Ok, now I’ll take a look.
So let’s assume CRT is legit. As a white male, what am I supposed to do? What actions are expected of me?
In case you want an outsider’s perspective:
I don’t remember encountering the term “critical race theory” outside this board. I know it’s been discussed in at least one other thread, which I vaguely remember seeing but not reading much of.
That blog post you linked to is not a “great and concise defense of CRT” for someone like me. It seems to be aimed at readers who are already familiar with, and probably sympathetic to, CRT. But I didn’t come out of it any more enlightened than I went in, about what CRT is, or whether or why I should believe it. Heck, is “believe” even the right verb? “Adopt”? “Use”? “See the world through the lens of”? Does CRT make truth claims that can be believed or disbelieved? What does someone like you want me to do with respect to CRT, anyway?
Some of the posts in this thread have helped somewhat—especially @Gyrate’s. But I’m still confused about many things, including whether or not it’s worth my time trying to get unconfused.
Maybe you’re supposed to try to educate yourself about the economic, political, and social impact that centuries of racism has had in terms of creating disadvantaged communities. And rather than saying “Well, pfff, I had nothing to do with it - not my problem” acknowledge that the policies of our ancestors have passed down disparate consequences for people of different backgrounds. Consider the fact that inherited wealth is comparatively much less in black communities than in white communities, which is almost certainly attributable to history.
Whites want to see themselves as individuals first - I get that. But whites have that luxury because centuries of law and traditions created a society that embraced individual opportunity for whites, but not so much for blacks or others.
This is an excellent question. Here’s how I see it:
- Examine. Look at specifics of social dynamics with a critical eye, figuring out how race impacts them (sometimes it’s to a trivial degree, other times it’s to a pretty significant degree). Do your best to do so without being defensive: if you’ve benefited from racial disparities, or if you’ve perpetuated them, there’s nothing to gain from denying this.
- Change. If you’re doing things personally that perpetuate racist institutions, do you best not to continue with these actions. As a teacher, for example, it means looking at everything from how I choose to call on students to what behaviors I consider worth writing an office referral for to how I identify kids for programs like academic giftedness.
- Advocate. If there are social structures that you see that perpetuate racial inequalities, speak up for changes. Encourage your elected leaders to change policy; and if they won’t do so, change your elected leaders.
This isn’t about sackcloth and ashes. This is about noticing something that’s not fair and working on a personal and social level to change those unfair things.
None of that seems particularly controversial, and I think a lot of people who have problems with CRT would agree with much or all of it. However, there’s a popular perception among critics of CRT that it attempts to provide a theoretical basis for some rather more controversial propositions including, but not limited to:
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All white people are racist.
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Only white people can be racist because racism = prejudice + power.
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There’s no such thing as a non-racist person. There are only racist people and anti-racist people.
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That any material difference between racial group averages can only be attributable to racism.
Plus numerous others. Are any of these claims central to your perception of CRT?
First, to learn that CRT is used also by Asian researchers to counter the ethnic cleansing China is doing against minorities there. That is just to get a perspective and a notion that a lot of conservative sources of information were/are giving you poppycock about this item.
Second, as for what to do if you are a white male, it will depend then on conclusions or what the evidence shows about their peer reviewed research coming from the scholars doing CRT.
Of course one should notice also another thing, what they conclude is not a law, only that their criticism of systemic racism in the US and elsewhere is not coming just from their imaginations.
I think that, as a term, “critical race theory” is pretty opaque. If I, knowing nothing but those words, try to guess what it means, I’m guessing either that it is a theory that says that race is critical (how? why?), or it’s a theory that’s critical of race (which means… what?).
Nothing. You don’t have to do anything.
Here’s my definition, posted earlier and repeated here for your benefit:
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.
How’s that? Does that make sense? Do you agree, disagree, other?
Before looking at the subsequent posts, my initial reply would be this.
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Assuming that you personally aren’t racist, there isn’t much you can do. Voting Democratic and trying to convince others to do some is about the extent of what we, as individuals can do in terms of changing others.
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On the off chance that you happen to be racist, stop being racist. Given that you’re even asking the question, I’m assuming that you aren’t, and that this second part doesn’t apply.
Educating oneself is always good, but I don’t see how it helps change other people. Unless Crafter Man is an elected legislator or holds some kind of position where he is in charge of something like the hiring and firing of police officers or some such thing, I’m not sure what he personally, or any of us as individuals, can actually do about it. Boycotts are the only other thing I can think of that might be effective, and then only in helping to remove the racists from positions of power rather than changing the personal beliefs of the racists.
That’s probably the most any one of us can do on a personal level.
That one is even more difficult. There’s not anything any of us (assuming we mean Americans regardless of race) can do about that. As little power as we have to change things here at home, there’s even less we can do to change things in China.
No, none of us have to do anything. But I take the meaning of his question as what should we do, not what do we have to do. Even thought that might be very little, as little as pulling the lever for the D candidates at election time, that still counts for something.
Except the BIGGEST problem with CRT is it forbids any real analysis or discussion of why the median situation of some races is below that of others.
It mandates subscription to all sorts of ahistorical fantasies (“the American Revolution was fought to preserve slavery,” “police originated as slave patrols”, etc. - these are not just one-offs but part of a larger CRT notion that history may be constructed at will in order to serve current political goals and that using reason and objectivity are “white” characteristics) and absolutely cuts off any real investigation into the factors that ACTUALLY determine social outcomes.
Can we talk about the effects of the number of black children who grow up without two parents? The effects of outdated beliefs about nutrition? About the use of violence in child-raising? About the incentives to have kids single, at a young age, brought about by the structure of the social services system? Even if we acknowledge that the reasons for many of these problems ultimately originate in structures forcibly imposed on blacks by whites during slavery, there is no discussion of them permitted - the median black person has less net worth and a shorter life expectancy than the median white person because The Cabal Of White People got together and decided, racistly, that this is how things will be. Until we identify all the members of The Cabal of White People and replace them with The Cabal of Black CRT Professors in the smoke-filled room that decides social outcomes, nothing will change for the better even a little bit. Anyone who even entertains the possibility that some other explanation might be viable is at best naive and probably a racist working on behalf of the cabal.
CRT is inherently defeatist and encourages blacks to choose between passivity and violence while waiting for some revolution that will never come. It should be obvious to any non-brainwashed person that telling a black child “you have no influence over your own destiny, there’s no point in working hard at school or bettering yourself in any way, you are doomed to a negative outcome by forces beyond your control” is about the most evil thing you can do for improving the median situation of minorities. And CRT is all aboard that train. Do you understand why it’s so repulsive to normal people?
None of these are central to my understanding of CRT. Perhaps a modified version of the last one – something like “In the US, systemic/institutional racism (and similar phenomena) are responsible for most of the statistical differences between racial groups” might be central or close to central.
As I outlined above, that comes from ‘Critical Theory’, which is a strand of philosophy or social theory that, instead of merely describing or analyzing the current state of affairs, focuses on questioning and criticizing the assumptions behind societal power structures, and the ingrained cultural assumptions at their base. Its direct focus is that of emancipation, that is, freeing people from bondage.
Originally, the more narrow ‘Critical Theory’ referred to a particular Marxist school of philosophers, centered around Adorno and Horkheimer in Frankfurt, and hence, called the ‘Frankfurt School’, and was, to a certain degree, a reaction to the failure of the socialist revolution in Germany (Novemberrevolution), and a subsequent departure from certain ‘orthodox’ Marxist views that were deemed too ideological. More widely speaking, however, any movement that has an emancipatory aim and combines both the explanation of the current power structure with a practical focus on overcoming systemic inequalities can be called ‘Critical Theory’, with CRT being the particular expression focusing on matters of race.
Your straw-man version of CRT is definitely horrible and repulsive.
I’ll address these:
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All white people are racist. In general I think that “are racist” is not useful most of the time. “Racist” isn’t an immutable quality like “ginger” is. Racism is something you (or social structures) do. That said, everyone who grows up in this society grows up around racist stereotypes and absorbs them from mainstream media and from other societal members from a very young age, and it beggars belief if someone says they’re unaffected by this aspect of our culture. Everyone, I believe, is likely to have beliefs and assumptions influenced by their culture; and if you grow up in a racist culture, you’ll have beliefs and assumptions influenced by racism. Recognizing that this is true is a necessary first step for combating them. This is true for folks of all racial categories, not just white people.
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Only white people can be racist because racism = prejudice + power. I don’t generally find this one interesting; rather, it’s a semantic issue. Institutional racism involves power, and individual racism involves prejudice. The anti-white prejudice I face tends not to have much power behind it, especially when compared to anti-black racism that my friends and co-workers and neighbors face. Recognizing this difference is super important. Arguing over whether it’s the “real” definition of racism isn’t important.
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There’s no such thing as a non-racist person. There are only racist people and anti-racist people. I’ve heard this applied to positions, not people, and I’ll be honest, I don’t necessarily agree with it. There’s a debate recently over whether dentists should continue to recommend flossing. If there’s a racial component to that debate, I don’t know what it is, and I’m deeply unconvinced that it’s in the top ten important aspects of that debate. That said, I do think that a lot of seemingly innocuous debates should be examined through the lens of racial justice. This applies to everything from the temp agency I used to work for who had a race-neutral policy of denying employment to anyone with a felony conviction (which, given the sentencing disparities in our national history, unfairly denied employment to many Black applicants) to questions about who can serve on a government tourism board: if it’s limited to business owners, that may unfairly discriminate against Black citizens in a town in which the Black business district was bulldozed a few decades back. If you don’t examine an issue through a racial justice lens, there’s a very real risk that you’ll unwittingly support a position that maintains racial injustice, i.e., supporting institutional racism.
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That any material difference between racial group averages can only be attributable to racism. I would say that you have a very high hill to climb to suggest an alternative diagnosis for such differences. The fact that races are social constructs suggests that disparities will be due to social differences; and our society created these constructs as part of a hierarchical structure to justify extremely racist policies. When folks create an arbitrary hierarchy and use it to impose injustice, and then one group has different outcomes, it’s sooooooper likely that those different outcomes are due to that arbitrary, unjust hierarchy that got created.
No it doesn’t. You keep saying things that aren’t true, so there’s no real reason to engage with you except to point out that what you’re saying has no basis in reality.
I’m not referring to instances in which people are outright racist. The previous poster asked what he could do about it. I interpreted the question as basically saying:
“Well, okay, so like my great grandfather, or my white neighbors’ great great grandparents were slave owners in 1864, or my great grandfather didn’t hire black people back in 1910, or my grandfather was a cop who took a night stick to a black guy’s head - or maybe my neighbors’ grandparents, great parents or great, great grandparents fit that description. I had nothing to do with this, and there’s not much I can do to redress those grievances now, decades or even centuries later.”
What I’m saying is, understand that we all inherit the legacy of apartheid, and we inherit more than just a legacy; it’s a legacy with real world economic, political, legal, and social consequences. That doesn’t mean that white people should be forced empty their bank accounts and release their property to non-whites. But understand that in order to redress those grievances might require more than just merely acknowledging that it happened. Keep an open mind if, say, someone suggests something so ‘radical’ as reparations.
It’s not just police officers, it’s hiring in general. If you have influence over the hiring or promotion process of others at all, then you should examine any biases you may have. If you don’t think that someone is a good fit, or that they have worked hard enough to get that raise, it’s not a bad idea to consider that from the perspective that starts with the assumption that you are biased. Maybe you are not, but it is something to examine when you make these decisions.
Missed the point but can be my fault here, the poppycock from right wing sources of info was the idea that CRT is just about Black people in the US or that it is useless in other situations. CRT is used by other minorities to point at the systemic abuses in other countries, and that leads to another related point:
Chances are that research like that one can be used by right wing sources of info to hit China too, point being that CRT is not really just for leftists as some on the right are painting it.