BTW, I confirmed on my own that that last bit about: “More recently, CRT has contributed to splinter groups focused on Asian American, Latino, and Indian racial experiences.” is happening.
It is one big part that convinced me that a big chunk of the criticism against CRT is baseless. Without mentioning anyone, I do remember right wing critics of CRT in this message board claiming that CRT was not benefiting or was silent about Asians or other minorities, confronted with a cite from an Asian scholar using CRT that criticized China’s treatment of the Uyghurs those critics only chose to ignore the evidence of how narrow or already prejudged their views are of the CRT framework.
The misunderstanding IMHO is that you are not getting that CRT is a framework, not the research itself, like in the example of the Asian researcher about the bad treatment of the Uyghurs in China, it shows research that is specific and stands or fails depending on the quality of the specific research.
What I’m trying to say here is that you are not noticing that you are demanding that all research and data gathering should remain the same. NOW that would really be unscientific right away. I would agree that sociology has its flaws, but we usually do check the quality of the individual papers, not reach for a blanket judgement of a framework used.
I think I conveyed it in relatively plain and simple language. But it’s always easier for opponents to make up shit than to accurately and concisely explain a complex idea. So it’s always an uphill battle – just like the fight against racism, bigotry, and all the other bad things are.
I’m not demanding anything except a clear explanation of what CRT is. Saying it is a framework is not clear, and if it is a framework it should be a lot more definable than the work that it categorizes. Don;t expect people to put the effort into understanding this so far nebulously explained concept, it’s proponents need to do the work to present a argument that will interest people.
One of the reasons CRT can’t be taken seriously is exactly the sort of refusal by CRT proponents to ever admit that CRT actually exists or defend it whenever its absurdities are pointed out. Since I’m on the wrong side of this argument to be allowed to critique other posters in the thread with impunity, I’ll use the tweets from the Angry Klonopin Addict cited in Banquet Bear’s post as a perfect example. The idea that no one has ever used CRT outside of law schools, that it’s not used in any “high school” or “church” or “workplace,” and that is has no adherents besides one unnamed professor at Virginia, is an absurd lie. CRT ideology is being taught at all sorts of places in 2021, that’s the reason we’re talking about it. You’d think that if was such a great thing then it could be defended on its own merits rather than doing this totally disingenuous dance of “CRT? never heard of it!” whenever someone objects to segregated rock-climbing classes, or destroying schools that have “too many Asians,” or teaching five-year-olds that math is racist.
Every educated person outside the eugenics-adjacent far right has understood that race is socially constructed for 100 years. CRT retreats from this by positing that race and racism are metaphysically fundamental facts of the universe and by trying to take over, rather than eliminate, the social construction of race. Teaching five-year-olds to identify themselves primarily as “white” and think of race as the only factor that motivates society is an absolutely insane idea to go about “eliminating racism” but in the CRT curriculum that’s exactly what happens.
CRT is a recipe for perpetual race war that justifies itself with 1) the false claim that we are already in one 2) the refusal to admit that it ever actually exists when challenged on any of its beliefs or actions.
I’ll also add that the right-wing analysis of CRT is completely off-base and that nutpicking cranks like James Lindsay to represent anti-CRT criticism is another fallacy. It has nothing to do with Marxism (in fact, they’re fundamentally incompatible) and the constant invocation of the Frankfurt School boogeyman to make connections between the Marxist left and the identity politics left that don’t really exist is a tiresome bit of intellectual laziness.
There are loads of normal, rational people who can see how crazy the CRT obsession with race is and have problems with what it’s doing to education, race relations, and social progress in America. The refusal to engage with them in favor of two extremes on Twitter shrieking at each other is just another sign of an ideology that’s totally indefensible on its own merits.
We are in one, in a manner of speaking, much in the same way that we’re in a class war. And in both cases, there is a real death count.
But when the poor start to speak out against persecution by the rich or non-whites about persecution by whites, suddenly the response is “Whoa! Why are you stirring things up? Everything was fine until you started kicking up a fuss!”. But then in asymmetric wars, the smaller groups often get characterized as terrorists (unless they win and get to write history, of course).
As much as I’ve been critiquing the systemic part of CRT, I think this claim is not supportable. It’s obvious that there is a race war going on. Not every single one of us is participating in it, and that’s part of my issue with the systemic phrasing of things, but there most definitely is a race war taking place. For anyone claiming otherwise, I think at the very least they would have to either 1) point out when the race war ended or 2) claim that there never was one to begin with. Which of those do you believe, and what evidence do you have to support it?
If you mean what is shown below then it is somewhat clear, but not what I’ve heard and seen in mainstream media where most people will hear anything about this, and it is still flawed by perceptions of intent.
You didn’t mention a principle I’ve heard over and over again that slavery was the ‘original sin’ of this country, really IMHO a dumb thing to tell a largely Christian audience because it implies an inescapable guilt held by all people. If that’s not part of CRT then I shouldn’t hear that almost every time the subject is discussed.
Maybe the message about the systemic racism being worse than individual racism was intended to be clearly stated but I never hear it, rather I hear about how ‘white’ people are continuing to rig the system in their favor and refusing to even admit to the existence of system racism. That’s true, but if it’s part of CRT it’s not in your definition.
I’m not sure if CRT actually claims these things, but this is also part of my issue with the idea of systemic racism. The racism of, say, the plantation owners of the Confederacy, belongs to those particular people, and they are all long gone. Even a direct descendent of those people (and many of them are people who we would recognize as Black rather than white) doesn’t bear the blame for that racism. To carry MLKs statement a bit further, each person should be judged based on the content of their character, not on the color of their skin, and also not on who their ancestors were or what their ancestors did. The converse is that many people are quite deficient in character. It’s not just a few bad apples, it’s a whole lot of bad apples, which is why I think characterizing the race war as ongoing is accurate.
I think you’re hearing rather superficial and probably inaccurate descriptions of CRT from the media. But let’s skip that. What do you think of my definition? Do you disagree, or find it problematic, or otherwise?
It can be, by people who bother to find out what it actually means. The only reason you can’t take it seriously is because you consistently decline to do so.
What @Left_Hand_of_Dorkiness said, It is clear that you are missing the sarcasm and what she is really saying, the job of the critic there is to come up with the definition. Tyler Campbell (the one tweeting her) claims he was taught in high school about it and if that was the case he should come with the definition he claims to have learned. It seems that we will have to wait a lot for that, more likely what he thought was CRT was not.
I’m sure that I have. However, in the end that is what will count, what the majority of people will perceive of this.
I’ll get back to you. In general it’s fine but you bring up questions of intent, and it’s lacking in any conclusion. Leave out the intent part and you are just reciting facts disconnected from any explanation of how this will help.
And for everyone else with some definition of CRT, if it doesn’t explain how the words ‘Critical’, ‘Race’, and ‘Theory’ apply then it’s a loser. Everybody will use their pre-existing definition of ‘Race’ whether or not it applies, but what do ‘Critical’ and ‘Theory’ mean in this context?
The Criticism is against the systemic racism and not only what to do about it but how to criticize it. “how victims of systemic racism are affected by cultural perceptions of race and how they are able to represent themselves to counter prejudice.”
Now one has to point out that that and the systemic racism it studies is not on the whole a law. IMHO it is proper to call it a theory at this time. And again, there are easier to follow explanations about the specific issues they look at in papers that follow the framework, are you saying that it is complicated to declare that what the evidence shows and the conclusion that what the Chinese are doing with the Uighurs is bad? What is too complicated to understand there?
CONTROLLING RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE AND EDUCATION FOR COUNTERING RELIGIOUS EXTREMISM: CASE STUDY OF THE UYGHUR MUSLIMS IN CHINA
-Dilmurat Mahmut
As I pointed before, a framework is not the research, one has to look at the research before just coming (as others did) with caricatures about what CRT is or does.