Critical race theory

[Narz]

Yeah, I agree. You know, 20 years ago they were saying dinosaurs had no feathers. Now they're saying they all had feathers. Give it another 20 years they'll be making up some new ****. That's why I put paleontology in the pay no mind pile with the rest of the "sciences".

I don't buy that you're genuinely comparing paleontology to flavor of the month cultural theories. Biological theories may be proven wrong & certainly will be corrected as our knowledge grows but they have to be based on something.

 

[Ajidica]

Nixon was publicly embarrassed by the Little Rock school integration during a trip to Latin America. It was significant enough that he convinced Eisenhower to edit a speech to specifically address it. The modern usage of the term "whataboutism" emerged from the Soviet proclivity to use "and you lynch negroes in the South" as a rhetorical counterpoint to American accusations of Soviet antidemocratic practices.

I'm pretty sure I would classify Nixon and Eisenhower as part of the foreign policy establishment.
And I know you have been in discussions where I have broken out my favorite (though sadly probably apocryphal) anecdote about Nixon and the connection between the civil rights movement and decolonization:
When Nixon was in Ghana for its independence celebrations, he asked a man celebrating in the street how it feels to be free. The man responded "Sir, I am not free, I am from Alabama".

But again, the original comment was expressing opposition to the idea that "white people" in general didn't care about civil rights, but were primarily -if not exclusively - concerned with it making the US look bad.

 

[GenMarshall]

What I do not believe is that I am responsible for suppression of non-white people through my privilege, or that I have anything to apologize for based on my race. That idea is so...racist...it makes me sick.

Same here. The word "colonizer" is thrown around a lot here. Sorry, but it's not my fault that nearly 100 years ago my paternal grandfather came to Canada from Sweden and owned a sawmill and farmed in BC and Alberta in the 1930s and 1940s. It's not my fault that my paternal great-grandfather (grandmother's father) decided to emigrate from Sweden to Canada a few years before WWI and homestead. All this happened decades before I was born, I'm not responsible for the dismal lack of FN/aboriginal/native/Indigenous content in my school curriculum, so take the word "colonizer" and fly a kite with it when talking to me. It's pointless to tell me to "go back to Europe" because I've never been there. I know where my ancestors are from on my dad's side, but we haven't had any contact with any of them in 35 years (the letters stopped coming right after my grandmother wrote to tell them my grandfather died). /rant

That generally sums up my feelings. The framework of CRT demands that because I'm a white person that I should accept my status as being an "oppressor" and that I was born with the irredeemable sin of being a racist, despite not having a racist bone in my body growing up and being exposed to Dr. King's message of "Judge not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character", don't be a dick to people regardless of race, and treat people like people.

The framework also sets up a catch-22 kafkatrap no-win situation. If two customers, one black and one white, come into your store. If you pick the white customer first, CRT dictates that you're racist against the black customer and that he's a second class citizen. If you pick the black customer first, CRT dictates that you're racist because you don't trust the black customer in your store and want him out as quickly as possible.

I agree with you Valka and side with you that it's not my fault that my great great-grandparents back in the 1880s-1890s decided to hop on a boat, bound for America. All I know was that my modern ancestors came to the US decades after the US Civil War ended and largely stuck within the northeast region of the United States. Why should I pay for the sins that America have committed, when my modern ancestors haven't even boarded a damn boat for America (my maternal side) or crossed the Canadian-US border (my paternal side) back in the 1880s-1890s? /rant

I predict that over half of the comments on the various YT review channels are going to be ranting and screeching how the show has "appropriated" the Harriet Tubman story and HOW DARE THEY MAKE ANY WHITE WOMEN INTO VICTIMS even though the series is about a dystopian future where most of the U.S. is under a theocratic dictatorship that views ALL women as property (the Wives have a bit more privilege than the rest, but they're still not allowed to read or write).

If you want to keep your sanity, I'd strongly advise not venturing to Twitter. Comments like those are magnified x100. This is why I roll my eyes whenever someone makes a remark about Orcs being equated to black people.

 

[sophie]

I don't buy that you're genuinely comparing paleontology to flavor of the month cultural theories. Biological theories may be proven wrong & certainly will be corrected as our knowledge grows but they have to be based on something.

Yeah, I'm right there with you. That's why I'm disdainful of pseudoscientific tea-leaf reading like parsing arbitrary "species" from random pieces of rock. Much prefer things rooted in actual empirical data of the here and now like sociology.

 

[bernie14]

California Ethnic Studies Curriculum imposes “critical race theory,” excludes Martin Luther King Jr.

Steeped in the ideology of critical race theory, which holds that white racism against “people of color” is the root cause of all social inequality, the entire program is meant to obscure the fundamental factor that binds youth of all races and national background together in America’s most ethnically diverse state—social class. California school children will instead be taught, according to Encyclopedia Britannica’s definition of critical race theory, that white people—including white working class children—are to blame for all social ills:

 

[Narz]

California Ethnic Studies Curriculum imposes “critical race theory,” excludes Martin Luther King Jr.

Steeped in the ideology of critical race theory, which holds that white racism against “people of color” is the root cause of all social inequality, the entire program is meant to obscure the fundamental factor that binds youth of all races and national background together in America’s most ethnically diverse state—social class. California school children will instead be taught, according to Encyclopedia Britannica’s definition of critical race theory, that white people—including white working class children—are to blame for all social ills:

Divide & conquer.

 

[FriendlyFire]

Britannica’s definition of critical race theory, that white people—including white working class children—are to blame for all social ills:

Its almost like there are two realities that are being reported
/shurgs The only thing we learn from history is that we dont learn from history

"Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said racism is a sickness, and we have to become the healers. There is no other place that has the greatest responsibility than our educational system. So we have to support this and have ethnic studies."

Though the curriculum is voluntary
it is still only a recommendation for districts that want to incorporate ethnic studies into their curriculum and not yet a statewide requirement.

https://edition.cnn.com/2021/03/22/us/california-ethnic-studies-high-school-trnd/index.html

 

[Lexicus]

Steeped in the ideology of critical race theory, which holds that white racism against “people of color” is the root cause of all social inequality, the entire program is meant to obscure the fundamental factor that binds youth of all races and national background together in America’s most ethnically diverse state—social class. California school children will instead be taught, according to Encyclopedia Britannica’s definition of critical race theory, that white people—including white working class children—are to blame for all social ills:

You know it only takes like 50 seconds to google the Encyclopedia Britannica definition of critical race theory and realize that this is a lie.
Here is the beginning of that definition:

Critical race theory (CRT), intellectual movement and loosely organized framework of legal analysis based on the premise that race is not a natural, biologically grounded feature of physically distinct subgroups of human beings but a socially constructed (culturally invented) category that is used to oppress and exploit people of colour. Critical race theorists hold that the law and legal institutions in the United States are inherently racist insofar as they function to create and maintain social, economic, and political inequalities between whites and nonwhites, especially African Americans.

So I am curious as to who in this thread disagrees with the premise that race is not a natural, biologically grounded feature of physically distinct subgroups of human beings.

Here is a further quote from the EB article:

In their work Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, first published in 2001, the legal scholars Richard Delgado (one of the founders of CRT) and Jean Stefancic discuss several general propositions that they claim would be accepted by many critical race theorists, despite the considerable variation of belief among members of the movement. These “basic tenets” of CRT, according to the authors, include the following claims:
(1) Race is socially constructed, not biologically natural.
(2) Racism in the United States is normal, not aberrational: it is the common, ordinary experience of most people of colour.
(3) Owing to what critical race theorists call “interest convergence” or “material determinism,” legal advances (or setbacks) for people of colour tend to serve the interests of dominant white groups. Thus, the racial hierarchy that characterizes American society may be unaffected or even reinforced by ostensible improvements in the legal status of oppressed or exploited people.
(4) Members of minority groups periodically undergo “differential racialization,” or the attribution to them of varying sets of negative stereotypes, again depending on the needs or interests of whites.
(5) According to the thesis of “intersectionality” or “antiessentialism,” no individual can be adequately identified by membership in a single group. An African American person, for example, may also identify as a woman, a lesbian, a feminist, a Christian, and so on.
Finally, (6) the “voice of colour” thesis holds that people of colour are uniquely qualified to speak on behalf of other members of their group (or groups) regarding the forms and effects of racism.

The only one of these points I would dispute is (6) and that only partially. I also might partially dispute (3) but to a lesser extent.

 

[Sofista]

I'd like to post a reply to the debate, but apparently font size is limited to 7 here.

Would writing it all in CAPS be okay?

 

[Arakhor]

I wouldn't advise that, no.

 

[Estebonrober]

California Ethnic Studies Curriculum imposes “critical race theory,” excludes Martin Luther King Jr.

Steeped in the ideology of critical race theory, which holds that white racism against “people of color” is the root cause of all social inequality, the entire program is meant to obscure the fundamental factor that binds youth of all races and national background together in America’s most ethnically diverse state—social class. California school children will instead be taught, according to Encyclopedia Britannica’s definition of critical race theory, that white people—including white working class children—are to blame for all social ills:

Like when you post something like this how do you not know its complete bullfeathers? This is such lazy crap. All of this discussion from the right wing PoV is such lazy crap. It seems to me to be nothing but hurt feelings and a complete unwillingness to confront one's own prejudices.

 

[Estebonrober]

From what I've read implicit bias is mostly bs. Iirc in the early days they were trying to show it had some relevance but better put together studies showed the earlier ones were fatally flawed.

It's also a rather shallow & cynical view of humanity. When my mother met my old roommate I knew she'd judge her a bit for having tattoos & pink hair but despite my many issues w/ her I knew in a matter of seconds she'd be able to look past that & see her for her more substantive character aspects.

There are certainly some people who see other human beings as nothing but avatars/stereotypes but these are people on the dark-triad spectrum, this is not how normal human beings interact in an integrated society (on the internet it's certainly easier)

I would like citation that implicit bias testing has been debunked. Also your anecdotal story is a) stupid because your mom is far more likely to consider your feelings on the matter first and foremost and b) has absolutely zero bearing on the discussion at hand.

 

[Manfred Belheim]

Well... the one thing I've learned from this thread is that tagging my photos of old television sets with #CRT on Instagram probably wasn't a good idea.

 

[Samson]

I have read about as much about CRT as the OP, and have not studied history or even Liberal Art (whatever that is, drawing naked people?) Feel free to call this rubbish, it may well be.

However, I do know a thing or 2 about models, and the most important thing to understand about models is that they are all wrong, but some are useful.

CRT is a model, the theory of compensating wage differentials is a model, the labour theory of value is a model, as are newtonian and quantum mechanics and general relativity. We know they are all "wrong", in the sense that they are not a full and infallible methods of predicting what will happen in the future based on the present. They are all abstractions that attempt to explain the real world, which is actually composed of millions of laws, billions of individual circumstances and trillions on inter-personal interactions, in a way that can be grasped by our little monkey brains. What makes them useful is to what extent this abstraction allows us to come up with interventions that make the world better.

My criticism of the academic field of CRT is that they are too nationalist, in that they seem to fall into the common american mistake of forgetting that the rest of the world exists. One of the most important features of any model is its generalisability, in that how well is explains situations outside of the situation from with the data that is was built from was gathered. It seems to me that CRT actually is MORE applicable in other countries that have a more recent history of racially distinct laws. Myanmar is the one that immediately springs to mind, but I also think India is another good example, and how well it fits countries like the UK, France, Australia and Russia would be very interesting. If I was a CRT academic, I would fit the model to every country in the world and demonstrate that it explains a varying amount of the inequality that exists around the world, and how that relates to the countries history. It seems that would be uncontroversial. Once that was done, the question changes from "Is CRT a valid theory" to "how much of the observed inequality is explained by this model", which is a whole lot less emotive and can be discussed objectively.

From what I've read implicit bias is mostly bs. Iirc in the early days they were trying to show it had some relevance but better put together studies showed the earlier ones were fatally flawed.

I am not sure what you are referring to, but there is very strong evidence from fMRI studies in this area.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

White men are "normal" and every other category is some deviation whose defect is seen as a handicap. Rendered this way, antidiscrimination is understood as applying some benefit to some category with "oppressed status" so that their "oppression coefficient" or whatever can be counteracted.

That's some pretty damning stuff.

From what I've read implicit bias is mostly bs.

It depends on the context/evidence. IIRC a lot of people guessed/agreed with the notion that soldiers from the North better adapted to the cold than soldiers from the South during world wars for example. Even though it was wrong. Yet something led a much more than random distribution of people to believe the wrong thing.

The main problem with CRT in the context of bias is the tendency to reject evidence or to use it selectively. Proper beliefs constrain anticipation of future events. If you believe X thing, there are future observations you should expect to see, and observations you should not expect to see.

What makes them useful is to what extent this abstraction allows us to come up with interventions that make the world better.

Specifically, what makes models useful is how often/well they predict future outcomes. The interventions are a policy decision based on the best available information, and their consequences are in turn modeled --> observed.

The policy decision of "communism" might have produced a nice sounding model the first time, for example, but the observed outcomes never matched it. So it's a bad policy. That doesn't necessarily refute the model of the world that led to it though...that would have to be done separately etc.

If I was a CRT academic, I would fit the model to every country in the world and demonstrate that it explains a varying amount of the inequality that exists around the world. It seems that would be uncontroversial. Once that was done, the question changes from "Is CRT a valid theory" to "how much of the observed inequality is explained by this model", which is a whole lot less emotive and can be discussed objectively.

Not much to say about this part other than that I agree.

 

[eyrei]

I can't refute vague generalities; you need to make a real/specific claim. A good starting point would be you providing a specific source for this:

Wikipedia...

 

[sophie]

That's some pretty damning stuff.

Correct. Which is precisely why Crenshaw says this is how one ought not to conceptualize discrimination. This is the sort of framing which critical race theory actually actively pushes back against.

 

[eyrei]

What specific interventions could be applied to oppressed populations based on this theory?

Presumably, the purpose of the research is to understand the experience of the oppressed group well enough to do something about it...what was learned from this research that can be applied in a constructive manner by a government? So far, I see that it points out the problems certain groups face, and it explains that some intersections have it particularly hard. But does it help us understand those problems well enough that we can try to fix them?

Blaming white people is not a fix. Its just blame, especially when you say it is unconscious.

Reparations? I'm not a big fan, but not totally opposed as a remedy for past slavery. How about for being part of the non-dominant group...do world governments owe reparations to anyone that has ever been oppressed? What about scenarios where white people are not the oppressors? Or where white people suppress other white people (many examples in history like feudalism...not sure if there are any currently)? Is that what the application of CRT would do?

 

[Moriarte]

So I am curious as to who in this thread disagrees with the premise that race is not a natural, biologically grounded feature of physically distinct subgroups of human beings.

I don’t see a problem with race existing within biological, economic (social, etc..) categories simultaneously.

 

[Narz]

Also your anecdotal story is a) stupid because your mom is far more likely to consider your feelings on the matter first and foremost

clearly you don't know my mom