408 times on Fox News
Judd Legum on that critical theory that everyone’s talking about.
Between now and November 2022, you will be hearing a lot about Critical Race Theory (CRT). On Saturday night, former President Trump bashed CRT during his first rally since leaving the White House. Last week, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) introduced the “END CRT Act.” In the first two weeks of June, CRT was mentioned 408 times on Fox News.
Andrew Sullivan is obsessed with it.
It’s all because Republicans see it (see their distortions of it) as election magic.
Trump, Cruz, Bannon, and many other Republicans say that CRT is an insidious force that is being imposed in schools, corporations, and the government. This is how Cruz describes CRT in his new bill.
By teaching that certain individuals, by virtue of inherent characteristics, are inherently flawed, critical race theory contradicts the basic principle upon which the United States was founded that all men and women are created equal.
This is a false description of CRT. (It is also an inaccurate historical description of the Declaration of Independence, which states “all men are created equal.” And it was referring only to white men.)
So what’s a not-false description?
Critical Race Theory emerged from a group of legal scholars trying to answer a question: Why, after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 created formal legal equality between racial groups, does substantive racial inequality persist?
Let’s explore how this works with a concrete example. The United States has the largest prison population in the world. But Black Americans are incarcerated at far greater rates than whites. As of 2018, the latest data available, Blacks represented 12% of the general population and 33% of the prison population. Conversely, whites represent 63% of the general population and 30% of the prison population.
I bet we can think of reasons before reading further. There’s more surveillance of black people, more stop and frisk, more arresting. There are different sentencing patterns. There are differences in who can get better lawyers. Stuff like that.
One explanation could be that Black Americans commit more crime. The data, however, does not fully support such a conclusion. About a quarter of the prison population is serving time for drug crimes and “[b]lack and white Americans sell and use drugs at similar rates.” Nevertheless, Blacks are 2.7 times more likely to be arrested, and more than 6 times more likely to be incarcerated, for drug-related offenses than whites.
CRT scholars look at these statistics as evidence of structural racism. Specifically, they seek to identify “laws, policies, and procedures that function to produce racial inequality.”
And that’s not a wicked thing to do.
I think that’s pretty clear, isn’t it? Law should be more impartial than that, yeah?
The purpose of CRT is to understand the structural causes of racial inequality — large and small — in order to dismantle them and create a fairer society. CRT scholars use similar analysis to explain how the law creates racial inequality in health, education, and other areas.
Is there a good reason we shouldn’t do that?
It’s not being taught in schools.
Anyone with a basic understanding of CRT understands that it is not being taught in K-12 schools. The reason is simple: The concepts underlying CRT are generally beyond the scope of undergraduate education, much less elementary school students. A website set up by CRT critics to document “the negative impact Critical Race Training has on education” does not even cover K-12 curriculum because it’s “more difficult to track.”
And then there’s the “downstream” claim.
Some critics of CRT acknowledge that CRT itself is not being taught in schools but students are being taught concepts derived from CRT. Pundit Andrew Sullivan, for example, says that students are being taught “a whole new epistemology that is directly downstream of academic critical theory.” For example, Sullivan claims, schools are teaching “white kids to internalize their complicity in evil.”
Oh “downstream of”…but that could mean anything. Go far enough downstream and you can end up in a different country altogether. Go downstream on the Mississippi and the landscape changes a lot.
CRT, by contrast, is about how structures — not individuals — create racial inequality and injustice.
This is what I keep saying. It’s not about individual psychology, and it’s not the same as the annoying HR “trainings” a lot of people are exposed to.
CRT scholars reject the idea that inequalities between races can be explained through genetics…But CRT scholars also reject the idea that you can fix these inequalities by ignoring race.
Too nuanced for the Andrew Sullivans of the world, I guess.
Any rational human being (i.e., not an elected Republican official or a mouthpiece for the right like Silly Sully) cannot really deny the arguments of CRT.
However, I am not sure this is true:
The purpose of CRT is to understand the structural causes of racial inequality — large and small — in order to dismantle them and create a fairer society. CRT scholars use similar analysis to explain how the law creates racial inequality in health, education, and other areas.
Is this really the goal? Is there a goal? Some of the more radical writers would argue this is not possible. Can “original sin” be overcome? THAT is where I am slightly sympathetic to more nuanced conservative critiques (obviously not the bozos you are quoting). Some theorists call into question the very concept of a “fairer society”. At the same time, I wonder if the radicals are right: can we overcome the original sin? Maybe not?
If I were a gambler I’d put money on Republicans being right about it being election magic. As we’ve all become all too aware substance and rational arguments don’t amount to much. The DiAngelo/Kendi version of CRT is what Cruz refers to and that’s the version people that haven’t been paying attention will see.
Quite, given that blacks were not regarded as fully human by a significant number of the white population, certainly not as ‘people’ and very certainly not as equals. Women of course were variously regarded as delicate incapable flowers, slovens, harridans, cloven bodied witches, or preferably invisible; but again most definitely not equals to any (white) man.
Also, the naked hypocrisy of anyone as openly racist as Trump; or pretty much any politician who has ever blamed (largely black) poor communities for being responsible for their problems with poverty, crime and drug addiction, ill health and lack of education, is truly staggering when they then try and hide behind ‘talking about race is racist’.
Staggering but utterly predictable; the two go together.
There is also an article in ‘The Atlantic’ on the subject. It is responsible & worth reading.
Les sigh.
Nope, hold it right there. It’s called Critical Race Theory for a reason. It’s a Critical Theory. That means its purpose is, according to the founders of that school of thought, expressly not to understand but instead to critique and change. This is in contrast with what they called “Traditional Theory”, which does seek to understand, such as biology, chemistry, mathematics, logic, etc. The whole point of Critical Theory is that it improves understanding only insofar as it can point to something and say, “That’s bad.” Since this normative judgement is, again explicitly, not restrained by the definitionally morally deficient “understanding” provided by Traditional Theory, it is free to contradict the determinations of Traditional Theory. When someone says that CRT seeks to understand, that’s either ignorance or mendacity.
Good golly, Miss Molly. These articles remind me of nothing so much as the apologia from putatively sophisticated theologians. Like, “You see, religion is a language that allows us to explore the most significant questions of existence.” It’s seriously frustrating.
I confess to finding, Nullius, little to grow exercised about in the link you provide to ‘Critical Theory’. It speaks of The Frankfurt School, Kant, and of a liberal thinker like Habermas. It also refers to Karl Marx’s polemical assertion in ‘Theses on Feuerbach’ that ‘The philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.’ I would say two things: first, thought about political and social structures has, pace Marx, never been a view taken studiously from the outside, as though thinkers about these matters were dispassionately studying, say, an ant colony. Read Plato, read Aristotle, Confucius, Lao-tse, Kautilya, Sir Thomas Moore, Locke, Hume, Burke, Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu (who had such an influence on the founding fathers of the USA), Karl Popper… Political thought is not a natural science, to be compared with physics or chemistry, and it never has been. This is not to say that techniques derived from the sciences and from mathematics (statistical analysis, say) are not useful in what are called the political & social sciences – Thomas Piketty’s ‘Capital’ comes to mind, as does Mark Moffett’s ‘The Human Swarm’, in which some interesting and enlightening comparisons are made between animal (including insect) societies and human societies. Nor to say that political thinkers such as the ones you appear to dislike renounce objectivity. The fact is that when one is talking about politics or social structures one is necessarily implicated in them, which is not to say that all works of political thought are or should be mere calls to arms, nor to say that their calls for change or calls for maintaining the status quo are not grounded in an understanding of reality.
The second matter is that one can learn from works of political thought with which one profoundly disagrees. I disagree with Marx, while appreciating many of his insights, just as I disagree with Hegel, against whom Marx wrote, again while appreciating, and being stimulated by, some of his insights. I have also read works by that nasty old Nazi, Carl Schmitt, in which I find, though I loathe Schmitt’s politics, many things of interest (as did that very good liberal historian Reinhart Kosselleck); and so with Michael Oakeshott and other conservative thinkers whose work I have read with interest.
And a third thing is this: it seems to me to be a complete exaggeration to assert that thinkers like Marx, Horkheimer, Adorno et al were not seeking understanding as well as change. Had their calls for change not been grounded in some sort of understanding of what their societies and what the politics of their time were like, nobody would have listened to them and we should not bother to read them still now.
[…] a comment by Tim Harris on 408 times on Fox […]
A friend posted a link to this essay by Matthew Yglesias that I thought was very perceptive. He argues that conservatives are not really up in arms about CRT or the 1619 Project, but that the conflict began earlier and amounts to the argument that the conservative movement is the bad guys in American history. Yglesias has some useful things to say about the history of teaching American history, the shift from class focus to race focus, and the shift in perception among the American Left.
Yes, Yglesias is perceptive. This latest spat about CRT is one in a long line of spats, mostly manufactured, as this one is. I was glad to see him say that Martin Luther King ‘was a socialist who argued for a radical redistribution of material resources’.
In case Nullius in Verba or anyone else should get a wrong idea of my politics, I would say that I regard myself as a social democrat in the Karl Polanyi mould, but am interested in a variety of intelligent political thought, including that with which I disagree, since I believe it is important to understand one’s adversaries and to recognise both their insights as well as where one thinks they go wrong.
The great Judith Shklar certainly did not regard thinking about politics as being, as a desideratum, a branch of the natural sciences, and in my experience, natural scientists can be just as foolish about political matters as anyone else. One might consider that great scientist J.B.S.Haldane’s praise for Stalin, or, on a much lesser level, Jerry Coyne’s descent into reciting curmudgeonly right-wing talking-points.
I should add, regarding Jerry Coyne, that he is an intelligent man, and I find myself in agreement with at least some of what he says.
And one further thought (sorry, Nullius); I have been, among other things (being rather a Jack of all trades) a critic of contemporary poetry & drama, and I can assure you that you cannot criticise or ‘critique’ anything without understanding something of it. ‘Critique’ and ‘understanding’ are simply not mutually exclusive, and they cannot be.
Science, too, proceeds through the ‘critique’ of theories, or, as some waggish scientist pointed out, through the retirement or death of elderly scientists in powerful positions, whose disappearance from the scene allows other views and criticisms to be to be aired and judged. If you criticise a particular scientific theory, and wish to be taken seriously, you should at least display some understanding of that theory.
Re “you cannot criticise or ‘critique’ anything without understanding something of it”:
Not in the least true. One only has to read much internet discourse to realize that people criticize all sorts of things without understanding them. The criticisms may not be compelling or logical, but they exist. Goodness, there are tons and tons of trans-advocate “criticisms” of gender-critical views that are utter nonsense, just to pick an example. They are fabrications, strawmen, dismissal before the fact, motivated reasoning.
My understanding of the complaints about Critical Theory is that it does these kinds of things; dismissing before the fact, motivated reasoning, and so on. It’s possible that the often-cited epistemology problems are not built into Theory but into poor use of it, but I see these kinds of problems in many discussions about gender and race and social justice, and it seems reasonable to attribute the problems at least in part to Theory, based on what I’ve read (including an unabashedly anti-Theory book that tried to be fair nonetheless).
Heck, even the criticism of Theory itself might be a case of critiquing it without understanding something of it. And Critical Race Theory; how many people “out there” have been criticizing and “critiquing” CRT without understanding something of it?
Too late I see the addendum: “… If you criticise a particular scientific theory, and wish to be taken seriously…”
That helps, thanks. However, taken seriously by whom? Lots of people take things seriously without the things being rigorous or logical or supported by evidence. When part of the shtick is that things like “reason” and “evidence” are biased and anyone who is using them is a colonialist oppressor or some such, then anything goes.
And even then, assuming a particular normative interpretation, is being taken seriously truly to be the primary correctness criterion for a critique? Not that it put forward a logically valid argument from sound premises, but rather that, for whatever reason, the audience adopt a particular attitude toward it?
I think we are just playing with two possible meanings of ‘criticism’: 1) finding fault; 2) an analytic evaluation of something, whether favourable or unfavourable or simply drawing attention to what you consider problems or possible problems in some otherwise illuminating thesis. I am speaking of the latter, as I should have thought to be clear, and not the banging out of ignorant opinions, however ‘seriously’ held. In the first case, too, a person generally has reasons, which may, if stated, be valid or invalid, or there is some other cause, such as that of the fault-finder finding enjoyment in carping at others. In the second case, the critic is putting forth a case, with reasons, so that the case being made may be judged by others. In no way am I proposing that ‘being taken seriously’ is a ‘primary criterion for correctness’, and fail to see how my words could be taken that way. One may take something seriously, as I take Marxism seriously, while disagreeing with major aspects of Marx’s theses. Again, I don’t think that playing about with two possible senses of ‘serious’ is helpful. I am sure that anti-evolutionists are ‘serious’ in their opinions, but I see no good reasons for taking their opinions seriously.
Being taken