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How a Conservative Activist Invented the Conflict Over Critical Race Theory


How a Conservative Activist Invented the Conflict Over Critical Race Theory  

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Author: TheCrow   Date: 6/24/2021 11:04:36 AM  +3/-1  

"Critical Race Theory" is an academic study of racism in America. It is not divisive nor does it advance divisive ideas. Systemic racism exists in America. How else would you explain the difference in the average African American family's net worth being 10% of the average white American family's?

How else would you explain the fact that African American males are incarcerated at five time the rate of white American males?

The first step in resolving an issue is recognizing it.

How a Conservative Activist Invented the Conflict Over Critical Race Theory

To Christopher Rufo, a term for a school of legal scholarship looked like the perfect weapon.

June 18, 2021
An illustrated portrait of Christopher Rufo against a blue background
Illustration by Angie Wang

Remote work turned out to be advantageous for people looking to leak information to reporters. Instructions that once might have been given in conversation now often had to be written down and beamed from one home office to another. Holding a large meeting on Zoom often required e-mailing supporting notes and materials—more documents to leak. Before the pandemic, if you thought that an anti-racism seminar at your workplace had gone awry, you had to be both brave and sneaky to record it. At home, it was so much easier. Zoom allowed you to record and take screenshots, and if you were worried that such actions could be traced you could use your cell phone, or your spouse’s cell phone, or your friend’s. Institutions that had previously seemed impenetrable have been pried open: Amazon, the I.R.S., the U.S. Treasury. But some less obviously tectonic leaks have had a more direct political effect, as was the case in July, 2020, when an employee of the city of Seattle documented an anti-bias training session and sent the evidence to a journalist named Christopher F. Rufo, who read it and recognized a political opportunity.

Rufo, thirty-six, was at once an unconventional and a savvy choice for the leaker to select. Raised by Italian immigrants in Sacramento and educated at Georgetown, Rufo had spent his twenties and early thirties working as a documentary filmmaker, largely overseas, making touristic projects such as “Roughing It: Mongolia,” and “Diamond in the Dunes,” about a joint Uyghur-Han baseball team in the Chinese province of Xinjiang. In 2015, Rufo began work on a film for PBS that traced the experience of poverty in three American cities, and in the course of filming Rufo became convinced that poverty was not something that could be alleviated with a policy lever but was deeply embedded in “social, familial, even psychological” dynamics, and his politics became more explicitly conservative. Returning home to Seattle, where his wife worked for Microsoft, Rufo got a small grant from a regional, conservative think tank to report on homelessness, and then ran an unsuccessful campaign for city council, in 2018. His work so outraged Seattle’s homelessness activists that, during his election campaign, someone plastered his photo and home address on utility poles around his neighborhood. When Rufo received the anti-bias documents from the city of Seattle, he knew how to spot political kindling. These days, “I’m a brawler,” Rufo told me cheerfully.


 
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