws early in the game, he is prone to making bad throws resulting in interceptions and thus falling behind early, which the Packers typically do anyways. 

As mentioned, Love did throw some “deep” balls early to no avail, and the Vikings took that early lead that they were a good enough team with Cousins at quarterback to expand upon. Of course it might have been a different story if Cousins had missed the third quarter too, but those are the kind of "breaks" this Packer team doesn't need to have if they want to know what kind of quarterback they have; they already have that "easy" schedule to begin with.

The Packers play at home again next week against the Rams and a familiar face in Matthew Stafford, although that is not certain since he apparently suffered a thumb injury against the Cowboys. Two years removed from their Super Bowl win, the Rams have become strictly ordinary at best, and were blown-out today. If Stafford remains on the sidelines with another no-name back-up in his place, this is a game the Packers should win, emphasis on the “should” rather than the “win.” If the Packers lose this game against a back-up, then I think the writing is on the wall for the Love “era.”  

In regard to film at least, "culture" is something that only oldtimers want

 

What exactly do people mean when they talk about “culture”? How people behave? What they believe in? Is it a nation’s “history”? Is it “art,” as in literature, film and music? Or just some undefined “environment” that someone exists in or creates to justify abhorrent or bigoted beliefs?  Or what is "acceptable" within some hypocritical, narrow-minded religious fanaticism?

I’ll just stick to “art,” and specifically the place of film as an increasingly “disposable” form of “culture.” I guess someone’s age has something to do with it, when your knowledge of the past was once your present, which the latest generation only knows what they have been exposed to in the current present. Today’s generation seems to believe that “culture” is more “disposable” than ever, if you read comments about how print books and disc-based media are a “thing of the past” and are being replaced by “Ebooks” or streaming services. 

Perhaps they have a “point”—people are more apt to go to the library not to read books but to use free public Wi-Fi or just as an excuse to get out of the weather.  If they get an inch to watch something, just get a subscription and find whatever they’ve haven’t seen out in the past year; old movies are just "old."

But then again, if you think of yourself as the “cultured” type, you know that the “classics” are never just "old." Unfortunately, they are rarely available at the touch of a button on television; of course you could go to a Russian website that deals in pirated or public domain films from the past, like ok.ru, to find virtually every film that has ever made it to digital format for free. 

But then there is the issue of “quality” and “control,” which is where owning “hard” media comes in. People who actually have large collections of films on “hard” media like video discs naturally consider themselves more “cultured” than people for whom “culture” is just something that they only care about as a few hours or less diversion in their daily lives.

I have read people suggesting that “hard” media is “disposable” too, that video discs “rot” after a few years or decades and become unplayable. While there might be some justification in that belief in regard to Laserdiscs and CDs, DVDs and Blu-ray discs—as long as there are no manufacturing defects—can last a lifetime or longer if people handle and store them like they actually mean something. 

For me, the 10x10 storage unit I rent that is stocked up with video discs constitute the only possessions that mean anything to me, although admittedly when I can’t find a film on any of the 100 or so external hard drives I should have copied it to, it’s a slog to try to find the original disc.

Like for most videophiles, if a story is good, “special effects” and CGI are not important. I look at music today—and “music” is a term that can only be applied in the broadest possible way today—and I hear almost nothing that defined songcraft for thousands of years. For example, orchestration in popular music was a way for “contemporary” musicians to add classical music pretensions to their “art.” 

I’m not particularly into “classical” music, but I do hear the connection between the classical tradition and “pop” music until around the mid 1990s, when the “music” scene was taken over by rap/hip-hop and “pop” music that was nothing more than words with someone trying to shoe-horn in unmelodic and dull arrangements and call them “songs.” 

That wasn’t always the case, of course; I think Katy Perry’s “Firework” and “Teenage Dream” could have found a place in at least the Eighties music scene, while Maroon 5’s “Sugar” sounds like 70s Earth, Wind and Fire.  But those were exceptions to what is “ruling” today.

So I am a fan of cinema because I like films that relied on telling good stories first. Not that I dislike films that are just a “canvas” for CGI or special effects, but that I can appreciate the artistry of older films and actors with real charisma and personality. I mentioned the silent film The Unknown the other day; Lon Chaney was one of the greatest actors in cinema history, and that despite the fact that all but one of his films was made in the silent era. 

And that is our loss, because in his only “talkie” before he died of throat cancer exacerbated by the intake of fake snow—The Unholy Three, a remake of his silent version—it was demonstrated that Chaney had a great future going forward, as his powerful voice was as versatile as his makeup artistry to transform himself into any character, even as an old woman (hence his reputation as “the man of a thousand faces”).

But while there are some people younger than I am who collect films, I notice that on Blu-ray.com people who review films rate their “quality” not necessarily because they like a film, but the quality of the transfer and special features; if they actually think it has “cultural” relevance is not at issue unless the reader thinks it does. 

I was reading an article in The Guardian written by Zach Schonfeld concerning the “death” of “arthouse” films that even the French are giving up on in a world where the current breed of moviegoer is only interested in the instant gratification that mass CGI-enhancement is used to mask the lack of adult-level story-telling. He suggests that it is not that filmmakers don’t want to make films that tell a story, but that movie-goers today don’t want to see films that make them “think” too much.

Schonfeld writes that

In 2018, the film-maker Paul Schrader made some controversial remarks about how the business has changed since his 1970s heyday, when he wrote Taxi Driver and Raging Bull.  “There are people who talk about the American cinema of the 70s as some halcyon period,” Schrader said at a Bafta Screenwriters event in London. “There’s probably, in fact, more talented film-makers today than there was in the 70s. What there was in the 70s was better audiences.” The director added, “We now have audiences that don’t take movies seriously, so it’s hard to make a serious movie for them.”

Schonfeld notes that “Schrader’s words seem like a grim portent of an era when art films and character-driven dramas struggle to find an audience in cinemas. Though much of the blame lies with the major studios and entertainment companies, who’ve all but eliminated risk and originality from theatrical releases, the pandemic also got viewers hooked on streaming instead of movie-going.”

Sure, there are still people out there who look for “meaning” in films, but that is more likely to be those who want their own prejudices, narcissism and politics confirmed, and not to be “disturbed” by real life or the gray areas in between morality and ethics. Schonfeld goes on to say that

The present state of moviegoing in the States should serve as a warning. Try visiting a multiplex outside major markets like New York or Los Angeles, and corporate-moulded franchise movies are often your only option. That’s a problem not because such movies are unanimously bad (though often they are), but because, as Martin Scorsese argued in 2019, they are “perfect products manufactured for immediate consumption”, lacking in “the unifying vision of an individual artist”. What’s gone is the excitement, the risk, of seeing something new. The cinema becomes a theme park rather than a site of discovery.

Mentioning Scorsese is ironic, given his most recent film, Killers of the Flower Moon, tells the story of the murder of Osage Indians by whites for their oil “headrights” in the 1920s. In its opening weekend it finished second in the box office. What did filmgoers prefer to see—again? Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour film, which I’m sure she is taking in a healthy cut of the $160 million gross as of last week by conning millions with her main “selling point": her Aryan-Nordic appearance and the “MeToo” politics of most of her songs. We see where this country is at when the narcissistic “music” of a narcissist who speaks to other narcissists still tops of the box office ahead a movie that actually has a serious story to tell.

So much for “culture” of the “artistic” kind. Old geezers like Scorsese  only have so much time left to make films that actually matter to those who appreciate real art as part of the "culture," and what will follow is only what an increasingly shallow and narcissistic “audience” is willing to subject itself to. So much for "culture," then.