Another Critical Race Theory thread

Great Debates
21

From the linked article:

Yet, somehow, [Critical Race Theory] gives Republicans the heebie-jeebies.

“Heebie-jeebies” is an unfair framing which implies that there’s no such thing as a principled opposition to CRT. It’s kind of a bit like when republicans casually dismiss criticism of Trump as “Trump Derangement Syndrome”.

Furthermore, opposition to CRT isn’t restricted to republicans, or conservatives for that matter. It’s quite easy to find centrist, socialist, and Marxist critiques of CRT as well.

That conservatives oppose CRT tells me something: that they oppose any change to a pattern of systemic oppression, because they benefit from the system . Breaking that pattern might liberate millions of people, but it hurts the profits of an extraordinarily wealthy minority.

Frankly, this is just silly, for several reasons.

Firstly, the presumption that conservatives who oppose CRT must therefore oppose “any change to a pattern of systemic oppression” is simply illogical. CRT isn’t the only game in town. It’s perfectly possible to advocate for reforming oppressive systems without advocating for CRT, just like it’s perfectly possible to advocate for reducing wealth inequality without endorsing no-holds-barred, “eat-the-rich” European style socialism.

Secondly, it presumes that CRT’s methods will actually lead to its stated goal of racial equity. There’s plenty of room for disagreement on that point. What if you think CRT’s methods are counterproductive, and will just make society more divided? Does that mean you support systemic oppression? That’d be a neat trick; supporting systemic oppression while opposing social division.

Thirdly, I don’t know where Myers gets this idea that CRT would hurt the profits of the 1%. CRT isn’t some rogue, subversive ideology. It’s thoroughly mainstream. Robin DiAngelo and Ibram Kendi charge $15,000 per hour to give diversity talks at Fortune 500 companies. Far from disadvantaging the rich, it seems very much to me as though the rich have wholeheartedly embraced CRT and are using it to turn a profit.

22

I was unaware Tucker did all the producing, marketing and dissemination of his show, all on his lonesome. Also unaware he was the owner of Fox.

23

I think that’s a pretty good brief definition, with the caveat that CRT is very complex and not monolithic – there’s plenty of debate within CRT advocates about what it means and what we should do about it.

My definition, briefly – CRT posits that race is socially constructed, with no significant biological basis; that, over the centuries, race has been socially constructed as a tool to aid the powerful (who are usually white males); that this has been used very successfully to divide, conquer, and aid in other aims of the wealthy and powerful, to the point that racism in some form has infiltrated deeply into most government and societal institutions of the United States; and that it’s this institutional racism/bias/bigotry/etc., rather than the personal actions of those individuals motivated by personal racial animus, that is responsible for most of the harm of racism in the US. I’m much less informed about CRT (and the facts of race and racism) in other parts of the world, so I’ll limit my comments to the US.

It’s hard to conclusively prove all of these things aside from that race (and therefore racism) are socially constructed. But IMO it’s the best explanation of so many facts of the world and society around me – both provable, citable facts (i.e. statistics and the like) and my personal experience. It explains why, both statistically and in my personal experience, black people are faced with so many more and greater challenges in achieving success in most (but not all) areas of life. That’s why I see it as a useful theory. And unless/until something more useful and more explanatory comes around, I think it’s the best explanation of the facts of race and racism in America.

24

This is the biggest issue I have with the term. The impression I get is that the people who support the idea of systemic racism seem to shift the blame away from individual racists, which I just don’t get. Here are some of the things I believe and why I don’t like when systemic racism is seemingly used as a crutch, which is what it seems like it’s used for.

  1. The US as a whole is a racist country.

  2. Some people are racist, to varying extents, and some people aren’t racist.

Systems are composed of the individuals who make up those systems. Is there a racist law on the books somewhere? The racists in that situation are the individual legislators that passed the law, as well as the current legislators that refuse to repeal the law. Blame the voters as well in a situation where a known racist legislator is reelected. Is there a bank somewhere with a policy that leads to racial discrimination in lending? The person / people who made the policy are the racists, as are the people who refuse to repeal the policy. The local PD suffers from systemic racism? Fire the racist cops. They can’t be fired? Why not? Somebody makes those hiring decisions. Find out who that person is, and there’s your racist. There’s a policy saying that a cop can’t be fired for being racist and the person who does the hiring and firing has their hands tied? Then just move up the chain and find the person / people who wrote that policy and blame them.

Blaming systemic racism seems to take away some of the blame from the actual racists and places some of the blame on people who aren’t racist. That makes it more difficult to find the individual racists, not less. That’s the problem I have with the idea.

25

Well, until somebody with a more complete understanding comes along, I’ve just been reading a book on the Frankfurt school, so I naturally consider myself an expert on at least the Critical Theory part…

Critical Theory is a particular strain of Marxist philosophy whose basic idea is that it’s not enough to analyze the world (as Marx alleges previous philosophers have predominantly done), it must instead be changed, and a prerequisite to this change is a critique of the current state of affairs—‘critique’ here often being traced to Kant’s critiques, but applied to social, political, or economical issues, and in particular, the power structures underlying them. In that sense, Das Kapital can be considered the founding text of Critical Theory, in that it presented a critique of political economy, denouncing the exploitation of the labor force by the bourgeoisie, and exposing the structural oppression inherent in the system.

An important breakaway point from orthodox Marxism for Critical Theory, at least in the form as conceived by Horkheimer/Adorno, is its renunciation of all ideology, and emphasis on a ‘negative’ style of critique: broadly, not saying that things should be any particular way, but rather, giving reasons why they shouldn’t be the way they are now.

Different ‘flavors’ of Critical Theory locate the origins of power differentials, inequality, socioeconomic oppression and so on in different social and cultural assumptions and structures, as opposed to individual psychology. Where for Marx, it was the ownership of the means of production that lies at the heart of the power struggle, Horkheimer and Adorno were more concerned with the question of how power differentials led to the horrors of fascism, for example, moving away from trying to identify any one particular source that might be responsible for these ills.

Critical Race Theory, to the best of my understanding, then locates the origin of social power differentials in the notion of race, which it criticizes as itself socially constructed to keep up the status quo—that is, creating a part of the population that is essentially exploited to keep the powerful in power. As such, the focus of racism is shifted from an individual phenomenon into something baked into the foundations of modern culture; it’s not just your weird old uncle after he’s had a few too many, it’s society itself, and thus, any successful means of combating racism must necessarily include systemic change.

This simplifies a lot, and undoubtedly gets a couple of things wrong, so if anybody has additions/corrections, I’d be grateful.

26

You lost me on that bit of taking some blame away from actual racists, as I have seen when racists do out themselves, there are then moves from others that are not seen as racist by a mess of people to help them try to overcome the proper adversity they get by coming to their defense.

27

The part I don’t get is how we change a system other than changing the individuals who make up that system. The US legal code is a system. But the people responsible for it are the 435 members of the house and 100 senators. The judicial system is made up of individual judges. The executive system at the federal level is made up of Biden and his cabinet and the people that work under them. At the local level you have all the municipal police departments made up of individual officers, and so on.

I think we’ve reached a point where individual racists are probably not going to stop being racist. Back in the day there were people like Robert Byrd (D-WV), who grew up a member of the Klan and died a friend of the NAACP. In his day it was possible to be a racist because that’s how (generic) you were raised. With more exposure to people from other backgrounds and with education, those kind of racists who were otherwise decent people outgrew their racism.

These days, I think being a racist is a symptom of being an asshole, and that’s not something you can educate people out of. Just look at all the videos of all the Karens Behaving Badly out there. That kind of racism can’t be fixed by education. The only way to fix the problem, IMHO, is to identify the racists (who are most likely racist as one aspect of being an asshole) and remove them from positions of authority.

It’s the impression I get that this is the end result of the idea that “everybody is racist.” If everyone is racist, Tucker Carlson can tell himself that he’s no different than anyone else, so why is what he is doing especially wrong?

28

You did not read the cite huh?

29

I was trying to merge my reply into my earlier post and rushed my reply :sweat_smile:. Yes, Carlson is openly racist. And I messed up by implying that the idea of systemic racism is about trying to change the minds of the Tucker Carlson’s of the world. Nothing is going to change his mind. Best case scenario is that he might pretend to stop being racist.

IMHO the problem comes in with saying that yes, Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump and Steve King and so on are racist, but so is my Aunt Edna who doesn’t discriminate against people based on race, has always voted Democratic, supports BLM, and so on. How does lumping them all together and saying “everyone is racist” help the problem?

30

You don’t think all the people who came before that are also responsible for the system? How can you change dead people?

Yes, it’s a system - but it’s greater than the sum of its parts, and it has complex feedback loops and emergent behaviour. “Just change the individuals” is not a productive mantra when the system, itself, is capable of creating new individuals to replace the ones you change, and at a greater rate.

I don’t think that’s true for everyone. Yes, for some, but not all.

31

What helps me think about this (and I’m not pretending to speak with any authority from a CRT-angle or anything) is the analogy of the racist hiring algorithm. So suppose you have a company and decide to use AI to weed out potential candidates for a job, because AI is hot shit, and you want a piece of that, or whatever. You want to get to a point where you can feed a resume to the AI, and it tells you whether the candidate is a good fit for that position.

Now, the issue is how the AI is supposed to know who is and who isn’t a good fit. But, if you’ve got a large enough company, that’s no problem: you just feed it the performance evaluations and resumes of a large enough sample of employees, and you get a model that connects resumes with likely performance. And then, you’re all set: with each new resume that comes in, you just feed it to the AI, and it spits out a percentage telling you how well that candidate is expected to do in a given job.

However, after a while, you notice that the AI tends to prioritize white males as candidates, while deprioritizing non-white people of equal qualification. Your AI shows clear racial bias. So, an approach combating racism at the individual level would be, scrap the AI, and start over. Maybe it was just defective, or something.

Except that’s not going to help any: each new AI you train will inherit the same bias—it’s not your AI that’s racist (indeed, that’s a nonsensical notion), but there’s racial bias in the training data used to build the model your AI operates on. White people are hired more often compared to people of color with equal qualifications, they’re promoted more often, paid better, evaluated better. That’s the correlations your AI learned, when presented with the training data.

Now, every kid growing up in the modern world is essentially in the position of that AI. We don’t learn that differently; so, we use the ‘data’ society presents us with to abstract general rules (which typically has a far greater effect than the rules we’re explicitly taught, hence, parents are often instructed to teach by example). But those data are heavily skewed: most heroes in films are white males; the archetypical powerful person is an old white guy in a suit; companies are led by white males; criminals, even nonhuman ‘evil’ entities are more often depicted as black; and so on.

That’s how the individual racists are created: by being extremely sensitive to the racially skewed training data presented by society. Sure: there is considerable variance. The data in some (social) environments is more equitable than in others; but it’s bias-free hardly anywhere, and as long as there is some bias, there will be ‘clumps’ of exceptionally high bias, which will lead to people with extremely racist views.

So, this is at least one point at which you can apply force to change this situation: do what every competent AI engineer would do, and clean up your data—which means, in this case, change the current system: ensure equal representation for minorities in positions of power, in media as well as in the corporate world, or even in everyday language, for example. In the current situation, if we magically could switch everyone’s learned biases off, and start the learning process again, we’d likely be back where we are in no time.

Now, I don’t think this is the only feasible strategy, or even that it’s going to be sufficient on its own. There are more parts to systemic racism than just representation, for instance; there are ingrained power structures, laws on the books, and so on. Furthermore, nobody’s saying that you shouldn’t combat racism at the individual level, as well; that anybody should just get to ‘blame society’ for their individual racist acts. But it strikes me as unlikely that a strategy that focuses on the individual exclusively will be any better than trying to train one hiring AI after the other.

32

Thing is that is not really that are saying that all are racists, one thing you should remember about the ones you mentioned is that their racism is not a dealbreaker for a lot of people (that do have power to give them a bullhorn or vote to keep those in power). IMHO around a third of Americans are not only trying to keep it that way, but also to keep a narrative that has been in place even longer than CRT came into the picture.

That narrative includes very off the wall criticisms of a new framework that are launched by the same actors that in reality are not impartial at all.

33

Here’s where my optimism kicks in, and admittedly it might be unrealistic optimism. Imagine a world in which Hillary Clinton had won in 2016. The SCOTUS would have 6 liberal justices, 1 moderate leaning conservative, and 2 hardcore conservatives. That’s a change of just 3 people. In this scenario the recent law passed in Georgia to make it harder for Black people to vote would be on it’s way to being struck down by the SCOTUS. Having had their racist law struck down, some of those racist Republican state legislators would possibly be facing stronger opposition from a Democrat in their next election. In districts where a large enough proportion of the white voters aren’t racist, they would likely lose their seat. Maybe there might even be a court challenge to reduce gerrymandering in the state congressional districting, which would be a lot more likely to be upheld by a 6-3 liberal court than by the current 6-3 conservative court. Add up enough of these victories and the racist white folk might have to start pretending to not be racist, which I still believe is the best that can be hoped for.

The link says he was home schooled in a racist family. That shows that I was wrong in assuming that there isn’t anyone who no longer grows up racist. Yes, we should focus on education to help those particular individuals to outgrow their racism. But my guess is that comparatively few current day racists are of this particular type.

34

Sure, they are being an asshole, but they are being an asshole to a specific target that they feel is deserving of it based on social cues that are pervasive in our society.

35

Well, everyone’s a little bit racist…

36

…this twitter thread by Imani Gandy (AKA the Angry Black Lady) contains about the simplest explanation of what it is that I’ve read: and its hilarious.

(Some bad language)

She later challenges people to define CRT, and some responses are just outright bonkers. (But you have to dig deep to find them)

So Gandy argues that CRT is only really relevant in a limited academic environment. What people are really angry about is just normal anti-racism.

37

I wasn’t going to enter the fray until somebody else brought up Marx. And now you’ve got that Prokofiev cantata stuck in my head.

I hate living in the suburbs. Specifically, I hate driving 45 mph for ½ a mile, then sitting at a red light for three minutes; over and over, to perform the simplest errand. I dread approaching a crosswalk where the concept of pedestrians is alien to drivers making right turns with chins craned left. In 2021, moving into the urban core is an impossibility for the majority of the middle class, even if they wanted to. But down deep, I know one of the main reasons we moved out her in the first place. In particular, who we were moving away from.

I avoid the US’s medical system as much as possible. Professionally one of my collaterals is worm comp rep, and it’s the most frustrating part of my job. There’s a lot of reasons it reached this dysfunctional point, and one is “why should we pay for them?”

The justice system, both criminal and civil, are also at a state of dysfunction. Education, both higher and basic; public and private, all carry the stain of the US’s original sin. And as an officer in submarines, iiandyiiii may not have been spared the worst of its effects on the military, but among us dirtbags in the amphibious navy it was common as the roaches on the mess deck.

But is it the root cause? With few exceptions such as Angela Davis, Black activists have always been resistant to the argument that inadequately regulated capitalism was the monster they’ve fed with their own blood. Critical Race Theory, as I understand it, only takes the root cause analysis so far, and because, like the idiots who drown every argument in Evolutionary Psychology to explain everything, they turn out the lights and pull down the shades. “Tribalism” is somehow so ingrained in the human psyche, and more so in the White race because it’s served them so well, that it makes for as undeniable belief as the obviousness of the sun’s circling the earth. Maybe not the claptrap about Dr. Yakub creating white devil-people, but still see selfishness as an almost genetic trait that’s more dominant among whites through the conditioning of privilege.

And so we avoid Marxist economic philosophy to find a root cause, but jump to Lenin and to Stalin, where the undesirable class/race must be liquidated because, as the last-named explained to lady Astor, they refuse to commit suicide. All theories carry within them the seeds of their own destruction; hopefully smiting a deserving antithesis or two along the way, but not without some collateral innocents as well.

38

That seems to be a large part of what’s up for debate. I disagree with that assessment.

Does she say what it actually is, rather than what it isn’t? As my posts make clear, the impression I have is that it’s mainly about racism being a systemic problem rather than an individual problem. Is this actually the case, or is my understanding flawed?

39

As the Purdue University writing lab explains it (there are many other frameworks students can use BTW):

https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/subject_specific_writing/writing_in_literature/literary_theory_and_schools_of_criticism/critical_race_theory.html

Critical Race Theory, or CRT, is a theoretical and interpretive mode that examines the appearance of race and racism across dominant cultural modes of expression. In adopting this approach, CRT scholars attempt to understand how victims of systemic racism are affected by cultural perceptions of race and how they are able to represent themselves to counter prejudice.

Closely connected to such fields as philosophy, history, sociology, and law, CRT scholarship traces racism in America through the nation’s legacy of slavery, the Civil Rights Movement, and recent events. In doing so, it draws from work by writers like Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King, Jr., and others studying law, feminism, and post-structuralism. CRT developed into its current form during the mid-1970s with scholars like Derrick Bell, Alan Freeman, and Richard Delgado, who responded to what they identified as dangerously slow progress following Civil Rights in the 1960s.

Prominent CRT scholars like Kimberlé Crenshaw, Mari Matsuda, and Patricia Williams share an interest in recognizing racism as a quotidian component of American life (manifested in textual sources like literature, film, law, etc). In doing so, they attempt to confront the beliefs and practices that enable racism to persist while also challenging these practices in order to seek liberation from systemic racism.

As such, CRT scholarship also emphasizes the importance of finding a way for diverse individuals to share their experiences. However, CRT scholars do not only locate an individual’s identity and experience of the world in his or her racial identifications, but also their membership to a specific class, gender, nation, sexual orientation, etc. They read these diverse cultural texts as proof of the institutionalized inequalities racialized groups and individuals experience every day.

As Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic explain in their introduction to the third edition of Critical Race Theory: The Cutting Edge , “Our social world, with its rules, practices, and assignments of prestige and power, is not fixed; rather, we construct with it words, stories and silence. But we need not acquiesce in arrangements that are unfair and one-sided. By writing and speaking against them, we may hope to contribute to a better, fairer world” (3). In this sense, CRT scholars seek tangible, real-world ends through the intellectual work they perform. This contributes to many CRT scholars’ emphasis on social activism and transforming everyday notions of race, racism, and power.

More recently, CRT has contributed to splinter groups focused on Asian American, Latino, and Indian racial experiences.

40

I have heard plenty of things I agree with within the descriptions of CRT but I still see no clear, consistent message that people can discuss. Over and over again the issue of systemic racism appears, something I consider unquestionable to begin with. But just about everything besides that is rambling and seems to be the personal opinions and experiences of the person offering the explanation. It could be the best theory on earth but that won’t be realized if a people can’t understand the message. I don’t understand why that principle isn’t realized here, and in many other recent causes. If you can’t convey your message in plain simple language it will be ignored, denied contradicted, and it probably is lacking in meaningful substance as well.