Banning books because you think the authors of the banned books advocate for banning books. That's a good one.

I'm also going to borrow "CriticalRaceTheory!" for later use, thank you.

That said, actual academic literature from left-leaning critical-such-and-such fields can be truly weird and can sometimes seem extreme. Of course, that's part of the exercise: take a weird idea and run with it as far as possible as an interesting and hopefully enlightening way of looking at the world. And sometimes the literature seems jarring because it forces you to contend with things that you would rather not contend with. That's good and useful, but it also makes the literature very easy to misinterpret.

For example, consider "Whose culture has capital? A critical race theory discussion of community cultural wealth" by Tara Yosso from 2005: https://www.iirp.edu/images/pdf/AvNtDE_EDUC_701_-_Yossos_Com...

The premise of the article is that Communities of Color are not deficient in cultural wealth, and are in fact rich in it. Great! I can't imagine anyone seriously disagreeing with their point, but they cite a lot of literature from the 90s that does disagree with it. So I guess articles like this is necessary, in order to counteract something that (to me) seems like an unfair and bleak assertion about a very large and heterogeneous group of people.

> CRT challenges White privilege and refutes the claims that educational institutions make toward objectivity, meritocracy, color-blindness, race neutrality and equal opportunity. CRT challenges notions of ‘neutral’ research or ‘objective’ researchers and exposes deficit-informed research that silences, ignores and distorts epistemologies of People of Color (Delgado Bernal, 1998; Ladson-Billings, 2000). CRT argues that these traditional claims act as a camouflage for the self-interest, power, and privilege of dominant groups in US society (Bell, 1987; Calmore, 1992; Solórzano, 1997).

This is a pretty heavy claim to make! I'm not even going to argue against it, because it's probably been true historically. However it's very very easy to interpret this as an assertion that objectivity is inherently racist, rather than a claim that objectivity has historically been used as cover for institutionalized racism. The latter is a sobering good point, while the former is an extreme view of the world that I think most people would disagree with. Having not read the material the author cites, I am not sure which version the author is claiming and I am not interested in guessing.

Or consider the claim directly above that one:

> The intercentricity of race and racism with other forms of subordination. CRT starts from the premise that race and racism are central, endemic, permanent and a fundamental part of defining and explaining how US society functions (Bell, 1992; Russell, 1992). CRT acknowledges the inextricable layers of racialized subordination based on gender, class, immigration status, surname, phenotype, accent and sexuality (Crenshaw, 1989, 1993; Valdes et al., 2002).

Wow, permanent? That's also a heavy claim to make, and one that people are sure to bristle at.

As far as I can tell from the small amount of CRT source literature that I've read, if we take the permanent and funtamental attributes seriously, then through a CRT lens my whole post is probably just racist and oppressive.