MSNBC's All In discusses Fox News' “critical race theory” obsession
Chris Hayes: “The entire right-wing media machinery has become obsessed, whipping up a moral panic almost entirely among white people”
Published
Citation From the June 15, 2021, edition of MSNBC's All in with Chris Hayes
CHRIS HAYES (HOST): All right, I'm about to show you a chart and it is not a chart of some massive breakout of COVID somewhere, though it does feature exponential growth. This graph represents the number of times the words “critical race theory" were spoken on Fox News over the last few months: 1,300 times, growing every day. Look at that. Critical race theory, as a sort of technical term, is basically a set of analytic tools that academics in some fields use, starting in law, for studying systematic racism in our society. The right has rendered the term meaningless through over-deployment making it into a culture war rallying cry. Since February, month over month, the mentions of the term have more than doubled. The entire right-wing media machinery has become obsessed, whipping up a moral panic almost entirely among white people, that their children are being taught toxic truths about America`s long history of racial oppression hierarchy. Now, the history of race in the U.S. is obviously an extremely complicated subject. All kinds of scholarly historical debates about the proper emphasis, stuff I tend to get into myself. But this is really not a debate about all that. Instead, we are seeing just a classic mobilization of right-wing backlash politics that's really meant to punish and intimidate teachers and educators, administrators, school board members who would deign to discuss racism and white supremacy.