Interesting 3 yr Delta
Poll: The real reason Republicans are so riled up about 'critical race theory'
Conservatives claim that schools are indoctrinating students in “critical race theory.” Liberals argue that conservatives don’t even know what critical race theory is — and that if they did, they’d realize teachers aren’t actually exposing kids to it.
But a new Yahoo News/YouGov poll suggests that the roiling culture war over so-called CRT isn’t about whether today’s schoolchildren are suddenly probing the complexities of an academic approach to race that originated among legal scholars in the mid-1970s.
Rather, the clash over CRT — aside from whatever the term now connotes in the public imagination — appears to be a supercharged spinoff of a deeper dispute between conservatives and pretty much every other group in the United States.
According to the poll, the right largely believes that racism is personal — the product of one individual discriminating against another. The rest of the country mostly agrees that racism is systemic — a force that continues to harm people of color, regardless of how isolated individuals treat them.
And therein lies the disagreement over what kids should learn in school.
The survey of 1,592 U.S. adults, which was conducted from June 22 to 24, set out to determine how closely the public’s opinion of the term “critical race theory” aligns with a central idea behind it. To do that, Yahoo News and YouGov asked respondents whether they’d “heard of critical race theory” — and followed up with the ones who had heard of it by asking if “critical race theory is something students should be exposed to in school.”
It turns out only about half of Americans (52 percent) are even familiar with the term "critical race theory," according to the poll, and political engagement is likely to account for that exposure. As Time magazine reported in a recent cover story, “conservative advocacy groups, legal organizations and state legislatures” have “mounted a campaign to weaponize” the term because they believe that “fighting it will be a winning electoral message.”
As a result, awareness is much higher among white Americans who identify as conservative (71 percent) or liberal (70 percent) than it is among white moderates (48 percent), African Americans (42 percent) or Latino Americans (39 percent).
Given the sharply polarized, cable-news-driven nature of the current feud, it’s little surprise, then, that the people who say they’re familiar with the term also tend to say they don’t want it in schools. Overall, 49 percent of those who have heard of CRT are against “exposing” students to it; 37 percent favor exposure.
Some groups disagree, of course, including Democrats (by a 76 percent to 9 percent margin), Black Americans (62 percent to 23 percent) and 18- to 29-year-olds (53 percent to 23 percent). But within most demographics, those who’ve heard of CRT — including people 45 or older as well as independents (who oppose exposing students to it by a 55 percent to 29 percent margin) — do not.
The interesting thing is what happens — and, more to the point, what doesn’t happen — when you dissociate one of CRT’s main tenets from the hot-button term.
To do that, Yahoo News and YouGov also asked — before ever mentioning “critical race theory,” so as not to influence the answers — whether respondents agreed or disagreed with the concept that “racism is not merely the product of individual bias or prejudice, but also something embedded in legal systems and policies.” We then asked if that concept is “something students should be exposed to in schools.”
That particular wording, it’s worth noting, wasn’t chosen at random. Here’s how the Florida Department of Education’s new policy prohibiting “the teaching of Critical Race Theory” in public schools — one of dozens of similar measures introduced in Republican-controlled states this spring, and one of at least six that have been enacted — defines the term: “the theory that racism is not merely the product of prejudice, but that racism is embedded in American society and its legal systems.”
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https://www.yahoo.com/news/poll-the-real-reason-republicans-are-so-riled-up-about-critical-race-theory-090015052.html