Reviewing this conversation, I think it was my saying ‘just so stories’ that led to the misunderstanding. If Freudian psychoanalysis had been the comparison that first came to my mind, then maybe you would have understood what I meant.
I believe we are talking about 3 sets of ideas here. The first are those not susceptible to evidence by their nature, for example utilitarianism or solipsism. Then there are ideas that are capable of being tested, whether scientific theories or eg theories about where writing originated. And then there are things like Freudian psychoanalysis, which appear to be in the second group but actually allow so much latitude that any evidence can be interpreted as fitting them. This can also include various woo ideas, especially as they fail testing and their practicioners adapt to insulate them from it.
When I said that if CRT did not make testable predictions it was not a theory, I meant that it would in that case belong to the third group of ideas that masquerade as being testable theories, but actually are not. Whereas I believe you were thinking of it being in the first group, so we ended up talking at cross purposes.
It’s possible that what people call the CRT framework belongs in the first group (is there a name for this?) while the ‘6 points most CRT practicioners agree on’ really are empirically testable. And it’s my philosophy that things that are empirically testable ought to be empirically tested (note I am not referring only to running controlled, repeatable scientific experiments here, but also gathering what evidence is available to see if it agrees with the theory or not).
Well, I may have more stringent standards for what constitutes a conclusive test. A lot of hypotheses are extremely difficult to test rigorously, but that doesn’t mean that “testing” them sloppily will produce acceptably meaningful results.
As I always used to say to the departed SlackerInc, the knowledge we get from research on a subject is only as good as the research methodology.
That’s very different from saying something isn’t testable at all. Having spent some time looking into various woo theories, I’m very wary of people claiming their pet theory isn’t testable or that the tests that have been done are not valid because of < dubious reason >.
There’s also the difference between (to put it in legal terms) accepting something on the preponderance of the evidence, vs refusing to accept (or to reject) it until proved beyond reasonable doubt. That’s probably a philosophical difference and as such not necessarily resolvable.
I will say that I think it is useful to examine one’s own biases. If all the explanations and theories you believe match what you want to be true of the world, that is a good reason to re-examine them.
I’m not sure what ideas in CRT wouldn’t be testable, on the most literal level:
Institutionalized, or Systemic, racism–defined as “the systemic ways dominant society restricts a racialized individual or group’s access to opportunities”–is alive and kicking today. Obviously we can get lost in the definitions here, but if we can hammer out a sufficiently unambiguous lexicon, we can look at the facts. If we find, for example, that Black homeowners on average receive the same estimate for a home price as White homeowners with similar homes, or that Black students receive similar discipline for similar infractions as White students, or that applicants with “Black” names are hired at similar rates to similar applicants with “White” names, each set of facts would undermine this idea.
Past racist systems affect the present. This one should be obvious, and its denial is so bizarre, but okay. If we discover that many White people in the past didn’t benefit from racist structures that allowed them to accumulate wealth disproportionately, and that Black people in the past weren’t exploited by those racist structures, it’d be falsified. Or if we discovered that no significant number of White people inherited wealth from people in the past, it’d be falsified. Or if we discovered that there were no ill effects to growing up in a household in which a parent was in prison, or any of the innumerable other ways that past racist systems affect the present, you’d undermine this idea.
Racism is a common experience for folks whose racial identity is non-dominant. If you prove that, say, a majority of Black people haven’t experienced a racist encounter in the past year, that would go a long way toward undermining this one.
Interestingly enough this is one of the firmest examples of a system that was racist against white people, if you look at the effects rather than the motivations like many want to do. I couldn’t find statistics for World War II, but for World War 1 an overwhelming amount of casualties were suffered by white people. A Comparative Study of White and Black American Soldiers during the First World War | Cairn.info
Now for people who voluntarily expose themselves to harm, not being able to prove yourself is an impediment. But if you’ve been drafted, you don’t care about valor and moving up the ranks or else you’d have volunteered. When you’re dead, it doesn’t matter if it was because someone who happened to look like you thought you’d make a better soldier.
Now, it does feel a little silly to call this system racist even though the disproportionate casualties from just a few years of war almost match the entire disproportionate policing system in the years since, but many applications of it to other areas also seem like a stretch, and many of those don’t involve letting people die.
I can think of an arena where CRT could potentially be harmful: trying to bring universal health care to people. As far as effects go, in the 70-something years of racially-disproportionate health insurance, it probably killed more people overall than preferentially exposing white people to violence in the World Wars, and was partly caused by racial indifference since unionized, white, people didn’t want to push for universal health care since they got insurance through their jobs.
Now, whatever the relative statistics are, universal health care will help more white people than black people just through sheer numbers. Any voice who says “but, you’re just doing this because it will help white people!” is a voice against doing the thing that will save the most lives of all races.
Look, maybe they actually did get followed around the grocery store by the manager, when White people didn’t get followed around, and maybe that was racism. But you never know, maybe someone had secretly put a “Follow me around and earn cookies!” sign on their backs, and the manager was hungry. You don’t know, why do you always have to think racism?
I think this is a fundamental misunderstanding of CRT and its implications. But maybe I’m wrong. Can you find a single example of any CRT scholar who says anything remotely like this?
To be more serious, this is a tricky area to quantify and falsify. One explanation, the one that white supremacists prefer, is that Black people have been indoctrinated by the Left to view every personal failure as an example of racism, and that self-reported instances of racism are therefore suspect. It’s a real convenient argument for folks that don’t want to grapple with issues of racism, and allows the vast majority of reports to be dismissed.
That argument strikes me as plainly stupid, but I’ll be honest, I don’t have the set of facts in front of me to demonstrate why it’s stupid.
And yet it was blacks who were very clearly, and often explicitly, the ones supposed to be marked with a condition of inferiority. That racist systems sometimes also do harm to members of a nominally favored class, most often the poorest/least influential members of that class (eg: poor white people) is hardly novel, and it’s actually kind of the point. Indeed as a #crossthread, I made a similar point in the Lost Cause thread.
And upthread I mentioned Hunter v. Underwood, which remains applicable as a case in point as one of the “totally not racists” [/scare quotes] alternative explanations put forward by the state for an act passed with expressly racist intent was that it was secretly aimed at disempowering poor white people, white supremacist comments at the convention notwithstanding.
Indeed, I would think such a convoluted scheme of entrenching the interests of powerful whites at the expense of PoC and disempowered/poor whites together fits well within what the analytical framework of CRT. At the end of the day, white men with power who pass racist legislation, facially neutral or otherwise, don’t really care so much if it harms powerless white people, just so long as it keeps them in power. I feel we are seeing that play out now, actually, with the GOP and it’s ongoing support for Mr. Trump.
Your passing familiarity makes you think that it’d argue against UHC.
If it doesn’t, rather than study more to figure out why it doesn’t form such an argument, you’ll declare it a useless “hypothesis” (did you mean “theory”?)
If that’s not the structure of your argument, you may wish to clarify.
(note I am not referring only to running controlled, repeatable scientific experiments here, but also gathering what evidence is available to see if it agrees with the theory or not).