RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/09/proof_that_modern_academic_leftism_is_insanely_stupid.html

I quickly realized as I shepherded my children through public school and college that leftists in education are incredibly uninformed to the point of abject stupidity. My kids became used to the fact that I would become almost incoherent with rage when I read through illiterate and factually inaccurate lessons or assignments from their teachers. However, I have never come across anyone as spectacularly uninformed as Dr. Linda ManyGuns who works at Mount Royal University, in Alberta, Canada. Dr. ManyGuns has declared war on oppressive capital letters.

What you must appreciate before getting into Dr. ManyGuns’ truly astonishing dive into stupidity is that she really is a faculty member at Mount Royal University, in Calgary, a public university with a $99 million (Canadian) endowment and over 14,000 students. Just this April, Mount Royal University proudly announced that she was its new “associate vice-president of indigenization and decolonization,” responsible for “providing vision, strategy, leadership and direction to advance indigenization and decolonization commitments.”

Dr. ManyGuns is a woman with a long, successful academic career as both a student and educator. In addition to the obvious qualification of being a “Blackfoot woman” and an elder for “the Buffalo Women’s Society and part of the Beaver Bundle Society,”

ManyGuns has a Bachelor of Arts from St. Thomas University, a Master’s from Carleton University, a law degree from University of Ottawa and a doctorate from Trent University. Her academic papers and projects are always on Indigenous subjects and informed by traditional knowledge.

For 11 years, ManyGuns was a professor in the University of Lethbridge’s Department of Indigenous Studies. She understands the importance of Indigenous students succeeding in their education and while serving as chair, updated the 45-year-old curriculum. Previously, as a waitress, high steel construction worker and chef, ManyGuns experienced discrimination and lateral violence but refuses to let it define her.

https://capx.co/why-we-are-reclaiming-history-from-the-distortions-of-critical-race-theory/

Writing history is about critical assessment, not the imposition of a political agenda
Critical Race Theory is a dangerously simplistic way of explaining both the past and the present 
CRT is lightweight, imprecise and totally unconcerned with an authoritative account of the past

In 1984 George Orwell wrote, ‘Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.’  The idea of controlling the past can be traced back long before the emergence of Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany. It is the backdrop to boastful inscriptions on the walls of ancient Egyptian temples at Luxor.

Today this idea has taken a new form. A way of reading the past is being imposed in universities, schools and wider society that is justified not by its historical accuracy but by its political message. The adherents of so-called Critical Race Theory (CRT) have no sense that the task of the historian is to expound the evidence, rather than to indulge in moralising jargon. They have no sense that it is important to engage in argument, rather than to impose one’s views. They have no sense that the dogma they are spreading is not taken seriously by very many historians. Or rather, it does need to be taken seriously by its opponents, for it is a dangerously simplistic way of explaining both the past and the present.

History Reclaimed is a new website that challenges the increasingly dominant dogma of the Theorists, and demands proper debate about the distorted view of history that lies at the heart of the new thinking. History Reclaimed supports the art of writing history as it has been written ever since the time of Herodotus in ancient Greece: collecting the evidence and assessing it before spinning any general theories about the nature of human development.

Interestingly, Karl Marx understood perfectly well the need to accumulate large amounts of data before moulding the arguments of Das Kapital. The days he spent in the imposing Reading Room of the British Museum were given over to serious study, as even those of us who reject his conclusions have to concede. By comparison, CRT is lightweight, imprecise in its use of terms such as ‘capitalism’, ‘imperialism’ and ‘colonialism’, and much more concerned with righting supposed wrongs in the past than in writing authoritatively about the experience of our ancestors.

At the core of the ideas that we are challenging is the notion that history has been moulded by the racism of white people towards black people. Racism is seen as an invention of white people in western Europe who sought to create worldwide empires through the brutal exploitation of the labour of black Africans. These Africans were transported in vast numbers across the Atlantic from the early sixteenth century right up to the nineteenth century, and no one can deny that their treatment was at best callous and at worst murderous. It is possible that as many as 12.5 million slaves were imported to the Americas, the largest number towards the sugar plantations of Brazil, others towards similar plantations producing sugar, cotton and tobacco in the Caribbean islands and in what became the United States.

In this interpretation, the oppression of African slaves was not merely based on pseudo-scientific ideas that different races possess different levels of intelligence. It is also argued that the Industrial Revolution that took off in 18th-century Britain was funded by the profits of the sugar industry, which depended on slave labour. The fact that there were more significant sources of capital in the agricultural transformations taking place in Britain is conveniently ignored. So too is the fact that the main source of slaves was African kingdoms that willingly sold their war captives.