I think a lot of misunderstanding about critical race theory is that people think of it as a collection of conclusions. “Critical race theory says that disparity in educational achievement between blacks and whites can be traced to redlining.” In fact in and of itself CRT doesn’t say that. It merely provides a framework from which you can come to such a conclusion. The statement above is an application of critical race theory not the theory itself.
I think a good analogy could be drawn between Critical race theory and evolution theory. Consider that statement “Evolution says that man and apes descended from the same ancestor” In fact, in and of itself, Evolution says no such thing. The similarity anatomical structure, and genetic pattern tells us that man descended from apes." Evolution just provided the framework that allowed us to better explore and understand the reasons behind this similarity.
At their most basic CRT and evolution are more or less unassailable tautologies.
For evolution you have.
parents pass generally pass on characteristics on to their off spring
but they do so imperfectly so that occasional new characteristics arise
these characteristics may make individuals more or less likely to reproduce
Therefore
over time characteristics that improve survival will dominate
Parts 1-3 are pretty simply ideas that are hard to argue with, and statement 4 is just math.
Similarly
Racial discrimination has played a large role in the formation of the laws and culture of the United states
This racism in laws and culture will have indirect effects thats on things that aren’t explicitly directly racist.
Therefore
Racism has an influence far beyond its direct effects.
Again, 1 is clear to anyone who has bothered to crack open an non-Texan history book. 2 is just a restating of the butterfly effect and 3 is simple math.
In the same way that evolution theory permeates all of biology so does CRT permeate other social disciplines that doesn’t mean that all of biology is just evolution, but rather that it touches on all aspects of biology and when studying biology it is important to keep evolution in mind, Similarly not everything is just about race, but race touches on everything and when looking at any aspect of social science it is important to keep race in mind.
Also like evolutionary theory, CRT can be misapplied to draw incorrect conclusions. And given the large amount of literature produced by CRT, undoubtedly some of these apply the CRT framework to derive incorrect conclusions. But such individual examples do not make CRT as a whole invalid. Nor do individual examples that on the surface seem contrary to what one might expect prove the theory invalid any more than the persistence of hereditary diseases in the human population disprove evolution.
What system are you discussing? The largest responsible for oppression?
Why is there implication that, despite changing its composition, specific self replicating behavior would be preserved? After all, I agree that social systems exhibit complex feedback loops and emergent behavior.
This said, I’m not sure what dead people have to do with this. If we can make connections between the current state of an opressive system and oppressive people of the past, the composition of the system was probably not truly changed; we probably didn’t replace oppressors.
To me this is what FilkTheBlue is getting at: replace the oppressors. And if thats the goal, it probably makes sense to pronounce the oppressors as much as possible, and you might ensure that by including only oppressors in the cluster of oppressive people.
In my opinion, and based on what I see as common interpretations, CRT and ideas like it seem like a crude application of radiation to kill cancer cells – just kill everything. Fortunately these are ideas and not cancer so we have the luxury of a bit more time to improve our solutions.
It’s an observation of real effects, not a predictive model. There is no “would be”, there is “is”. The systems-based approach is an explanation for the observations, which come first.
But using the same framework you can say the same thing about CRT as you can about racism. The same logic that says that injustices can be influenced by racism even without being explicitly racist says that CRT has influence beyond its content if a substantial number of adherents think you can’t be nonracist. Whether or not that particular conclusion is correct, the same logic applies to any conclusions one would concede are incorrect.
I’m not sure what the framework should be: it’s a conundrum similar to “death of the artist”. But if one applies, the other should apply too. The indirect influences of CRT shouldn’t be off the table to talk about since it itself talks about indirect influences.
Hi, veggiejuicer, and welcome! I’m kind of confused by what you wrote, including suspecting some typos. (WHen you talk about the need to “pronounce the oppressors,” I’m genuinely unsure what you meant to type).
People in groups often do dumb things to get along with everyone else in the group. This tendency allows less-than-optimal social structures to continue, because changing them means going against the group’s will. It’s hard, scary work to do that. And people who don’t intend to be oppressors, placed in a position where oppression is the default, will continue with the oppressive social structure, because that’s the easiest thing to do.
Only if premise 1 also applies to CRT, which it does not. CRT did not (and does not currently, despite RW boogiemen) have a large role in the formation of the laws and culture of the US.
Hence you can’t conclude that it has an influence far beyond its effects.
This makes sense if I understand what you’re saying. You’re saying that if you apply critical race theory (societal laws and structures that create racial disparities) to the role of unequal neighborhoods and education, you’d find that the practice of redlining had a major detrimental effect on educational achievement of minority communities. If you were a social scientist, you could work out several hypotheses to find evidence to support or reject.
Well sure, everything causes ripples, but comparing the effect of CRT which is just a few years old with limited scope to centuries of racism which which formed the fundamental basis of many of our social structures is comparing this to this.
Thank you, I appreciate the welcome! I like a lot of discussions on these boards and felt the want to participate. I hope I don’t come across as hostile as I’m just firmly stating my opinions and of course kindly welcome opposing views.
My goal in participating in these discussions in general is to contribute toward finding a way to make a world where things are stable in a reasonably fair way for all people, however you want to classify them.
I feel that ideas like CRT, in practice, don’t target the problem, which I think is oppressive people. They target “white people” in defense of “people of color”
How can you have an idea that is designed to fight oppression state that race is a construct for an oppression by people of a race X? Isn’t that reverse oppression?
Race is a miserable concept because its often arbitrary, and in this case thinking “white people” as a whole are oppressive means all sorts of truly loving people get included as collateral damage.
I think the effect of targeting people in this blanket of a cluster is pissing off innocent people and causing further division, but also diluting the replacement of the people who are the truly oppressive racists
So it wasn’t a typo when I suggested we “pronounce” these people in lieu of the goal to replace oppressors. By that I’m suggesting we drop the blanket of “white people” and use a more specific group of people, like certain LAPD cops, or certain politicians, etc.
About all this theory of systems: maybe it was a mistake to pick at the definition as we’re just getting into the weeds over the true definition of it, but I just don’t think its any more complicated than several parts each with certain activity and potential influence on others and I hope to avoid thinking there is more magic to it than that. Throw some new parts in there and the influence spreads causing novel behavior.
If we talk about something more concrete like the system that is society in the US. New parts have been put in and influence is spreading and the novel behavior is absolutely emerging. I don’t think there is enough patience with this. Let the older generations be replaced by the new ones and then reassess instead of coming up with ways to essentially double down on affirmative action. I think this is adding more momentum to the proverbial pendulum instead of trying to find equilibrium
My response to Left_Hand_of_Dorkness relates to your first two points. The last two are of such low effort I’ll let them go. Again I’m not trying to be hostile, just pragmatic in this case.
That is, I think, a fundamental and total misunderstanding of CRT. As I understand it, its huge focus is systems. It doesn’t target “white people,” it targets “white supremacy.”
The idea that it targets “white people” is the Big Lie that’s being told about it by right-wing media as a way to demonize it. It’s not a new lie: it’s the same lie that was told about abolitionism and about Marcus Garvey and about the Southern Leadership Conference and about every other civil rights movement or idea.
Are you getting the idea that CRT targets “white people” from a direct source, or is it a representation of CRT that you’ve heard from somewhere like Tucker Carlson?
Now that I’m reading more, this is my understanding as well. The systems may not have even been designed to target POC in the first place, but if they unfairly create serious disparities, they are a problem.
A conventional “good people/bad people” understanding of racism will dismiss this problem: “You can’t call these researchers racist!” A color-blind approach will dismiss this problem: “As long as they’re recruited without regard to race, there’s no issue, but if you start trying to recruit by race, you’re the real racist!”
A systems approach, however, is extremely helpful. No researcher needs to be fired or pilloried. Instead, the system should be examined, the barriers to participation by racial minorities should be studied, and the system should change to remove those barriers and establish new structures that ensure medical research includes a racially representive cohort of subjects.
Here’s a similar article from JAMA on this provides an interesting guide:
For future investigations, it is important to think carefully about the fundamental question. Why should race variables be used, if at all? Consider 4 steps: (1) execute a systematic review of prior research because race may have been exhausted as a tool and is futile to study again, or may offer insight for how a new study may best leverage past work, or create novel hypotheses; (2) if race measurements are deemed appropriate, carefully consider collateral, explanatory biological and sociologic variables appropriate to include in the same investigation, and how standardization, accuracy, and relevance may be enhanced in explaining race-based signals; (3) in any comparative analyses, investigators should consider whether White race should be the reference standard because normative values are reasonable, but normal designations that characterize some humans as aberrant are problematic; and (4) carefully consider the potency of any race-related research and gauge a holistic portfolio of clinical and social consequences, including the amelioration or aggravation of existing inequalities. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2775794
I can’t directly refute a wiki page, a poem, and a phrase like “ya think?”, yet I do refute my interpretation of your overall hypothesis. To see that, you may have to open up to what I’m saying even just a little bit, or I need to do a better job of explaining. This said, I’m losing steam because this feels like the usual game of debate where you (not you personally, but the royal “you”) just shut things down with “nope, lol” or you attack points instead of putting in effort to interpret what the other is trying to say.
This is how this discussion appears to me, and I describe it as a mix of things written in text, my interpretations, and my internal dialog with hope that it brings clarity to the things I did write.
FilkTheBlue suggests targeting the specific people who are harmful and in my head I agree with this because I make a daily effort to respect people and reflect on the consequences of my actions, both implicit and explicit, so I refuse to be grouped with some assholes who happen to be “white” (whatever that even means, japanese are white but they get to be asian, as an example)
You suggest its not good enough because they multiply faster than we can replace them
I question that mechanism because I don’t think we can know that as we have never actually replaced the seriously harmful people to observe the cascading effects of that positive influence. Part of why I think we fail to replace the truly harmful agrees with other things FilkTheBlue says about how the harmful people slip into the cracks when we generalize with these ridiculous concepts of “white” or “black”.
You suggest the mechanism is a thing because you have seen it with your own eyes yet you agree we have not actually replaced any harmful people (“ya think?”)
I am lost because you’d have to replace them to see the effects of it with your own eyes. I reinforce my belief in the ability for this system to change by simply replacing some of the bad eggs of the present by considering new generations.
You say no thanks
I wonder if you’re aware of the information age and how that only really took off in early 2k, and how the kids that grew up in this and unlike any of recent memory and are yet to take control of modern society. Never in the history of the world have we been able to communicate outside of our little cultural bubbles. Carrier pigeons do not hold a candle to your smart phone.
There is some other stuff in there but I wrote enough
Not to sound coy, but in the interest of typing less, you do see what is in common between “white people” and “white supremacy” right?
I don’t watch mainstream news and only am exposed to it when someone passes clips around on the internet. Also, I don’t think with a bipartisan mindset, and similarly I don’t really think in binary terms at all. I can say I have only ever voted democrat though, but thats just because for as long as I have been voting those candidate’s policies appealed to me the most.
I do know who Tucker Carlson is, but I thought everyone was in agreement he is just another jackass puppet like the rest of them trying to stir the pot to turn a profit.
No, my interpretations of CRT come from reading discussions like these from a variety of message boards and blogs and the wiki, but to keep it simple, IIRC, people in this very thread state it as a sort of “white people” thing. Maybe its enough to say the theory is bad because nobody has any problem understanding a good one.
Yes–the same thing that’s also common between “white people” and “white dwarf.” But I know which one I’d rather have within a hundred miles of my planet.
If you didn’t realize they’re different, well, now you do. If you persist in treating them as interchangeable, that’s on you, not on the theory.
By which standard the theory of special relativity is an absolute shit theory.
Of course they are not literally the same, thats why I asked what they have in common. We both know what kind of person a white supremacist is. Policies and social systems come from people. Sprinkle a little syllogism in there… then I end up wondering what the common denominator is going to think the problem is.
We’re talking about ideas to implement in a big way, ones that everyone needs to grasp so that we can start to improve our world and love each other as we should. I struggle to compare that to one of the pillars of modern theoretical physics. But I do see how what I wrote doesn’t really promote this.
This is getting really snarky and its probably not healthy. I appreciate your insight and have a question that I really want to get some feedback on. Would you mind providing your definition of a white person or a black person? Thats not a setup for me to attack something, truly innocent curiosity because I can’t define it well myself.
