Historian Annette Gordon-Reed: Jan. 6 was a "turning point" in American history

[Nevilledog]

Link to tweet

https://www.salon.com/2021/07/12/historian-annette-gordon-reed-jan-6-was-a-turning-point-in-american-history/

In the past six months, since the events of Jan. 6, I have been meditating a great deal on William Faulkner's wisdom and warning: "The past is never dead. It's not even past."

American history is a puzzle, full of contradictions and complexity. But some people, instead of studying this history so as to make better decisions in the present and future, choose to take a hammer to the puzzle. They smash it and then hammer the pieces back together so as to fit their self-serving lies and distortions.

Consider the moral panic created by the white right against "critical race theory." Of course, as deployed by right-wing propagandists, "critical race theory" possesses little if any resemblance to the epistemological framework of the same name. For the white right it's a term that means everything and nothing, a convenient vessel into which they can pour white rage, white fear, white victimology and white supremacy in an ongoing attack on multiracial American democracy.

Writing at the Atlantic, historian Ibram X. Kendi summarizes this:

The United States is not in the midst of a "culture war" over race and racism. The animating force of our current conflict is not our differing values, beliefs, moral codes, or practices. The American people aren't divided. The American people are being divided.

Republican operatives have buried the actual definition of critical race theory: "a way of looking at law's role platforming, facilitating, producing, and even insulating racial inequality in our country," as the law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, who helped coin the term, recently defined it. Instead, the attacks on critical race theory are based on made-up definitions and descriptors. …

*snip*

[uponit7771]

1. THANK YOU !!! Too many people are still downplaying 1/6 in their minds