That stat in a vacuum
It tends to be hard to pin down what people are talking about when they talk about Critical Race Theory. Is it that nonsense from Robin DiAngelo (who is white) claiming that a whole list of good things like reading and thinking carefully are white? Or is it people patiently reminding us that mass incarceration isn’t just some random accident?
Here’s a specific current example: consider the fact that a disproportionate amount of people from Black and Latinx communities are being impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. According to the CDC, Black and Latinx people are twice as likely die from the virus as white people. A person considering that stat in a vacuum might assume that genetic or biological factors are to blame—a false conclusion that insinuates that there is something inherently wrong with Black and Latinx bodies. However, a person applying a critical race theory framework to this issue would also ask how historical racism—which manifests today in everything from access to clean air to treatment by medical professionals—might be influencing this statistic, and would thus arrive at a much more complete and nuanced explanation.
If that’s all it is…it’s not so much a theory as pointing out the fucking obvious. Yes of course African Americans have had poverty forced on them for generations by a million things like redlining and all-white labor unions and barriers to promotion (Michelle Obama’s father couldn’t get out of the damn boiler room because those other jobs weren’t for the likes of him) and crap schools and crap city planning and on and on. If that’s all it is why doesn’t everyone subscribe to it?
Those who find themselves on the second-lowest rung of life’s ladder can be encouraged to be grateful they are not on the lowest.
Not that you don’t know this already, but to acknowledge this means admitting that things are not just fine the way they are, that the US is not a colourblind, post-racial meritocracy, and that the way things pan out with “winners” and “losers” is fundamentally rigged. The truth being denied is that those who are On Top are not there because they deserve to be, but because they cheated. There’s an entire political party devoted to hiding and denying the fucking obvious, and they are busy rigging the system further, to prevent the other party leveling the playing field.
Word has it that the Latinx communities don’t care for the word “Latinx,” which was selected and bestowed upon them because it’s better.
Like everything else, CRT has a reasonable, valuable version and an extreme or counterproductive version, which sneers at the values of the Enlightenment because they were created to justify slavery. My understanding is that in schools and colleges where a lot of emphasis is placed on race and calling out racism — the micro aggressions being somehow worse than the obvious aggressions — people don’t get happier, interracial friendships do not form, scholarship does not thrive, and things do not improve.
I’ve noticed that in many critiques, CRT is linked to TRA, philosophically and in practice.
Yeah, but no. What’s gone on here – and I think it’s a fairly common mistake – is a slide from inference to implication or (in this case) insinuation.
Why does a disease apparently hit some populations harder than others? It might be that biological explanations can be quickly eliminated; but they aren’t wild, and they don’t imply or insinuate anything as morally loaded as the idea that there is something inherently wrong with the more vulnerable.
For example: imagine that the genetic lottery has thrown up a gene that makes carriers that bit more resistant to a certain pathogen. And imagine that that gene happens to be more common in population A than B. People from population B are therefore that bit more likely to succumb to that pathogen. One might infer from that a claim about inherent inferiority among Bs: but it’s not – or at least, it doesn’t have to be – implied. Nature doesn’t work like that.
It’s perplexing – and counterproductive – that this kind of highly moralised inference gets quite so much traction. If a claim about biology in this context is false, then it’s false, and we try to solve the problem by another route. But “worse at resisting this virus”, even if true, wouldn’t imply “worse all told”. That should be pretty obvious. The listener has to do the work to add that; but complaining about insinuations from bare hypotheses concerning reality hides that fact.
This is just Stats 101. You’ve found a pattern? Good on you. Now don’t jump straight to an explanation.
Sounds a bit like “choosie-choice” third wave, navel-gazing, boutique, liberal “feminism” vs. radical, second wave feminism.
See above. That might also help explain the additional charges of “colonialism,” and “white feminism” to the witchcraft accusations leveled against gender critical feminists. A wider brush applies more tar. And het, if you’re already riding the coat-tails of the gay rights movement, why not also try to leverage the civil rights movement as well? Whether sympathizers and “shallow travellers” are aware that at some point, everything is subsumed under the T is another question. I saw many (or at least more than I would have expected) “BLACK TRANS LIVES MATTER” signs amongst protests last year. How many of the Black people murdered by police in recent years were trans? I’m just a white guy from Canada, but it looked a lot like a distracting co-optation to me.
I fully reject the idea that Enlightenment values were created to justify slavery… societies had progressed to the point where they were starting to feel bad about doing it so you could certainly use some of the values that way, but abolition and anti-racism are very much descended from the Enlightenment. It’s a view that’s utter tosh just like damn near everything in the realm of hopeless critical theory.
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Ophelia:
As far as I can tell, that muddle is a quasi-intentional motte & bailey. We get into the same morass with terms like gender ideology and woke. Under this fog of confusion, when we try to talk about something serious, like the social contagion of gender ideology leading to ROGD in teens, we are met with resistance that denies that gender ideology is a meaningful term or maintains that it is just a right wing slur. I’ve seen this happen quite often with woke. I just saw it happen yesterday with critical social justice, saying that CSJ is a bogeyman entirely invented in conservative imagination. As though people like DiAngelo don’t explicitly refer to their project as critical social justice.
Bah. Humbug!
What a Maroon:
So you admit that you’re a bigot.
Sastra:
I’m pretty sure that the reasonable portion of CRT is merely plagiarized from actual sources of knowledge production. Kind of like how Christians will point to “thou shalt not steal” and claim religion as the source of morality.
Blood Knight:
And a perfect example of CT’s plagiarism, stealing the good parts and the labels from what came before and claiming it all as its own.
YNnB:
As a pedantic matter of logic, “X is not a meritocracy; s is in the set of those who are on top” doesn’t entail “s doesn’t deserve to be on top”. It does entail “s is on top does not imply that s deserves to be on top”.
CRT authors tend to adopt an easy-to-defeat concept of meritocracy rather than confront the notion’s strongest formulation(s). Here’s DiAngelo:
Her rendition of the concept is that in a meritocracy, a person is in a position if-and-only-if that person deserves to be in that position. Consider how similar this is to the way that genderists talk about the concept of biological sex, often asserting that the concept of binary sex requires that there be a singular distinguishing variable with no ambiguity. In the absence of that univariate explanation, sex is a spectrum or socially constructed arbitrarium. Likewise, DiAngelo asserts that meritocracy requires an iff relation between achivement and merit or effort. Such a relation is simply implausible in any possible world, even a world in which literally no one is or has been racist or in any way a bad actor.
It makes me want to tear my hair out by the roots.
Some of them were hijacked to justify slavery, but that’s a rather different thing.