Critical race theory

[Zardnaar]

Thanks for the links. Society’s woes continue to be economical in nature. Placing race in front of that is hiding the real issue - wealth inequality. A useful distraction working in favour of the ruling classes.

Pretty much this.

Also academics tend to be a bit out of touch.

They've all got cushy government/institute type jobs. Most not from working class backgrounds so their theories often get ridiculed out in the real world.

 

[Senethro]

Seeing as criticism of this critical race theory thing has been deemed lacking around here, I'm going to throw a bit of oil on the thread. And a match.

For all those who dislike this woke wave, there's plenty of ammunition to be had against it this site. In the spirit of Churchill's "If Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favourable reference to the devil"... or to be more contemporary in the spirit of intersectionality I'm reaching out to the conservatives and lending a hand to oppose the new censors

Start with Critical Race Theory: A Two-page Overview - hopefully the second part with be more useful.

Check the useful Translations form the Wonkish - this is useful for debate. The Critical Race Theory entry (I added some comments to the quoted text, bracketed):



And read The Rise of the Woke Cultural Revolution.

If you want to bead a dead horse, revisit Gamergate.

The come here and happily argue over those arcane terms knowing your references with quotations from the ivory-tower woke opportunists who created them, ready to turn their own theory on them. Because, inevitably, a theory of cynicism towards all power devours its own theorists as they grasp power - briefly.

There, I hope this will contribute to lift the discussion

I don't get what use any of these are. The writing is decent quality, but the content is all "Look at these dumb kids and their 16 genders. Aren't they dumb haha not like you and me." Big on sneer, but he is evidently expecting the reader to know why these things are bad already, because he never actually says why. (I say "he", I assume its mostly James Lindsay)

And, as usual, most importantly, it does not offer an alternative explanation or an alternative hope. They just want you to believe nothing and do nothing and maintain the status quo.

 

[Senethro]

Shower thoughts: I wonder if there is going to be a large scale break between (social) conservatism and capitalism in America. Already accusations and boycotts get thrown at Good American Companies which genuflect at the altar of the hated idpol. Are they ever going to make the leap that it was capitalism that hollowed out their societies values and replaced them with Make Money/Consume Product because capitalism is a false friend to everyone?

They need to be able to describe an alternative future because "No, it is the children who are wrong." only gets you so far.

 

[Samson]

I don't get what use any of these are. The writing is decent quality, but the content is all "Look at these dumb kids and their 16 genders. Aren't they dumb haha not like you and me." Big on sneer, but he is evidently expecting the reader to know why these things are bad already, because he never actually says why. (I say "he", I assume its mostly James Lindsay)

And, as usual, most importantly, it does not offer an alternative explanation or an alternative hope. They just want you to believe nothing and do nothing and maintain the status quo.

Quite. They are very into referencing some statements, but the contentious ones they just make and do not attempt to justify. Just in the first "proper" paragraph:

• [CRT] is not interested in progress
  
• [CRT] favors identity politics
• That positions critical race Theory as explicitly anti-Western and, in the narrower context in which it arose and mostly applies, anti-American

You're welcome.
But please check the critic from the left against this wokism also. This is what I actually can fully subscribe, the denunciation of this as race reductionism:

Also, WTH is going on with this. Race reductionism does not even have a wikipedia entry, reductionism's wiki page does not have the word "race" in it. Searching it you ONLY get critiques, is this a world record attempt for the biggest straw man ever?

 

[GenMarshall]

Shower thoughts: I wonder if there is going to be a large scale break between (social) conservatism and capitalism in America. Already accusations and boycotts get thrown at Good American Companies which genuflect at the altar of the hated idpol. Are they ever going to make the leap that it was capitalism that hollowed out their societies values and replaced them with Make Money/Consume Product because capitalism is a false friend to everyone?

That’s likely not going to happen since they’re not going to abandon capitalism for socialism or communism (The US is largely economically center or center-right). There’s already a separation but only with capitalism; normal capitalism and woke capitalism.

 

[El_Machinae]

I'd say there's a general groundswell of resentment against the amount of power that America's capitalist structure has shuttled upwards. Amazon's power, YouTube's power, etc. is really generating a resentment. There's an opportunity to point out that this upwards migration of social power was utterly predicted and that it's only government institutions that can reverse or slow this upwards trend.

 

[Cutlass]

Shower thoughts: I wonder if there is going to be a large scale break between (social) conservatism and capitalism in America. Already accusations and boycotts get thrown at Good American Companies which genuflect at the altar of the hated idpol. Are they ever going to make the leap that it was capitalism that hollowed out their societies values and replaced them with Make Money/Consume Product because capitalism is a false friend to everyone?

They need to be able to describe an alternative future because "No, it is the children who are wrong." only gets you so far.

The Republican Party is the party of corporations by corporations, and for corporations. And the corporations have very little tolerance for anything which interferes with that. But at the same time, the corporate ownership of the Republican party knows that they can't get enough Republicans elected without the racists and the failed christians. So they've been supporting those groups in elections. But sometimes they lost control. Now in the long run corporations are not going to allow the racists and the failed christians to cost them too much money, or too many elections. And that will drive a wedge into the Republican party, since the racists and the failed christians are dominant there now.

That’s likely not going to happen since they’re not going to abandon capitalism for socialism or communism (The US is largely economically center or center-right). There’s already a separation but only with capitalism; normal capitalism and woke capitalism.

Supporting Democrats means there is an absolute 0 chance of socialism or communism taking hold in the US.

 

[Gorbles]

They've all got cushy government/institute type jobs. Most not from working class backgrounds so their theories often get ridiculed out in the real world.

How on earth do you go from "they have cushy jobs" to "they're therefore not from working class backgrounds"?

Academics can come from all sorts of backgrounds. Shows how much you know

 

[Lexicus]

The feeling I was getting from the Vox articles was that the authors didn't particularly care about the intellectual backing of Critical Race Theory, they knew the highlights and they could add 'scientific approval' to their churnalism. The articles I've read in the Atlantic that touch on elements of Critical Race Theory suggest that several aspects of it are contentious enough people can reasonably disagree over it.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/dehumanizing-condescension-white-fragility/614146/

The phrase "critical race theory" doesn't even appear in that article, and for good reason: that Robin DeAngelo garbage has absolutely nothing to do with critical race theory.

 

[bernie14]

There once was a black guy named Bell,
Who stories of aliens he'd tell.
Crit theory!...Yo momma!
And then came Obama,
Poor Derrick rests squarely in hell.

 

[Farm Boy]

Shower thoughts: I wonder if there is going to be a large scale break between (social) conservatism and capitalism in America. Already accusations and boycotts get thrown at Good American Companies which genuflect at the altar of the hated idpol. Are they ever going to make the leap that it was capitalism that hollowed out their societies values and replaced them with Make Money/Consume Product because capitalism is a false friend to everyone?

They need to be able to describe an alternative future because "No, it is the children who are wrong." only gets you so far.

As if capitalism is the hallowing of simple and shallow evil as The Theme. You don't need Scrooge to tell you this tale. You can watch it unfold in Sodom, or you could take a great leap forward in time.

 

[innonimatu]

Seeing if someone wants to discuss this interesting opinion piece about the stuff. The essence of the critique:

As critical race theory developed, such counter-critical tendencies became more pronounced. Instead of noting that institutions have advanced racist agendas under the cover of universalism, and attempting to correct this, some race theorists started to enter a Schmittian universe in which institutional neutrality is not just unrealised but impossible, and the only task is to direct institutions towards your racial ends and against your enemies. And meanwhile, others strayed further into the reification of race.
[...]
The argument for whiteness-as-property is basically a series of analogies – property owners are entitled to the ‘use and enjoyment’ of their property, and white people have the ‘use and enjoyment’ of certain privileges conferred by their race; property is something to which the owner has exclusive right of use, and whiteness is formed ‘by the exclusion of others deemed to be not white’… Which is a bit like saying that a dog is really a type of metrical poetry, since they both have feet. (You could also quibble: if we’re going to be structuralists here, isn’t every category based on a differential relation to all other categories?) Besides, for a radical theory this is grounded in a strangely liberal, Lockean, non-critical account of property. Here, property is simply a relation between a person and an object – one ‘has’ whiteness. Meanwhile, the leftist view, which approaches property as a relation between people, is mostly ignored.
[...]
The real theoretical weakness of CRT is something far more damaging, and it’s arguably a legacy of its origin in critical legal studies. The mostly-white law school gang didn’t see the law as an expression of unjust power, but as a site in its production; similarly, when the critical race theorists tried to understand why non-white people were less likely to be involved in CLS conferences, they weren’t particularly interested in explanations that ran along the lines of well, black people are more likely to be impoverished, and impoverished people are less likely to become prominent legal theorists. That kind of analysis was dismissed as vulgar Marxism: instead, the obvious conclusion was that the CLS conference was itself engaged in the production of racism.
[...]
Critical race theory began by decrying the lack of a theory that responded to the direct needs of ordinary non-white people and offered a positively articulated programme for change. Its initial promise, per Richard Delgado (UCLA), was ‘deep discontent with liberalism, a system of civil rights litigation and activism, faith in the legal system, and hope for progress.’ On these criteria, the project has failed. It has jettisoned some of the better aspects of liberalism while retaining the worst. It began by defending the hard-won civil rights of ethnic minorities against a slightly sneering critique of rights-discourse, but soon switched to trashing those same freedoms. Its leading theorists have ended up abandoning liberation and insisting that social change is impossible. The main remedies they propose are affirmative action – which, as both its defenders and its detractors would have to admit, ultimately does far more to affect the ethnic makeup of law schools than to radically restructure society at large – and hate-crime legislation, which penalises expressions of individual prejudice without really striking against systemic racism. While CRT tends to totemically invoke the suffering of non-white people outside academia and the professions, in the end it has very little to offer them.
[...]
Critical race theory has turned into an umbrella term for every kind of new discursive orthodoxy around race: white privilege, white fragility, unconscious bias, intersectionality…[...] But I simply don’t accept that CRT is the source of all our present neurosis around race, or that the weird gestural politics of the twenty-first century were dreamed up in their entirety by a bunch of lawyers.[...]
To adopt the vulgar Marxist position: these incidents are only an expression of something far more fundamental within the structure of society. The problem is not bad ideas, but an unjust world. If you want to understand why people are upset, and why that upset expresses itself in unproductive ways, it’s useless to play around with intellectual genealogies; you have to go to the actual source, to the empirical study of the social. Obviously, conservatives don’t want to spend too much time thinking about actual social conditions; this is why the moral panic suits them fine. A panic means they’re under no obligation to engage with CRT as a theory; what they’ve developed is just a fancier way of railing against wokeness. (For what it’s worth, I think wokeness is actually a much better name for this thing: it makes clear that what we’re facing is not really a cohesive ideology, but a cluster of postures and affects.)
[...]
even great thinkers, even those who aim for liberation, can end up reproducing, in an inverted form, the worst and most repressive aspects of their age. Ultimately, I think critical race theory does the same thing; it is neither critical nor radical, but a capitulation to unfreedom.[...]

 

[Lexicus]

Seeing if someone wants to discuss this interesting opinion piece about the stuff. The essence of the critique:

This essay makes the good point here that many of the "anti-woke" forget:

As I write, seven US states have passed laws banning critical race theory. Politicians and pundits are lining up to denounce it in broadly illiterate terms; CRT is the font of everything evil, a threat to all liberal values. These people are not really referring to the works of Bell, Crenshaw, Delgado, etc (which they have not read), but something much more amorphous; attitudes more than ideas, a set of gestures, a certain tone. Critical race theory has turned into an umbrella term for every kind of new discursive orthodoxy around race: white privilege, white fragility, unconscious bias, intersectionality… Of course this stuff is in the schools; who wouldn’t want their children to be aware of all the important new trends? I’ve written about some of these affects before; I find most of them stupid and deeply unhelpful. And as I’ve outlined, there are theoretical failures in CRT that do pose problems for anti-racist activism. But I simply don’t accept that CRT is the source of all our present neurosis around race, or that the weird gestural politics of the twenty-first century were dreamed up in their entirety by a bunch of lawyers.

It’s true that a lot of concepts like privilege or implicit bias appear within the corpus of CRT texts, but so what? These days, they also appear in geology. Aside from intersectionality, which was first outlined in the Stanford Law Review, these are not specifically legal theories – and many of them significantly predate CRT. Go back to the primal scene: those early struggle sessions at the critical legal studies conferences are basically identical to what’s now happening within major media outlets and public institutions. But this was before critical race theory had constituted itself as a distinct approach or body of work. To adopt the vulgar Marxist position: these incidents are only an expression of something far more fundamental within the structure of society. The problem is not bad ideas, but an unjust world. If you want to understand why people are upset, and why that upset expresses itself in unproductive ways, it’s useless to play around with intellectual genealogies; you have to go to the actual source, to the empirical study of the social.

 

[Senethro]

phwoar. I could go for some vulgar marxism

 

[aelf]

This essay makes the good point here that many of the "anti-woke" forget:

But, hey, if it aligns with his agenda, I'm sure he's very onboard with censorship and ignorance even though he decries both constantly.

 

[Bestbank Tiger]

That’s likely not going to happen since they’re not going to abandon capitalism for socialism or communism (The US is largely economically center or center-right). There’s already a separation but only with capitalism; normal capitalism and woke capitalism.

The Democrats have turned into just another corporate warmonger party. In order to keep people from demanding anything in their own economic interests, they have to use social issues to divide and conquer. But the Republicans already have the God and country lane so the Democrats opt for wokeism.

The corporations are taking a similar course. Nike launched its Kaepernick ad right when they were hit with a metoo scandal. (And they're the world's most notorious exploiter of child slave labor.) But launch that ad and ignorant sheep think they're sticking it to the Man by buying Nike. Meanwhile the Man is laughing all the way to the bank.

Rinse and repeat with other global corporations.

 

[Bestbank Tiger]

That’s likely not going to happen since they’re not going to abandon capitalism for socialism or communism (The US is largely economically center or center-right). There’s already a separation but only with capitalism; normal capitalism and woke capitalism.

I'm not so sure about that. Even solid red states vote for a higher minimum wage if it's on the ballot. Louisiana has the TOPS program for college tuition. A recent Reuters poll shows that even a slight majority of Republican voters support M4A: https://www.truthdig.com/articles/even-a-majority-of-republicans-support-medicare-for-all-poll/

Might be more accurate to say the political class is economically center to far right and the general public is center left.

 

[Zardnaar]

The Democrats have turned into just another corporate warmonger party. In order to keep people from demanding anything in their own economic interests, they have to use social issues to divide and conquer. But the Republicans already have the God and country lane so the Democrats opt for wokeism.

The corporations are taking a similar course. Nike launched its Kaepernick ad right when they were hit with a metoo scandal. (And they're the world's most notorious exploiter of child slave labor.) But launch that ad and ignorant sheep think they're sticking it to the Man by buying Nike. Meanwhile the Man is laughing all the way to the bank.

Rinse and repeat with other global corporations.

Pretty much.

 

[Verbose]

Shower thoughts: I wonder if there is going to be a large scale break between (social) conservatism and capitalism in America. Already accusations and boycotts get thrown at Good American Companies which genuflect at the altar of the hated idpol. Are they ever going to make the leap that it was capitalism that hollowed out their societies values and replaced them with Make Money/Consume Product because capitalism is a false friend to everyone?

They need to be able to describe an alternative future because "No, it is the children who are wrong." only gets you so far.

The "Haves" might be working on why democracy is bad because it limits freedom in the sense of limiting the freedom the owners of capital and property to do what they want with it. So since so few own so much of the US, they might decide that capitalism is fine, and it's democracy that needs "fixing".

 

[Lexicus]

The "Haves" might be working on why democracy is bad because it limits freedom in the sense of limiting the freedom the owners of capital and property to do what they want with it. So since so few own so much of the US, they might decide that capitalism is fine, and it's democracy that needs "fixing".

They decided this already in the 1930s.

edit: I should specify, in the immediate sense, the Republicans decided this in the 1930s. But conservatives and right-wingers have understood for well over 2,000 years that democratic (majority-rule) governance threatens the prerogatives of the rich aristocrats.