Another Critical Race Theory thread

Great Debates
364

And of course, damuriajashi also deftly avoids looking at what the powerful politicians from the right (who are virtually all white) are doing about minority researchers involved in CRT that are becoming influential in academia. It is actually evidence of why CRT exists too. Right now they are trying to repress any teaching of CRT (and everything that even looks like it) in universities and schools (while it being taught in regular schools was almost not a thing, right wing sources usually invented or pointed at parents that were already misled by the right wing media to making them believe that that was the case).

That minority researchers and academics are the ones that will be affected more is not important for the critics of CRT.

What is important to me is that it shows how when politicians from the right claim to support minorities, it is a bunch of hooey. What is going on with the anti-intellectual efforts against minority researchers just demonstrates that there was really no interest on allowing minorities to “watch the watchmen”, or to research them.

365

Yes. I’m also baffled by the constant rhetoric demanding that CRT “explain” this or that phenomenon or complaining that it doesn’t “explain” this or that phenomenon. I think some people see “theory” in the title and immediately think of theories like gravitation or plate tectonics, whose value lies in providing specific quantitative predictive models of physical phenomena.

“Explaining” social phenomena in the social sciences doesn’t work that way. You don’t identify a particular phenomenon, crank it through the mathematical model of a theory, and assess the theory based on whether it adequately explains the phenomenon. There’s no one identifiable social “theory” that can claim to “explain” any complex social phenomenon.

So complaining that CRT doesn’t adequately explain specific social phenomena doesn’t really mean anything, other than sounding vaguely sciencey and conveying a disparaging attitude about CRT. It’s like complaining that your bicycle isn’t successful as a flotation device. The only effect of the complaint is to encourage a negative view of bicycles on the part of people who don’t know much about either bicycles or flotation devices.

366

Does the theory make predictions? If it doesn’t, then it isn’t a theory at all, it’s a Just So story. People like me are asking how CRT ‘explains’ something because we can see results that are the opposite of what CRT would predict.

Now that could be because we don’t understand CRT, and are wrong about what it predicts. But given no one has been able to reply to this point, or link to any CRT scholar who has done so, that doesn’t seem likely.

(However, CRT does explain the current drive to eliminate admissions tests. Since these are more meritocratic and difficult for the rich and powerful to give their kids an advantage on than other admission requirements, there is a ‘convergence of interests’ between underrepresented minorities and rich white people in removing them.)

367

100% of the CRT related outrage that I seen online is about what schools are teachig kids and what ordinary workers are being forced to endorse in order to keep their jobs, and 0% is about what researchers are doing in universities. It may well be the case that the former is a distortion of CRT, it may even have nothing to do with it, and CRT is just a label added by opponents.

But suppose you explain to these people that it’s not actually CRT? What then? They aren’t going to suddenly be happy. They object to the ideas being taught, whether they are CRT or not. That is why I don’t see much point to this thread, it ignores the issue that lead to there being a debate in the first place.

368

Again, that implies a specific narrow definition of “theory” that doesn’t apply in this case. You can restrict your personal definition of the word “theory” any way you want, of course, but that doesn’t mean that CRT scholars or other people who use the word in a different sense from yours are using it “wrong”.

A whole lot of other scholarly discourses, including literature, philosophy, art, political science, etc., also address social phenomena without applying predictive quantitative models to them the way the physical sciences apply such models to physical phenomena. If you think that makes all those discourses “Just So Stories”, well, you’re entitled to your opinion, but that doesn’t mean that there are no insights into social phenomena to be learned from them.

You now seem to have veered off into a different meaning of “explain”. Previously you appeared to be talking about whether CRT provided predictive models in order to explain phenomena, after the manner of scientific theories. Now you’re apparently talking about your attempt to explain a phenomenon based on something you believe about CRT.

It’s the difference between, say, “Jane’s new hypothesis explains the sudden increase as an artefact of the testing protocol” and “Jane’s new hypothesis explains her absentmindedness in meetings these days, because she’s always thinking about the hypothesis”.

I’ve noticed in other threads as well (and ISTM that it may be relevant to your feeling that other posters aren’t addressing what you’re saying) that you have a tendency to flop around linguistically in this sort of way. You start off talking about some term or concept and then drift off into tangentially related remarks about a different sense of the same term or concept, or a different term or concept that sounds like it, and it’s not always easy to keep track of the direction changes.

What, exactly and specifically and citedly, are the things that are being taught and “endorsed” that the outraged people are objecting to? I’ve seen a lot of outrage about strawman caricatures of supposed “CRT” ideas as retailed in right-wing media, but there’s generally a few degrees of separation between the outrage and the documented factual version of what’s actually happening.

369

Not really, until you check what you think the researchers cited got wrong. Again, it depends on the research that was published, not just the framework.

Not sure if I understand this bit, what CRT research pointed at what you claim here? Reading some papers close to the issue you are pointing at, researchers are finding that standardized testing models are aligned to a set of academic standards that meet the needs of White, middle-class students. Not much about rich whites benefiting by removing traditional testing.

What I understand so far is that thanks to systems that rich people have, that includes extra training facilities for testing, is something that poor minorities usually don’t have. The interests of rich or fairly well-to-do people are more likely to be geared to keep advantages like that.

370

Not really, you are demanding that the ignorance of others should be respected…

This is not that kind of board.

371

Sorry, but this is complete nonsense. One of the claims of CRT as laid out in earlier posts is that legal advances for PoC tend to serve the interests of dominant white groups. This appears to me to be testable, aka it makes a prediction, which is why earlier I said I would like to see evidence before deciding whether I agree with it.

When I say that CRT explains the drive to eliminate admissions tests, I mean it fits what the theory would predict. And when I say CRT does not explain disproportionate Jewish success, I mean that it contradicts what the theory (AIUI) would predict. This is clearly the same meaning of ‘explain’ in both cases.

As for the definition of theory, the key point is whether it makes claims that can be falsified. Are you saying CRT does not do this?

372

I’d have to go and dig out things I’ve seen and find references, which I will not be doing during the work day. Is it worth me spending the effort to do so? @iiandyiiii didn’t want to talk about it in this thread AIUI, and with the exception of @GIGObuster I’m not seeing a whole lot of useful engagement from the pro-CRT posters.

373

See my reply to @Kimstu.

Rich people can pay for tutoring and test prep, however, the advantage those provide is limited. Unless they are willing to straight up cheat, the kid still has to go and take the test alone. For other admission criteria like essays, grades, and especially extra-curriculas, money can give a far bigger boost. So the more admissions rely on those factors and the less on tests, the more it benefits rich kids at the expense of poor or middle class.

374

IOW, you have nothing. Really, it is not that hard to find and check for CRT research papers that explain different issues, you need to show that you can do at least that, or it could be that your sources of information misled you a lot about CRT. It is clear that they were and are afraid of finding that there is evidence and research in many of them. So it is better for them to not deal with them or link to them and so most of the readers or viewers of right wing media are kept in the dark.

Same for your following reply about testing. It is clear that you did not understand the whole side debate about what Ivy league universities are doing, more poor minorities get to be admitted when things other than testing are looked at.

375

You have completely missed the point of interest convergence.

376

A better question - how does Asians doing better than Whites in a narrow field negatively impact White supremacy? It doesn’t. It serves a useful purpose, in fact. White supremacy loves model minorities - I have first-hand experience of that here in South Africa, where Coloureds and Indians were purposefully used for the same function. “Divide and conquer” is a tactic older than dirt.

Is there a particular reason you’re not capitalizing her name, or CRT, or Asian? Your shift key is clearly not broken.

Anyway - this paper was from the very first CRT symposium.

Since you “know” her and her concerns, I’m sure you’ve read it, and can explain how an article on reparations for, among others, Japanese-Americans, that mentions “Japanese” 104 times, is not an “asian gloss”[sic]?

Or in her own words:

I participated in the first published symposium of Critical Race Theory scholarship, with an article (Looking to the Bottom, Harvard Civil Rights Civil Liberties Law Review) on reparations for Japanese Americans and Native Hawaiians. I co-authored the first CRT book, Words That Wound, centering analysis of hate crimes against Asian Americans. I used CRT analysis to write the first law review article on accent discrimination (Voices of America, Yale Law Review) based on case studies of Filipino and Native Hawaiian litigants. In We Won’t Go Back, written with Charles Lawrence, I used CRT to analyze Asian American responses to affirmative action. I have applied CRT to develop a course on Asian Americans and the law, first at UCLA and then at Georgetown. This work was foundational Critical Race Theory, developed by unpacking anti-Asian racism through a historical and structural analysis of US racism. All of it came out of struggle: real issues and real needs in Asian American communities. That is what Critical Race Theory is, and Asians have been at the center of it. If I start a citation list, it will go on for pages – many brilliant scholars using CRT to analyze anti-Asian racism. Suffice to say, Asian American thinkers were central in the development of CRT, and we were pushed and supported by our Black and Latinx colleagues.

But yeah, keep pushing that “Black-only CRT” narrative…

I’m not really interested in hashing out the ways “my own definition” and “made up” are different in implication or effect with you.

377

Not really, you are just giving us a guess there, not how important or significant that convergence is.

378

The person refusing to answer straight questions is complaining of lack of “useful engagement”? Oh, the irony.

379

Try asking some next time.

380

Congrats, you’re the first person to actually try and answer the question. Can you clarify whether you mean ‘White Supremacy’ is merely allowing Asians to have more success than whites in those fields, or that it is causing the greater success?

381

If you’ve somehow failed to notice the large and increasing amount of white supremacist rhetoric circulating in the last few years, I doubt any cite I could provide would convince you.

But it’s interesting how this appears to have struck a nerve.

IAN MrDibble but my money’s on “neither”. White supremacists are merely happy to misuse data about ‘Asian success’ in a desperate attempt to deflect from the very real effects of their historic and ongoing racism. If there wasn’t an ‘Asian success’ effect they could pretend was relevant, they’d simply find some other deflection.

382

Not “some”. Just the one, actually.

383

I mean using. The how of the success is irrelevant to my point.