Ugh, you're going to make me read it again?!😁

Just kidding. My reply to Paul wasn't a general critique of Tim's work, as I said, I've only heard of him recently, and the one Paul linked was only the second article of his that I've every read, but I'll run through a few key criticisms.

First of all, right in the second paragraph he claims that "conservatives" want to "ban anti-racist curriculum in schools" which is demonstrably false (sadly it lays the foundation for everything that follows). The bills don't ban anti-racist teaching at all, in fact, some of them actively encourage it. They just stipulate that that education shouldn't teach certain obviously racist ideas, such as that one race is superior to another etc.

I've yet to have anybody explain what the problem with this is, other than that "the right want it so it must be bad".

Then he simply asserts things like this without any evidence:

"The right wishes to paper over injustice in the nation’s past or present, thereby helping to rationalize whatever inequities continue to face us."

and this:

"By downplaying racism as an ongoing force, they hope students will shrug at disproportionate police violence against unarmed Black people, unequal housing access, or disparities in income and occupational status, concluding that such things are somehow the fault of those victimized by them."

There are a whole bunch of serious allegations here, directed at the nameless, faceless "right", and yet he doesn't even try to defend them. He just asserts them so that we know who the bad guys are, and moves on, assuring us that "of course the conservatives would deny this, but never trying to give an honest representation of the opposing position. It's incredibly lazy.

Next he invokes abortion, anti-vax/anti-mask people and Satan himself as justification for suggesting that we should teach children whatever the hell we feel like. Presumably because if they're already being screwed up, what's the harm in making things a little worse?

A little later, as I mentioned to Paul, he goes all the way back to 1786 to dredge up the worst examples of racism he can find without in any way acknowledging how little they have to do with the present day. I'm especially annoyed by this one because it's such a lazy, transparent trick. Of course, talking about racist history is important. But making no attempt to contextualise it is a hack move.

Of course contextualising it makes it harder to make his next argument which is essentially that because very young black children experienced racism 250 years ago, it's fine to teach today's kids about violence and bigotry that I'd agree they aren't ready to grapple with. This is just a ridiculous, callous leap of reasoning.

If you want to teach very young children about racism, that's great, but there are many more valuable ways to do so than talking about injustice which they're obviously to young contextualise. Jane Elliott's "brown eyes, blue eyes" experiment always springs to mind. One of my teachers did a version of it with my class when I was little, and it stuck with me right through to today. I was probably about six or seven.

Tim's whole article is built on the premise that "the right" is this collective of unalloyed racist evil, and everything they say should be interpreted in the worst, most disingenuous, most bigoted light possible. This is childish reasoning at best. And worse, I suspect he's actually smart enough to realise that.

But worst of all, speaking as a writer, is that the article doesn't *say* anything. At least nothing deeper than; "the right is racist and evil" and "it's fine to teach children ideas they're not ready for because some of them are exposed to other ideas that they're not ready for." If you don't already completely agree with him, there's nothing to take away from it, because he's shamelessly strawmanned the opposing argument.

So yeah, this ended up much longer than I planned, but those are my main problems with it 😅