From Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction (2001)
The critical race theory (CRT) movement is a collection of activists and scholars interested in studying and transforming the relationship among race, racism, and power. The movement considers many of the same issues that conventional civil rights and ethnic studies discourses take up, but places them in a broader perspective that includes economics, history, context, group- and self-interest, and even feelings and the unconscious. Unlike traditional civil rights, which embraces incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.
This is from the 2016 edition, but it is identical to a paragraph quoted by Max Eden and attributed to the first edition in 2001. The way I see it, the characterization of CRT by its critics today is reasonably close to this definition, which comes from two of its prominent proponents twenty years ago.
Eden quotes another paragraph that is slightly different in the 2016 edition. Here is the more recent version:
Although CRT began as a movement in the law, it has rapidly spread beyond that discipline. Today, many in the field of education consider themselves critical race theorists who use CRT’s ideas to understand issues of school discipline and hierarchy, tracking, controversies over curriculum and history, bilingual and multicultural education, and alternative and charter schools. They discuss the rise of biological racism in education theory and practice and urge attention to the resegregation of American schools. Some question the Anglocentric curriculum and charge that many educators apply a “deficit theory” approach to schooling for minority kids.
I will put more quotes from the introduction to the 2016 edition below the fold.
Last week, I had a jarring experience the day after I heard Jonathan Haidt talk to a conference of mostly high school educators. He had some disparaging things to say about CRT.
The next morning, I was supposed to do a workshop on The Three Languages of Politics to a small subset of conference attendees. Innocently, I decided to start with Haidt’s distinction between Discover and Defend, as analogous to my distinction between political rhetoric that is intended to persuade (which we rarely observe nowadays) and rhetoric that is intended to demonize. I said that I might end up repeating a lot of what Professor Haidt had said the previous evening.
“I hope not!” a woman in the audience piped up. It turned out that his talk had angered many in his audience. They pegged him as a straight white male (correct) and as a hard-right ideologue (wrong–at least for now).
Figuring that I was not going to get any traction otherwise, I let the teachers vent. Among their complaints was that CRT was misrepresented by Haidt and by other opponents.
I came away from my close encounter with teachers marinated in CRT thinking that there is no stopping them. They have their excuses ready when CRT is criticized. They claim that their critics are right-wingers out to distort CRT and suppress discussions of race.
I could have refuted these teachers by reading the two paragraphs above, but I did not have them handy. From now on, I will be able to find them doing a quick search of my blog.
Additional excerpts:
Unlike some academic disciplines, critical race theory contains an activist dimension. It tries not only to understand our social situation but to change it, setting out not only to ascertain how society organizes itself along racial lines and hierarchies but to transform it for the better.
Ethnic studies courses often include a unit on critical race theory, and American studies departments teach material on critical white studies developed by CRT writers. Sociologists, theologians, and health care specialists use critical theory and its ideas.
The authors state that most critical race theorists would agree with the following:
First, racism is ordinary, not aberrational–“normal science,” the usual way society does business, the common everyday experience of most people of color in this country. Second, most would agree that our system of white-over-color ascendancy serves important purposes, both psychic and material, for the dominant group. The first feature, ordinariness, means that racism is difficult to address or cure because it is not acknowledged. Color-blind, or “formal,” conceptions of equality, expressed in rules that insist only on treatment that is the same across the board, can thus remedy only the most blatant forms of discrimination
Because racism advances the interests of both white elites (materially) and working-class whites (psychically), large segments of society have little incentive to eradicate it.
A third theme of critical race theory, the “social construction” thesis, holds that race and races are products of social thought and relations. Not objective, inherent, or fixed, they correspond to no biological or genetic reality; rather, races are categories that society invents, manipulates, or retires when convenient. People with common origins share certain physical traits, of course, such as skin color, physique, and hair texture. But these constitute only an extremely small portion of their genetic endowment, are dwarfed by what we have in common, and have little or nothing to do with distinctly human, higher-order traits,such as personality, intelligence, and moral behavior. That society frequently chooses to ignore these scientific truths, creates races, and endows them with pseudo-permanent characteristics is of great interest to critical race theory.
A final element concerns the notion of a unique voice of color. Coexisting in somewhat uneasy tension with anti-essentialism, the voice-of-color thesis holds that because of their different histories and experiences with oppression, black, American Indian, Asian, and Latino writers and thinkers may be able to communicate to their white counterparts matters that the whites are unlikely to know. Minority status, in other words, brings with it a presumed competence to speak about race and racism.
Related, check out the National Education Association (teacher’s union) CRT-related Business Item 39. Soave at Reason reported on it on Tuesday, “Is Critical Race Theory Taught in K-12 Schools? The NEA Says Yes, and That It Should Be,” (and you can bet Rufo is all over it) which led to the NEA scrubbing their site and taking the page down (the link is to the Internal Archive) which isn’t shady at all and totally isn’t what people do when they’re trying to hide and lie about what they are doing.
As is the CRT stuff in there isn’t bad enough, what gets me is the famous first inscription over the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, “Gnothi Sauton” – “Know Thyself” is attributed in quite the howler to an “ancient African proverb”. And these people are “””teachers”””.
“They discuss the rise of biological racism…”
Rise? There is no rise. Biology is racist, and differences among homo sapiens have a genetic source, which good or bad culture can mute or amplify.
To paraphrase a great quote from John Wayne: “Life is hard, it’s very very hard if your culture amplifies your stupid disadvantages.”
All of this is reminiscent of what happened when people tries to talk about “critical theory” in the context of discussing Lindsay and Pluckrose’s “Cynical Theories” book. One should simply never play the “definitions game” with the left, especially with leftist academic jargon / terms of art, because it’s rigged and they always win.
I’m sure you can go back generations and find countless examples of the same, “Ah, but technically, that’s not the *real* X!” (which has also “never been tried”) prevarications and obfuscations, using narrow definitions which are little more than the refined work of PR marketing, specifically crafted after multiple iterations to seem as innocuous as possible on the face of the text, regardless of how it’s meant and used in practice by its proponents. Even deBoer has gotten fed up with it.
Arguments happen in words, and thus the way the manipulation works is to make people focus on the air-brushed and artificially constructed pretty facade of the legalistic literary map instead of believing their own lying eyes about the uglier motivations of their opponents in the real human social territory.
Ironically, all that ‘postmodern’ and ‘critical’ theory is supposed to be big on the problems of manipulative language, which we’re told is precisely why we need to make up and adopt all these ridiculous neologisms for everything.
One unfortunate but strategic thing about emphasizing the R in CRT, as opposed to just CT in general, is that there is plenty of crazy leftist gender and sexuality stuff – and the whole portfolio of the denigration of the elements of one’s cultural history and traditions and more or less of the same character, that gets inserted into the curriculum (at the expense of yet more of the traditional knowledge base). All that junk needs to go too, but obviously getting rid of the the R alone is a bridge too far.
As far as curriculum matters are concerned, I’ve noticed that most libertarian commentators hit a kind of mental stumbling block over the question, probably due to their principled opposition to the institution of state-run public schooling itself. “Well, this just goes to show another good reason why there shouldn’t be public school anyway … ” or “The worse the better, and we should support the public’s impotence in this regard, because if people can’t stop this ugly insanity, it will just help undermine support for government schools and … ” – “No, no, stop evading again, and actually engage with the question.”
It’s just hard to get over that hump when the premise is, “Ok, but *given* public schooling as a thing which exists that is unlikely to change, *what* should be in the curriculum, *how* should that be determined, and *who* gets to decide?” Who, after all, is in charge here? The intellectual framework under which many libertarians operate is apparently not well equipped to handle these sorts of questions, finds them uncomfortable, and so tends to flail about.
If all the crazy leftists want to insert a bunch of pernicious, divisive, and denigrating lies -yes, lies – all the way down into kindergarten story-time, in an institution that is inherently a creature of law, how to stop them, except by operation of law? If it’s a “bad look” to try and negatively remove things from the curriculum, then is is a “good look” to try to add them and tell teachers what they *must* teach, and then put in whatever anti-progressive instructions conservatives want? We don’t have to worry about this hypothetical because a Hawaiian judge will enjoin the effort and/or the NEA will strike and/or the usual suspects will just protest mostly peacefully until the inevitable unconditional surrender.
I’ve seen a few commentators talk about “academic freedom” which, I’m sorry, is just mindbogglingly dumb and absurd, bad faith argument. As if taxpayer-funded public school teachers – even down to elementary school! – are scholars pushing the bounds of our knowledge, doing novel research, innovating and discovering and so forth, and thus need special leeway and insulation from social pressure to explore new ideas without undue constraint. “Come on man!”
Sure, public school teachers should have the normal amount of professional discretion in order to determine the best way to get their job done, but there is no strong argument for “academic freedom” so they can decide on their own what the job itself should be, public outrage be damned.
At a Fourth of July party I was at two people talked to me about my school board unprompted just knowing where I live that had made national news over CRT (which as you note also includes transgender ideology nonsense not just race). One was an immigrant catholic from Spain who left Europe because he didn’t like the leftism, the other an ordinary public school teacher who is being forced to go to CRT struggle sessions and knows it’s an inevitability that he’s going to be forced to teach it to his kids which he dreads. Both stated that the people protesting CRT in my county, organized by Rufo and trying to pass laws against CRT in addition to a school board recall, are heroes.
But according to Arnold, David French, mcwhorter, and the other self serving pieces of shit they are monsters against the enlightenment.
There is no desire to teach history or facts here. To my aren’t goi g to balance out a lesson on Tulsa with a lesson on what blacks did the to e cities the last 50 years. They aren’t going to balance a story of Jim Crow with a story of someone living through the Great Leap Forward and cultural revolution somehow doing better then whites. They aren’t going to offer to offer the bell curve or a troublesome inheretance as a corrective to the notion that black white gaps are caused by systematic racism.
The purpose of crt is to flood children with as much one sided emotional blackmail about what happened to blacks a long time ago so that they turn OFF their critical thinking and just give in to whatever demands and activist make. The heroes are against this. The dilitenetes are embarrassed that they even try to defend themselves.
It *is* a little strange. There is a lot of oddly pro-bully, “Don’t try and defend yourself, you’ll just make things worse!” / “Just lie back and think of England!” commentary out there.
It’s not exactly ‘blaming the victim’, but more along the lines of Cet animal est tres mechant, quand on l’attaque il se defend.
Cowen did this yesterday in response to Eric Kaufman’s NR article ($) Political Discrimination as Civil-Rights Struggle
Lol, as if the current approach of doing nothing is going so well and is not also something we will come to regret, just as we now very deeply regret not doing whatever could have been done at the time to nip this slow-motion train wreck in the bud 20 or 40 or 60 years ago. “Just let the Bolsheviks take whatever it is they want and don’t try anything to stand in their way, it will just provoke them!”
I mean, if these people have an actual argument to make about what happens in each counterfactural, and who does what to whom, why, and how, and why the intervention scenario is clearly worse than the baseline trend, then sure, I’ll listen, go ahead and make it. Instead we just get a bunch of foggy, naked assertions.
“But according to Arnold, David French, mcwhorter, and the other self serving pieces of shit they are monsters against the enlightenment.”
I guess pointing out that none of them said or implied that Rufo is a monster but for some reason I feel compelled to do so anyway.
They literally published an op-Ed in the Nytimes calling anti-crt unamerican.
What keeps me up at night is what happens when my friends that are ready to fight over this give up. I k ow you people love fag marriage or whatever, but these people see nothing but a series of defeats for a long time now. They lived the bourgeois life. They didn’t screw around, got married, had 3+ kids, paid a lot of taxes, stayed within their budget, always did the right thing. What happens when they just fucking decide it’s over. That the crazies are going to win and to there is no point building for a future that doesn’t exist. I think having to where kids get woke would be game over here. The sheer insanity of all this has galvanized them, but another disappointment I think is it. It won’t produce rebellion so much as resignation. How does woke work without normal people to parasite offf of. It doesn’t.
This comment is completely out of line. You can’t call these pundits and our host a POS.
However…
David French is particularly outrageous.
Members of the public are entirely justified in wanting a say in what is taught to their children and funded with their tax dollars. David French is arguing that they shouldn’t. He fashions himself as a conservative leader, and is trying to negotiate unconditional surrender for Republcian voters. I would presume David French’s financial backers are on the political left and support French to help encourage Republicans to lose.
Kling is unreasonable and completely wrong on this as well, although I don’t think he’s nefarious about it, and I don’t suspect he’s funded by political interests.
French is now a pathetic fake and vile sellout who makes a living getting “strange new respect” from the left by constantly trashing the right, which is one of the two methods by which people part ways with National Review.
But all the stuff said against Kling for his principled and open-minded disagreement in this thread is just really out of line.
That being said, it *does* raise the question of what – besides “Lie back and think of England” / “Suck it up, buttercup!” – the objectors to reining in woke indoctrination suggest anyone do about any of this.
In the legal world, a story justifying the criminal justice system and its occasional administration of stern punishments above what is strictly necessary for the preservation of order is of a goodwill-maintenance character and goes, “If we didn’t have law and judges that the people felt would reliably address harms and grievances fairly and ‘do justice’ to malefactors, who “get what they deserve”, then people would lose faith, refuse to acquiesce to the state’s claim of rightful monopoly on violence, and not submit these matters to officials. Instead – as with criminal gangs who *can’t* go to the system – they would take matters into their own hands with private violence, vigilantism, vengeful mob action, vendettas, and the like. Sure, it’s always possible for a powerful state to ignore all those sentiments and deter all those actions by threatening to crush anyone who tried it, but that is fighting an uphill battle against the very population one is supposed to be ‘serving’, and thus bound to provoke deep resentments, creating a dangerously unstable social situation.”
Likewise, there is this old script for the narrative of how a good liberal society based on the principles of self-government and legitimacy deriving from consent of the governed is supposed to work, so people don’t feel like feudal serfs who simple have to obey their elite lords, like it or not.
Not that I am naive about whether this this narrative does, should, or even could correspond to reality, but legitimating stories and narratives that constitute a society’s dominant political formula remain an important way of convincing people that there is an outlet for their desires and grievances and to put their faith in and work through the system to address that.
And the Schoolhouse Rock version of the story goes that if people don’t like what is going on – especially if they don’t like what *the state* is doing to their communities – then they are supposed to go through the script and the *peaceful process* of achieving those desired changes.
They are supposed to peaceably associate and assemble, petition government officials, get together and talk to each other, deliberate in forums of civil debates, and hand out pamphlets to try to convince and persuade their neighbors, arrange for some kind of referendum or way to vote on the matter to demonstrate the level of demand, lobby their representatives for legislation, support different candidates promising to address the issue, or even run for office themselves on that basis.
Look, you know the drill. The point is, “You are unhappy with what the state is doing and want change? Here is the proper and legitimate and *peaceful* way you can achieve it without a single drop of blood, so that you don’t have to take things into your own hands and storm the capitol or something, and you have some other resort *besides violent revolution* to achieve your objectives.”
Now, whether and when the state *should* stand in the way of all of this to protect other people’s individual rights from being unjustly trampled by a majority – e.g., when they want to just grab your property – is an important and complicated question. But it is a *different* question from whether people are entitled to do this to regulate *state action itself*, when taking that type of state action as a given.
Well, after a few generations of degeneration and getting completely nuts on the topic, the dam holding back the insanity of elite progressive ideas broke in 2013, unleashing multiple waves of Great Awokening, and we are at a point where truly pernicious, despicable, dehumanizing, and cohesion-corroding lies are being shoved down everyone’s throats and paid for out of those same people’s taxes.
And what are these people supposed to do about it?
What the anti-anti-CRT commentators are doing is saying that all the usual tools in that script must be *off the table*. Laws on what shouldn’t be taught in publically-funded school? No. Laws insisting of viewpoint neutrality and political nondiscrimination? “You will regret it!”
In other words – there is no democratic or legal recourse for you, tough luck, serfs. If you don’t like what’s going on, too bad. Or, if you insist, then you are just going to have to do it the *extra-legal* way, *outside the law*, and *to hell with the system*, because the system doesn’t provide any avenue for you to do what you want done.
How to react to that? Do you really want people to say, “Well then, ok, it’s game on brutha!” That doesn’t sound very healthy for the body politic or much of a mitigation for resentments giving rise to tribal polarization and collapse of trust in the institutions. It’s basically a call to surrender or a call to arms with nothing in between. A big, important point of a liberal society is to give people the in-between!
So, without some middle path with a Burkean conservative outlet we are told is denied to us, because reasons, we get the enervating demoralization of Tokyo Rose or the black pill radicalism of “burn it all down”. That’s just great, thanks for the super helpful big think pieces, fellas.
>—–“But according to Arnold, David French, mcwhorter, and the other self serving pieces of shit they are monsters against the enlightenment.”
So now asdf is calling Arnold a “self serving piece of shit.” This has to be some kind of new low for asdf and this comment section.
Rufo > Kling. Not even close. It’s about Ws as opposed to purity.
But, asdf is way off in his posts.
[No more personal attacks and mischaracterizations–ed.]
Arnold,
You should answer to the challenges to your position that Rufo states in his article. You are taking a position that is hurting a lot of people, and I can’t for the life of me understand the justification. For the people in the middle of this it isn’t an intellectual game. People I know in the crosshairs of this stuff are in genuine pain, and “exit” is not an option for them.
Both Handle and I already called that out. That is completely inappropriate. It’s fair game to criticize each other’s viewpoints, and I do think Kling is completely wrong on the issue discussed, but name calling and personal meanness are wildly inappropriate.
FWIW, I like most of this crowd, even when I strongly disagree.
“So impressed with all you do
Tried so hard to be like you
Flew too high and burnt the wing
Lost my faith in everything
…
Broken, bruised, forgotten, sore
Too fucked up to care anymore”
(At least stick it out to the 1:35 mark for the wall of drums)
https://youtu.be/l34b8_tLB74
“FWIW, I like most of this crowd, even when I strongly disagree.”
Go on Twitter (like I did for the last month) and try to engage with the other side in a diplomatic manner. You will be instantly blocked. They want nothing to do with arguments that make them uncomfortable.
The debate is over. Strength in numbers.
Ok, don’t like that one? Let’s try something else.
“Found you when your heart was broke
I filled your cup until it overflowed.
Took it so far to keep you close.
I was afraid to leave you on your own.
I said I’d catch you if you fall
And if they laugh, then fuck ’em all (All)
And then I got you off your knees
Put you right back on your feet
Just so you could take advantage of me
Tell me, how’s it feel sittin’ up there?”
https://youtu.be/ZAfAud_M_mg
Kurt B, I recognized the NIN song from the lyrics. I love that song but have no idea what your point is in relation to this conversation.
Sure. Even the most politely worded inquiries from the right are often met by nastiness from the left. The left has power on Twitter and in university settings and in K-12 and they are mean about it. It’s been like that for a while.
I’m on the right. What else is there to say? Is the debate over? Mabye it is. Bad political outcomes seem highly likely. I try to focus on enjoying my life and delivering value to the world and investing in my career, helping my employer, my family, and my personal health. I have a lot of control over those things.
“One was an immigrant catholic from Spain who left Europe because he didn’t like the leftism”
Out of the frying pan and into the fire.
The left dominates language, they can quickly change definitions back and forth to win power struggles and frustrate rivals.
Randi Weingarten, the head of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), is already playing those definition games: “Let’s be clear: critical race theory is not taught in elementary schools or high schools. It’s a method of examination taught in law school and college that helps analyze whether systemic racism exists,”
This is a Jedi Mind Trick: “This is not the CRT you are looking for. The Unions are free to move about their business. Move along.”
That is after the AFT website advocates pushing CRT in school curriculums. The AFT also is choosing to headline Ibram X Kendi at their conference, who is a leading CRT proponent.
“One-sided Calvinball”, “Heads I Win, Tails you Lose”. You can’t play Scrabble on the honor system when your opponent is willing to make up words. Either you both agree beforehand to use the same dictionary, or forget it.
All that being said, *some* kind of linguistic term seems psychologically indispensable.
The Devil Needs A Name!
Strong Sapir-Whorf goes too far, but I believe there is definitely something to the claim that most people find it extremely difficult to think straight or communicate clearly without the crutch of a socially-established conceptual category, denoted by a term that is shorthand for all the details of the whole phenomenon, and which people understand as ‘conventional’ in the sense that it is Aumann Common Knowledge – everybody knows that everybody else in their reference social group knows and uses the term to mean roughly the same thing.
That’s what “Social Justice Warriors” and “Woke” and “CRT” do, and why these things catch on right away, regardless of the millions of words spilled in inscrutable academic jargon about it.
To criticize the lack of accuracy or precision of that usage is to miss the point entirely, which is that people just need *some* way to talk about all the implementations of progressive race lunacy they can’t stand and which are being rammed down everyone’s throats, like it or not.
If you are trying to think and talk about the source of evil in the world, and you use the name “Satan”, and somebody tried to argue against that by saying, “Technically, (according to our Satan-does-not-exist expert!) Satan can only have two horns, while the particular evil-causing demon you are complaining about clearly has *four* horns, and therefore … ” then they are just wasting everyone’s time.
You’re right. And so is McWhorter. People need simple names to talk about what’s going on.
My sense is that the “questioning the very foundations of the liberal order” your first quotation describes is at the heart of the dispute between CRT-influenced left activists and traditional liberals, broadly defined.
That is, a traditional liberal would say that a system of neutral rules applicable to all, rules which treat individuals according to their individual conduct and achievement, is a worthy ideal to strive for, and that reform should aim at better approximating that ideal. Liberalism recognizes that this ideal is not perfectly achievable in practice due to a long list of human flaws, and that racial bias is one of the important flaws on that list. So it’s good, on the liberal view, to point out when a facially neutral rule is racially biased in practical application– think of the crack vs powder sentencing disparity– but the goal of doing so is to promulgate more truly neutral, and more neutrally applied, rules instead.
CRT influenced left activists would, I think (and it would be useful to have a self described CRT proponent do a Turing Test check here), say that the neutral rule ideal is fundamentally fraudulent and unachievable even as an approximation, so the goal of reform through better approximation is undesirable. This may be held to be true either because
(a) neutrality is impossible to approximate in practice because racist institutions will inevitably, unreformably use facially neutral rules as a cloak to perpetuate racial injustice; or
(b) neutrality is impossible even in principle, i.e. philosophically there can be no such things as neutral rules.
This point of view is then taken to justify the presumption that any facially neutral rule which results in a racially unequal outcome is ipso facto racist, and may even justify facially non-neutral rules (i.e. explicit and avowed racial discrimination) as a means to justice.
Again, I would like to see whether avowed CRT proponents actually agree with the above. But it seems consistent with, for example, the pronouncements the SF school board used to justify removing the ability-based admissions criteria from the Lowell High academic magnet school.
Good post. It more or less accurately summarizes what I think most of them would actually say they want or agree with it. When pushed on a concrete working defintion or racism CRT activists usually say anything that results in racial equality. Basically it seems that they start out from the premise that everything, and I do mean everything, should in a genuinely fair system have compete racial equality.
One thing that’s hard to distill from ‘anti-racist’ types is whether they believe 1) “a genuinely fair system have compete racial equality” by definition, or 2) that any statistical inequality is *indicative* of unfairness, with unfairness defined in some conventional way. ‘Anti-racists’ often seemlessly move the goal posts between (1) and (2).
If you truly believed that the black white gap was mostly or even significantly caused by systemic racism, that that gap hasn’t closed in 50 years because of it, and that all of these neutral or even not so neutral means (AA) haven’t worked, then it’s reasonable to conclude that something radical must be done.
Only if you think most of the black white gap isn’t due to racism or some other changeable factor would you think such radical programs are not worth it.
The point of teaching kindergarteners how bad blacks have it is to both explicitly and implicitly state that racism is the cause so therefore we need to do XYZ today.
There is no way out of this besides Facing Reality.
Biological differences have been explicitly ruled at as just another part of the white supremacist superstructure. Does anyone anywhere honestly think Nicole Hannah Jones or Ibram X Kendi are going to suddenly say “we need to take this IQ data seriously”? That option simply isn’t on the table.
I’m not here to convince the woke, but to destroy them.
People who aren’t woke should stop squabbling like all the disparate groups that let the bolsheviks take power because they couldn’t put their squabbles aside and work together. It’s to these people that I say just fucking fight already.
“I’m not here to convince the woke, but to destroy them.”
+1000000
Amen
In politics, you win by persuasion; not the true believers of course, but the majority that live somewhere between them. If you’re approach is to issue the ultimatum: ‘you’re either with me and with David Duke, or you’re with Ibram Kendi’ then, well, it may feel like fighting, but it’s basically forfeiting. (and I don’t think that ultimatum is too that hyperbolic a characterization of what you generally seem to be getting at in your comments).
Yet another libertarian posting his Ls. Good luck!
Yeah I agree… the problem is that most right-wingers basically act the same way as the “woke” do… seeing the world in a black-and-white perspective…
So idk what the solution is…a libertarian solution would be to maybe provide a decentralised “country” for the various groups…
But as long as most Americans believe that the US is a real entity, and it is important, than I don’t see much of a solution…🤔
I’ve always wondered how CRT theorists think history should have happened had it been truly fair in their view. How could it have happened? Suppose James Maddison had been a CR theorist. What would the constitution have looked like with that influence in mind? How would a CRT activist design a modern constitution?
I’m also curious if CRT applies to world history, not just American history. Do we analyze the history of the Han Chinese or the Turks from that perspective? What about even more ancient people like the Sumerians, Babylonians, Egyptians, or Mycenaean Greeks? Are we going to analyze the Code of Hammurabi from a CRT perspective? I’m not being factitious.
I know there is this weird leaking of CRT outside the social sciences going on. Trying to get rid of naming scientific laws or phenomena after people. Apparently some people find it an issue that Newton’s Laws are called just that. OR trying to focus less on actually teaching math and science but focusing the history of those disciplines from a CRT perspective. How STEM is used to uphold hierarchy and important non-white contributions to it. Obviously, there is some push to deemphasis right or wrong answers even in hard sciences or to blatantly remove any and all qualifications, standards, and entrance exams.
No. CRT is a results oriented political activism movement targeting white supremacy and stigmatizing white identity. In some abstract sense it could apply to the Han Chinese, but as a political movement, it won’t. It does combat Anti-Asian hate and work to blame the surge of Anti-Asian hate crime on the political adversaries of progressives.
Dude this is easy. Woke runs scared shitless every time the CCP raises an eyebrow.
I’ll just note that according to CRT (and supported by the quotes above), it’s not just the United States that is fundamentally racist, it’s every multi-racial society that ever existed throughout time. This is the axiomatic premise about the way humans live together, and everything emanates from there. The idea that group disparities could arise from anything but past or current racism is not grappled with, as far as I can tell.
It’s not unlike Christians who have the axiomatic premise that God exists, so anyone who claims to be an atheist is secretly just in active rebellion against God and doesn’t want to follow His rules. When atheists object to this framing, they just get burned at the stake. If a system of thought neatly accounts for the heretics (with CRT, it’s fragile, uncomfortable white people), it’s hard to break out of it
Heh, “Atheist Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for Atheists to Talk about Their Rebellion Against God.” “Critical Religious Theory” “How to be an Anti-atheist.” “Antipagan Baby.” “Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Original Sin in Eurasia.” “Nice Heathenism: How Good-Intentioned Infidels Perpetuate Sin.” (Ha, that last one might have something to it.) You can’t even make a joke with inheritances like “Social Justice”, which is the theological linguistic equivalent of Muslims turning a conquered church into a mosque.
Ironically, we do actually live in a purportedly “Agnostic Supremacist” regime: theological evidence is inadmissible, religious conditions are unenforceable, the state is ostensibly viewpoint neutral on such matters, and so forth. But alas, this is pretense when it comes to these matters, on which the regime has taken sides – and the wrong one at that – for a long, long time.
Logically, yes, and when the left dignifies this argument with a response, it is Tu Quoque. Just because all other societies are fundamentally racist doesn’t excuse the US.
In more practical terms, the criticisms will be focused exclusively on white people, not just in the US, but whites in Canada, Europe, and Australia as well. And the racist behaviors of non-whites will not be excused but will be downplayed and hidden.
I’m not sure if this is really true. Some CRT advocates might actually argue that there were multi-ethnic societies that were tolerant or reasonably fair, until the West corrupted them for its own benefit. A number of scholars and politicians have argued medieval Spain under Islamic rule was a kind of proto-multicultural political system that was diverse, enlightened and tolerant. Some political activists have argued that New World Indigenous peoples were actually living in something pretty close to harmony and peace. Others have argued that social strife in India is basically a result of the British and that the caste system was benign and prior conflict between Muslims and Hindus exaggerated. CRT from a global perspective might end up being the story of how whiteness corrupted a prior (mostly) peaceful world.
–“Others have argued that social strife in India is basically a result of the British and that the caste system was benign and prior conflict between Muslims and Hindus exaggerated.”–
Imagine thinking that ‘racism’ in 21st century America is a massive problem but that a literal caste system was ‘benign’. Yikes.
Is there an online test for any CRT stuff with the expected answers? I think passing that around would be useful.
There are some websites that have student notes or exam questions from various courses. If you have access to any of those, just look up what has been taught in CRT classes at most prestigious law schools going on 25 years now.
Academic freedom is cool and all, but man, you gotta admit, sometimes those mad scribblings have a way of blowing up in all our faces a quarter century down the road.
Kimberle Crenshaw (Harvard Law ’84, co-authored the “Say Her Name” report) literally put together the book of key writings on the subject back then using her own and other papers from the late 70’s, 80’s and early 90’s on the topic (e.g., her Race, Reform, and Retrenchment, 1988) and has been hacking away on this and other ‘intersectional’ topics for 35 years as a law professor at UCLA where she teaches the advanced course on the subject.
Find her quizzes and exams, or those of any law professor using her book, and you’ll have a good start, at least, insofar as law school is concerned.
Now, how that all gets modified or dumbed down 10 grade levels as it trickles down into the mainstream lower education curriculum, like “Veggie Tales does Aquinas” or Napoleon and Snowball distilling farm dialectic into short, memorizable slogans for the prole animals “white man bad, four legs good” is a good question. So passing Crenshaw’s course might not quite hit the mark for what high school freshman will have to parrot back in their mandatory antiracism classes between home room and gym.
This brings up an excuse for some more of that wacky – and much-forgotten – American intellectual history.
See, the last time when the elites let their obsession with racial equality drive them completely insane when it came to matters of of education and crime, they nearly destroyed civilization in the urban core of every big city, but at least as a silver lining provided a lot of inspiration for Tom Wolfe’s brilliant literary artistry.
The forces of sanity and common sense not yet having been completely swamped out of the majority in most of the nation, however, meant that there was a pent-up demand for an intellectually respectable way to push back against all this nonsense and the disastrous catastrophe it unleashed. Which opened the door of opportunity to the neoconservatives, where there was a sudden influx of idled human capital and real intellectual firepower after many of them abandoned Trotskyism (long, long story; read Irving Kristol).
Anyway, starting around the mid 70’s, they managed, thankfully, to get the pendulum to start swinging the other way, and with the Reagan-Bush era, the Rehnquist Court, the collapse of the Soviet Union (and loss of esteem for classical Marxism) and so forth, they gained high status and influence and were perceived to be moving from triumph to triumph on an ‘irrendentist’ crusade to reclaim lost political territory from the fanatics.
The general feeling was that they were gradually ‘winning’ the war of ideas, to include on the race questions regarding crime and education, and the fury, frustration, disappointment and malaise of the leftist intelligentsia at all this was palpable. When Bill Clinton seemed to triangulate and accept the “equal opportunity consensus” on these matters, and with the Republican resurgence with Newt Gingrich’s “Contract With America”, they were being driven to derangement.
This wasn’t just a matter of the public’s demand for sanity, but the fact that the neoconservatives (and many of the Reagan-era libertarian intellectuals) *were* winning, because they had the better of these arguments, and they were smart, high-status, rigorous, prolific, and – get this – got to enjoy publishing in prominent public platforms without getting #Cancelled.
My impression is that this all had the effect of making leftist intellectuals feel like they were being pressed into a corner and pushed against a wall. They had to spend some time out in the wilderness and go back to the drawing board about how to retool their arsenal and refocus on the still-successful part of their general clientalist political formula in order to break out of the trenches again.
Well, they figured it out. And not only was their Manhattan Project successful, but this go around, they are also making damn sure they aren’t going to give any neo-neo-conservatives the same chance they had last time. It hardly matters, there’s practically no deep bench left. This is the “facing reality” that people on the right have to do with regard to our own numbers at the right extreme of the bell curve. Few indeed, not very merry either.
Gripping history, Handle!
On “no deep bench left”, I suspect it depends on what that means, or could mean.
In the Reagan etc. era, I see folks like Allan Bloom and Paglia, as part of the Right’s deep bench.
Nowadays, folks like Greenwald and Bari Weiss are roughly analogous (and very well-known, esp. in “well-read” circles), even if they’re not at the “high intellectual” level of Bloom etc.
Tho these writers are not “at the right extreme of the bell curve”, my sense of things is, that the Wokesters’ ability to intimidate opponents has driven so many sane folks rather far underground, but has not stopped such “well-read” folks from heeding writers like GG.
Whether there are enough such folks, in enough key places, to slow/ stop the Wokester tide, is quite hard to judge, not only for us, but for the Powers in WokesterVille, since those Powers may’ve driven folks far enough underground, that these Powers can’t get a good read on what’s really popping.
Thoughts?
My sense of things is, that the Manhattan Project success stemmed much from outside factors, e.g. the (perceived demagoguery of) the cheap shots thrown (incl. by Limbaugh etc.) at Clinton (esp. in the impeachment about Monica).
And then, the Dubya etc. orgy of malgovernance, esp. in Iraq.
So, Obama came in, on a wave of fear vs. / revulsion toward the Right.
We’re now seeing a similar
orgy of malgovernance from the Dems (dating from no later than, their jihad on Russian Hacking) who are clearly gambling that they can make “damn sure they aren’t going to give any neo-neo-conservatives the same chance” that Kirkpatrick etc. had last time.
But, I’m not sure, that I’d bet on the success of this gamble. Too many balls in the air.
“the Manhattan Project success stemmed much from outside factors …”
That’s not where it came from, and anyway, not how things really work.
The Woke Manhattan Project success was not so much as a ‘breakthrough’ innovation as a simple ‘biting of the bullet’.
Indeed, it was Neocon Manhattan Project prior to the Woke one which had something more akin to an intellectual breakthrough (which figures), which was weaving the updated “New Birth of Freedom”-style narrative of American Civic Nationalism (Exceptional, Propositional, some hand-waving about Judeo-Christian values, etc.), and with a positive spin on it, in contrast to high-status Marxist consensus of “totally evil from the beginning and still is” spin at the time. Consider Sontag 54 years ago.
What happened was that the progressives had taken up the dual mantles of (1) rationalism, empiricism, science, etc. *in contrast to* conservative religiosity, and (2) civil liberties of free expression and dissent to the point of subversion *in contrast to* conservative rectitude and patriotic loyalty.
The neocons, many of whom started on the progressive (i.e., Marxist) left, *knew all about* the rules of those games, and how to play them well, much to the chagrin of the traditional, anti-new-dealer paleocons who nearly went extinct under FDR and just as they were crawling back from the brink found themselves easily pushed aside into eventual permanent irrelevance by the neos.
The Neos played the actually open discourse + actual science game and, having both reality*** and a weary public on their side, repeatedly trounced many leftist arguments and claims on topic after topic, but most importantly on this subject, about race, crime, and education.
Many progressive intellectuals were left in a bind. If they stuck to the values and sociological epistemology they had publicly embraced earlier in the century, they weren’t going to win these arguments and make any headway.
On the other hand, when it comes to political existential survival, you are playing to win by any means necessary, and the obvious answer was just to give up on those values and epistemological foundations, and declare them invalid and illegitimate by using the ultimate trump card – declaring them to be inherently and irredeemably racist. The sequence was to take an achievement that was the basis for the pinnacle of universalist human civilization, then to call it mere a ‘white’ ideological framework, on par with a thousand other different and culturally diverse frameworks which were all ‘equally good’, and then to go further and say it was the worst thing ever, designed by whites for the express purpose of keeping whites on top.
Now, you may think that abandoning commitments to enlightenment ideas, classically liberal values, rationality, rigorous scientific epistemology, and so forth, and denigrating all that as evil, for the sake of winning petty political battles, would be a tragic and reckless move that would eventually blow up in their face. Well, yes. But it (a) worked, and (b) is blowing up in *all* our faces.
***Well, almost. The neocons were often as coy as Murray is today about admitting that equal opportunity and equal rights would not by themselves ever produce a convergence to equal outcomes. The big problem with that coyness is that it meant that neoconservative civic nationalism would always be living on borrowed time, as eventually that bill would come due. “Hey man, where’s that equality you promised me?” This is perhaps forgivable given the much higher uncertainty and optimism about such matters at the time, and in the sense that anything more would have been a bridge too far. It really could have worked out if it were true that blacks were just like whites but had not yet been given a fair chance. But unfortunately, that’s not how it is.
“That’s *not where it came* from, and anyway, *not how* things really work.”
Of course, that’s not where it “came from”,
in the sense of direct causation.
My point is that, wherever it came from, the speed/ depth of it’s progress hinged largely on external factors, as is often the case.
“not how things *really* work.”
I don’t see what makes you so sure of that.
Had there not been a wave of fear vs. / revulsion toward the Right, chances are quite high, that the ’08 GOP (open seat) pick would’ve outright won (like in ’88), or at least forced a closer race, against a moderate Dem (like in ’76). .
The Dems would only dare to nominate an unvetted Farrakhanist, upon knowing that the GOP brand had been far more tarnished, than at any time since at least ’64.
As for “it… is blowing up in *all* our faces…. could have worked out, if it were true that blacks were *just* like whites….”:
Fair enough, tho I suspect that it still may’ve worked at least somewhat, even if the two races were a bit different, if, say, mass commo technology hadn’t so aided instantaneous agitProp.
While we’re at the (long) intellectual history of all this, I can’t resist linking to Auster’s original article on multicultural ‘inclusive’ education, from way back in 1989. Read the whole thing, but two quotes to whet your appetite.
And this:
People, that was *31 years* ago. This bun’s been baking a long time.
One can imagine the anti-anti-CRT’ers back then, “Don’t do anything, you’ll regret it!”
Flash forward, “Well, how are things?”
“You were right. We didn’t do anything, and now we regret it.”
>—” We didn’t do anything, and now we regret it.”
What exactly do you regret not doing? You were a little vague on that.
And I’d be curious to know when you think this past period of American greatness you are nostalgic for had its peak.
I’m getting tired of hearing and reading about race.
Here’s another highlight from Richard Delgado: “If you are black or Mexican, you should flee Enlightenment‑based democracies like mad, assuming you have any choice. Enlightenment philosophy is the very means by which you are rendered a nonperson, always one-down. A thousand myths and tales, a thousand scripts, plots, narratives, and stories will paint you as hapless, primitive, savage, lascivious, and not-so-smart, suitable only for menial work. It’s as rigid a system as the Middle Ages, yet harder to change because it’s all informal and implicit.”
That’s the Richard Delgado philosophy. It would never occur to his fans among the high school teachers of Maryland that a black or Mexican student might say in response that it’s precisely the Delgado philosophy that paints them as hapless, incapable of escape, trapped in a system so vast and so intricate there’s nothing they can do to resist its brutality and its insidiousness.
The Leon Bridges philosophy is the healthy, grown-up response: “They tell me I was born to lose. But I made a good, good thing out of bad, bad news.”
John McWhorter wins this and writes the best article on the definition of “CRT”.
https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/you-are-not-a-racist-to-criticize
Read the whole substack post, but two awesome quotes:
As far as I can tell, this is Kling’s position: go ahead ahead bring that knife to the gunfight as long as you look good doing it.
The answer is to convince. This one shouldn’t be that hard – the extreme left has gone past where many/most of the rest of their fellow ideological travelers are. But both ideological sides are whiffing at meatballs these days.
The legislation route is at best a slightly less clumsy “Flight 93 election” type of effort.
Here are a couple of recent articles:
Sullivan:
https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/what-happened-to-you-e5f
Friedersdorf:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/07/north-carolina-critical-race-theory-ban-free-speech/619381/
And one from 1997. Remember that classical liberal left has not had a problem of criticizing CRT in the past. https://www.stephenhicks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Farber-Sherry-BEYOND-ALL-REASON-Posner-REV.pdf
Hilarious that in 55 comments not one person mentioned that teachers attending a Cato Conference might be oh, just a little bit atypical? Especially one that lumps 5-12 grade teachers together.
Why spend so much time and effort trying to define CRT? Most of this is literally nothing more than a *re-branding* of concepts from the 60s/70s to justify special treatment for certain under performing minorities, primarily the 13%. Maybe that special treatment made perfect sense back then (and it probably did given our history), but certainly not 60+ years later.
***
And while Mr. Kendi is using trendier language—“antiracism,” “implicit bias,” etc.—critical race theory amounts to little more than a fancy argument for affirmative action, and always has. The theory comes out of the legal academy, and early proponents argued that race, ethnicity and gender should be used as academic credentials in hiring and promoting professors. It’s less a serious academic discipline than a hustle. It posits that racial inequality today is the sole fault of whites and the sole responsibility of whites to solve—through racial preferences for blacks. It’s employed by elites primarily for the benefit of elites, though in the name of helping the underprivileged. Ultimately, it’s about blaming your problems on other people—based on their race—which might be the last thing we should be teaching our children.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/critical-race-theory-is-a-hustle-11626214782?st=6cnc3nwcf9gjkpy&reflink=article_copyURL_share