i'll pull my tags out for ease of rb (by I believe OP request? correct me if that's not you, OP):
#once again an academic term was lifted and used as a slogan#i really wish we'd stop lifting academic terms for use in the larger layman's discourse#they're not really meant for that#it's why crenshaw in specific has so many of her terms turned into nonsense by political discourse#she coined them to be as neutrally descriptive as possible - yk#the point of academic terms#but unless you read the theory surrounding them#they're not that intuitive#defund the police / CRT / intersectionality / etc#they don't make good slogans#bc they weren't designed to *be* slogans#a lot of times intuiting the definition will actually give you the opposite of the true definition#or at least a wildly incorrect picture of the actual definition/theory
I've said this before, but it bears repeating: academic terms make bad slogans, and the use of those academic terms without revision by activists is doing a lot of neo-cons' PR work for them.
Every time I explain what CRT or defund the police - or whatever buzzword is on Fox News that day - actually is, I inevitably get exactly what the interviewer on that Vox article got: namely, no objection. But two different things are going on with your Joe Schmoe's reaction to the term vs. the actual policy/theory.
The most basic thing that happens is you bring up a thing - I'm going to use defund the police as the example - and the person you're talking to knows nothing of the theory, nothing of the academic background, and they try and figure out what you're talking about simply from context and wording. Defund the police fails this slogan test because it's very unclear in its policy prescriptions.
(Of course, that's the point of academic terms, in the sense that you're usually building off of each other's work, and you have to break down what is going on before you can rebuild a policy framework from the ground up. Academics are also not policymakers, and so many of them don't actually go about recommending any policy anyway. So defund the police, academically, works precisely because it encompasses a broad body of work regarding the role of police budgets and the American police state, not because it's one definitive idea or policy.)
This declarification makes it hard to use as an advocacy slogan. Nobody understands, intuitively, what you want to have happen. So without any direction, they're going to compare and contrast it with what they already know of the subject. Police reform has been around for decades, so if there's a new slogan, they'll assume it's different and so it isn't that. Most people, because they aren't political or aren't policywonks or aren't academics, don't have much frame of reference for police policy changes outside of police reform - which is a broad category of policy proposals as it is - so they're going to assume that the only thing left is police abolition. (Which, defunding and abolition aren't the same thing, nor are they even the same area of academic theory, per se, but again, bad slogans.)
The thing is, many proponents of defund the police weren't police abolitionists, so those people came off as liars to the anti-Defund crowd. (And I think it's important to understand how often leftys come across as liars to their political opponents, even Dems. It's like 70% of the time, mostly for these sorts of reasons.) The actual police abolitionists were having a separate problem: they were being entirely ignored and used as political tools by basically every single political group that they weren't a part of, including other leftists. So their ideas were completely swallowed up.
This is a data void, where a topic has no previous frame of reference for anyone, and you can jump on it as a political operative and fill it with whatever nonsense you want. Basically all academic terms are susceptible to this, systemic racial critique especially.
The second type of response to throwing out an academic term as a slogan are the people that know what you're talking about - your Ben Shapiros (who graduated Harvard Law and absolutely 100% knows what CRT and intersectionality is, and even admits in the Vox article that the academic literature is fine and good) - but knows that nobody else knows what you're talking about. Christopher Rufo in the data void video I linked (a Carlos Maza video on CRT) literally admitted that they do this to terms on purpose. (Tweet is shown in the video.)
The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think "critical race theory." We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.
The left should not be facilitating this whatsoever. Activists and layman alike should be avoiding the academic terms as slogans. We should be actually developing slogans for activist purposes so as to protect the integrity of academic terms, and also to avoid really easy misunderstandings with people that don't have extensive theoretical backgrounds.
CRT and defund the police and every other lifted academic term is going the way of socialism - in that regular Joes you talk to will agree with your ideas up until you say the word socialism and now they act like you've strung their dog up the flagpole and are advocating to dash every baby against the rocks of the Atlantic.
I had a law professor in undergrad who was teaching the history of social work, and when I pointed out that her definition of socialism was incorrect (she was trying to argue that socialism was a welfare state), immediately moved on like I was trying to push a political agenda instead of pointing out her factual misunderstanding of what socialism was. (And she was trying to defend socialism - or really welfare states, but.)
The right will always attempt to do this to us, but we can't be facilitating it. A big part of the problem right now is the misuse of academic terms and the dearth of real political slogans.
