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Denis M.'s avatar

The co-opting (or "decodification") of CRT is one in a line of terms for which meanings have been changed in order to weaponize them in teh culture wars.

"Fake news" used to mean social media posts disguised as news articles but now means anything we disagree with (or as Charlie says..."I'm old enough to remember when..."). "RINO" was once used to describe Republicans who do not subscribe to traditional conservative values but now means any Republican who do not kiss the ring. We are seeing it in real time on Twitter with "doxxing" which apparently now means any location information about a person (or other information they do not want shared) instead of revealing their personal information for purposes of harassment.

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Travis's avatar

I will never understand the right's issues with failing to acknowledge things like systemic racism, systemic classism, and the way that both of these things plus inherited wealth poison the concept of "meritocracy" that this country is supposedly so proud of. If people are excluded from equality of opportunity at universities via a systemic paywall that excludes everyone below a certain class, then you don't have a true meritocracy, you have a faux-meritocracy derived from a skewed sampling pool that excluded a lot of people who aren't there simply because they don't have enough familial wealth to compete.

Either way, once the best of our faux-meritocracy pool makes it in the new economy, they only ever marry across class at scale and concentrate their wealth into their kids so that their kids can grow up and do the same exact thing as their parents some day. Our country's best and brightest aren't doing shit to lift their fellow citizens up, they're just co-mingling with each other and "living their best lives" as they raise the cost of living on everyone else while pretending that racism and classism don't exist anymore. THAT is why systemic racism and systemic classism still exist to such a degree in this country: the rich don't want competition for their kids, they want to maintain their advantage *for* their kids. They would rather keep a sick system that their kids will benefit from in place rather than fixing the system while diminishing the advantage their kids have via familial wealth.

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