Not merely the product of individual bias
If it has the word “critical” in it, it must be dangerous, is that the idea?
Across the United States, state legislatures are showing a newfound interest in — and aversion to — critical race theory, or CRT, an academic movement that systematically considers how even seemingly neutral laws, regulations and social norms can have different impacts on particular racial and ethnic groups. It examines how legislatures at times target racial minorities for adverse treatment — such as recent voter suppression laws in Arizona, Georgia and Iowa — and, at other times, are simply indifferent to how new laws will impact those outside the majority.
And this should be stamped out because…why, exactly?
CRT originated in U.S. law schools in the 1970s and remains well established and widely accepted there. But in recent weeks, some Republican-dominated state legislatures have adopted laws that ban the teaching of critical race theory in public schools. Some, such as the laws in Idaho and Oklahoma, even restrict the use of CRT in public colleges and universities. Other states, including Georgia and Utah, are actively considering similar legislation or administrative action. A bill has even been introduced in the U.S. House (where the Democratic majority presumably will reject it).
I can easily believe there’s some work that Identifies As CRT that is shite, but that doesn’t mean all CRT is shite, and it seems most unlikely that it is. Given US history it seems all but impossible that it is.
Education Week has an explainer on what CRT is:
Critical race theory is an academic concept that is more than 40 years old. The core idea is that racism is a social construct, and that it is not merely the product of individual bias or prejudice, but also something embedded in legal systems and policies.
So the opponents think…what? That racism is not embedded in legal systems and policies [in the US]? How could that possibly be in a country built on slavery? Race-based slavery?
I suppose that is what they think. That was then, this is now, racism is ancient history. We had the Civil War, and Martin Luther King, and…and Martin Luther King and what more do these people want? Meanwhile the prison stats sit on a shelf somewhere.
Fundamentally, though, the disagreement springs from different conceptions of racism. CRT thus puts an emphasis on outcomes, not merely on individuals’ own beliefs, and it calls on these outcomes to be examined and rectified. Among lawyers, teachers, policymakers, and the general public, there are many disagreements about how precisely to do those things, and to what extent race should be explicitly appealed to or referred to in the process.
In other words the people angry about CRT are focusing on “I am not a racist!!!” when the point is that it’s not about you, it’s about what racism has embedded in our laws and practices so deeply that we don’t even see it.
I just read the same article.
I don’t know how they plan to enforce any of those laws that they pass like this, unless they have “political officers” stationed in the classrooms in the Universities. I am quite sure that professors in the University of Oklahoma will be happy to test the law, which as the article states is illegal.
Many of these laws are driven by the same issues that James Loewen wrote about in “Lies My Teacher Told Me,” that in order to maintain the glorification of American Exceptionalism, education should ignore any negative traits of the United States. Gotta teach that nationalist pride or people will turn communist, you know.
Jo Phoenix referred to the following when she was on the Savage MInds podcast last week. Apparently it’s a problem in the UK as well as the us:
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2021/05/the-real-cancel-culture-on-campus
Education as a commodity doesn’t have any room for academic freedom.
Universities overseen by people with business degrees. Fabulous.
Kevin Drum, formerly of Mother Jones magazine, had a blog post recently where he was pondering what problems conservatives have with CRT. In the blog post he gave a bullet list that seemed to me a good first approximation definition (numbers are mine):
1. Race is a key part of identity in the United States.
2. Our nation was built on the back of slavery.
3. Systemic racism always has been, and still is, embedded in American society.
4, White people are oppressors who continue to play a role in perpetuating racism.
5. Black people suffer unequal treatment in a wide variety of ways, including school discipline, criminal justice, employment, housing, and so forth.
6. White people should be aware of the privilege and benefits they enjoy solely due to their skin color.
7. There are “Black ways of knowing,” based on lived experience, that are different from science, logic, reason, and other white constructs, but just as valid.
8. Students should be taught about racism and oppression from an early age.
Pluckrose and Lindsay discuss CRT in Cynical Theories. They see much less positive in it than I do, in a large part because they disagree with the concept of system racism (bullet 3). The largest negative, though, is in bullet 7, from postmodern epistemology: that there are “Black ways of knowing” based on lived experiences, and that science (and with it, logic and reason) is white and colonial and not to be trusted. This, to me, is the single biggest problem with CRT.
I don’t have the impression that conservative critics care about “Black ways of knowing”, though. I think they are, as phrased in the OP, focusing on “I’m not a racist!!!” (bullets 4 and 6). I can’t recall seeing any indication that school curricula deal with “Black ways of knowing”, either; just system racism, ongoing racism, and so on. (Maybe there are such curricula, but I haven’t seen indication, nor any complaints about that aspect.)
My understanding was that Critical Race Theory today was mostly the kind of garbage that you posted about here, not the very real stuff about how Black people were brought to this country as slaves, and kept in slave-like conditions for years after the abolition of slavery, and still today suffer discrimination and racism, and that because of all they they are at a huge disadvantage when trying to do just about anything at all in America.
GW, from what I’ve seen it has been hijacked in much the same way gender studies has been hijacked, by woke youth who want to break things, and who have imbued all non-Western cultures with a veneer of perfection, harmony, and equality that doesn’t really do justice to the complex, multi-layered, messy, chaotic, and dynamic cultures that are as much a part of the non-western countries as they are of western countries. It’s mostly just that their layers and their dynamics are different.
Meanwhile, the students receive the “benefit” of not having to study the hard stuff, like science and math, because those are imperialist, colonialist concepts that must not be taught. When I saw the course catalog at University of Nebraska Lincoln a couple of years ago, I was horrified at the idiocy that passed for science classes. No wonder students bypass our science classes; they wait until they get to the university and can take fluff courses.
A lot of the Republican backlash is no doubt rooted in racism, both of the active (“keep the mud races down”) and ignorant (“things are already totally egalitarian”) varieties. The thing is, finding CRT that is not shite is rather difficult when critical race theorists themselves define CRT as shite. Sure, you can find things they say that aren’t insane, much as you can find things said by the religious or by TRAs that aren’t insane, but the whole is rotten. You know how religious apologists and TRAs tend to leave out the objectionable bits, such as death for apostasy mastectomies for 12-year-olds, when talking to sympathetic press? Same thing with proponents of CRT.
Sackbut @ 4 –
I’m guessing there are reasonable versions of that along with not so reasonable. It seems obviously true (or at least likely) that black people know more about what it’s like to be black in the US than most white people do. It seems far from true that that translates to a different way of knowing. I read a lot on different ways of knowing for early B&W and Why Truth Matters (and indeed for my own interest). Experience is different from systematic inquiry, but it’s not some weird mystical Other Path.
Lots of academic fields have branches or sub-fields that are questionable or have gone off the rails at times. These things tend to correct themselves over time.
The last people I trust to do the “correcting” are members of state legislatures.
I’ve heard it argued elsewhere (John McWhorter) that systematic/systemic racism aren’t words that are up to the task. Namely racism set up the current system and can modify it in different ways but it doesn’t meaningfully exist as a real thing.
Example: remove the racism from policing; does this fundamentally solve anything? No.
Police are still scared of everything, are armed, unaccountable to no one, and attract bullying arseholes. It’s just racism that sometimes informs who they target.
Well it’s not as if that’s a minor aspect though, is it.
And surely there’s a lot of intertwining? I.e. racism, or maybe more precisely the history of racism & slavery & Jim Crow in America, shaped the institution of policing? Cops were the enforcers of Jim Crow, let’s not forget.
Is the “western colonialist bad, non-western cultures good,” aspect of current discourse a more modern version of the “Noble Savage” narrative?
Well like most things, policing is messy. It’s just that racism is one of the many things wrong with it.
Also, @maddog1129:
It is absolutely the noble savage trope and the whole white woke cadre are white saviours. There’s no getting away from that.
Among other things, yes.
Nullius @ 7, can you illustrate (give an example of) “the whole is rotten”? I know very little about it apart from rumor, and I’m suspicious of the rumors.
Ophelia @ 14:
No problem, such an attitude of suspicion is generally rather prudent. People like DiAngelo and Kendi are not aberrations or perversions of CRT. They’re extensions of a framework that traces right back to Derrick Bell at CRT’s beginning. I’ll try to sketch some of the essentials. Theorists really do only have a few basic principles and rhetorical moves. Once you familiarize yourself with them, it’s like a perversely easy game.
I suppose the first thing to note would be that CRT’s philosophical lineage is critical theory. I mean, it’s in the name, but it’s very easy to read it as the critical in “critical thinking” rather than in “critical theory”. As such, it inherits all the good and ill from its progenitor. Per the wiki entry on Derrick Bell, whose work informed CRT’s genesis, “Bell and other legal scholars began using the phrase ‘critical race theory’ (CRT) in the 1970s as a takeoff on ‘critical legal theory’, a branch of legal scholarship that challenges the validity of concepts such as rationality, objective truth, and judicial neutrality. Critical legal theory was itself a takeoff on critical theory, a philosophical framework with roots in Marxist thought.” It is important not to gloss over the concepts against which CLT, and by inheritance CRT, is set in opposition. CLT critiques the very concept of rationality—not whether anyone ever achieves perfect rationality, but whether the concept per se is problematic. That is, it advances the notion that rationality is not and should not be part of legal intentionality. Similarly, it opposes the ideas that objective truth should be a relevant concept in law and that the judiciary should strive for neutrality.
Critical race theory opposes even more ideas most of us would consider fundamental. According to early theorist Richard Delgado, CRT has no truck with “equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.” To clarify, he means that the ideas that the law should treat people equally, that it is possible to use reason as a legal tool, that rational inquiry is to be preferred over emotional response, and that constitutional law should be neutral are all problematic and in need of radical deconstruction. Opposition to equal treatment generates the CRT rejection of individualism and rights-based solutions to, well, anything.
I guess I shouldn’t let Marx off the hook here, either. CRT and, to the best of my understanding, the rest of the critical theories, inherit the idea of false consciousness (derived) from Marxist theory. This is the idea that citizens exist in a state of delusion. The proles can’t see that they are oppressed; the bourgeoisie can’t see that they are oppressors. Marx theorized that a subset of the proletariat would “awaken” to their oppression and spontaneously organize a revolution against their overlords. Applied to racism, the idea yields minorities who cannot see that they are oppressed and whites who cannot see that they are oppressors.
So when we see someone say, “Objectivity itself is the reification of white male thought,” that is directly derivable from early CLT/CRT critiques of objective truth and rationality. What society constructs as objectivity is a creation of white males and is patterned after that which white males value. The only reason that you might think that objective truth exists or matters is therefore white colonialization of your consciousness. You’ve internalized your oppression and exist in a state of false consciousness.
When Kendi says that it’s impossible for a white person to be not-racist, he’s drawing on Bell’s own notion of interest convergence. That is, white people only do things that converge with their interests. Since it is in white people’s interest to maintain their dominance over other races, those interests and associated activities are perforce racist. When Kendi supports removing anti-discrimination language from a state constitution or says that what we need is an unaccountable ministry of diversity (NewSpeak: MiniDiv), he’s merely continuing the assault on the notion of equal treatment before the law.
When DiAngelo goes on about white fragility, that’s again false consciousness and opposition to rationality. On the CRT view, reasoning and rationality that reach conclusions other than those approved by CRT support the status quo. Supporting the status quo is equivalent to supporting racist structures of dominance and oppression. Therefore, all such reason is automatically rejected. This is not a bug. It’s a feature. White people are “fragile” because their false consciousness renders them so, reacting unfavorably to being labeled racist. They respond with argument, because reason and rationality are tools of white supremacy. They become upset, hurt, and angry because their dominance is partly supported by their inability to see their own dominance; undermining that support causes emotional instability.
Like, it’s not difficult to take the basic tenets and go places we really, really shouldn’t, and to do so entirely validly.
Thanks, Nullius, that’s more or less the impression I got from the limited reading I’ve done.
Whenever I read “CRT”, though, my brain screams “Cathode Ray Tube”. Can’t help it.
Nullius, thanks for #16. It has been interesting and alarming to learn about postmodernism and its descendants, and I got a lot out of Cynical Theories. I mentioned that I had more disagreement with Cynical Theories regarding CRT than most other sections of the book, but much was eye-opening. I read and very much enjoyed DiAngelo’s What Does It Mean To Be White? some years ago, but I couldn’t make it through White Fragility, partly due to the nature of the book, and partly due to changes in my own perspectives in recent years.
The article you link to, Critical Race Theory and the ‘Hyper-White’ Jew, is absolutely astonishing. How awful. That’s an excellent example of “go[ing] places we really, really shouldn’t”.
Thanks Nullius. I’m all too familiar with the framework but didn’t realize CRT was part of it. Bit of a Trojan horse then. Blargh.
This whole thing (especially after reading that article) reminds me of an article I read that said one college (on the west coast, I don’t remember where or which) was sending their faculty to training for the remote learning pandemic adjustments. One thing they were told is to make sure your wedding picture was not showing on your camera, because that would be recognized by gay students as a statement that you are against same sex marriage and are homophobic. My first response was WTF? So were my second and third responses.
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latsot @ 17: Same. I’ve been searching for high quality CRT monitors on craigslist and whatnot (Forgive us, o Computing Gods! We knew not what we had!) so I’m kinda primed to read the initialism one way.
Sackbut @ 18: Once you see how the magic trick works, it’s hard to unsee, ya know?
Ophelia @ 19: You’re welcome, and I was pretty sure you were. (You recommended Theory’s Empire and Higher Superstition to me, after all.) And Trojan horse is exactly the right metaphor. Looks like a gift on the outside, but …
iknklast @ 20: Like the UK hate crime laws, microaggressions depend entirely on other people’s perceptions. If someone perceives something as a microaggression based in racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, or whatever, then it is a microaggression based in racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, or whatever. I’m not even exaggerating.