I wonder if it’s possible that both “racism” and “beating your children” are things that exist as social problems and are bad.
Apparently this is too complex a theory, according to some people.
That could be. Or it could be that when you start bringing up ways that Black culture is bad in a thread about racism, it looks awful like racism.
Oooh ooh that was a line from “Deliverance” wasn’t it? 
Seriously tho, where have you ever heard anyone speak like that in real life? In your lifetime, outside of Mississippi?
Whether a theory can be tested in a lab has nothing to do with whether it is falsifiable. “Falsifiable” means there is a conceivable observation that would disprove the theory. E.g.: The theory of general relativity could be disproven if Einstein rings, local time distortion around massive bodies, etc. are not observed where the theory says they should be. The theory of evolution could be disproven if a new species dropped out of the air with no fossil history. Keynesian economics could be disproven if deficit spending does not increase GDP and reverse recessionary trends.
A non-falsifiable theory is one which always invents ad-hoc hypotheses to explain any and all occurrences. Astrology can’t be falsified because any contradiction to the horoscope is explained away as not interpreting its vaguely worded advice properly. Creationism can’t be falsified because anything that seems to disprove it can be explained as God or Satan testing the faith of believers. Falsification is about whether the adherents of the theory are willing and able to put forth a hypothetical scenario which would cause them to stop believing in the theory, rather than constantly inventing new reasons that the theory can’t be wrong.
There’s all sorts of use for the concept of falsifiability in the social sciences. The question of CRT falsifiability is very relevant. If nothing can ever conceivably happen that shows CRT is an incomplete or incorrect theory, then it has no predictive or explanatory power; it is, at best, simply a tautological statement that “the entire world and every fact and causal mechanism within that world exist” and at worst the equivalent of pseudoscience.
So, with that cleared up, I would ask the CRT proponents - is this a falsifiable theory? Can you conceive of a potential arrangement of facts that would demonstrate that CRT is not true?
So you’re okay with identifying, criticizing and devoting societal resources to changing systemic problems in black culture, such as parental overreliance on corporal punishment, but not okay with identifying, criticizing and devoting societal resources to changing systemic problems in white culture, such as systemic racism?
This is the thing about so many anti-CRT-type ideologues: they overwhelmingly seem to perceive this type of analysis and criticism as a form of societal punishment, and their refrain is “Punish the black people INSTEAD OF us!”
Personally, I have never encountered a CRT argument trying to claim that black people bear no responsibility at all for working to improve their situation and remove their systemic disadvantages. Heck, black people working to remove the systemic disadvantage of anti-black racism is a huge part of the practice of CRT itself. And I’ve never seen a CRT argument trying to claim that the behavior of black people under systemic anti-black racism is always flawless (indeed, many counterexamples spring to mind, including Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq).
But I’m constantly coming across anti-CRT white people effectively trying to deflect all the responsibility for fixing societal racism away from white society and onto black society. I really don’t understand what makes some people such fragile snowflakes that they can’t just acknowledge “yeah, anti-black racism and white supremacism is a historical reality that still influences a lot of situations and attitudes today. As a white person, I’ve benefited from this legacy of racism, as have white people in general, and black people in general have been disadvantaged by it.”
What’s so hard about admitting that? It happens to be true.
Assuming adequately controlled experimental conditions. Those conditions don’t necessarily have to be in a typical science lab—since antiquity, as you note, many astronomical and geological phenomena have been sufficiently periodic and regular that models of them can be tested against “experimental” observations.
But there really aren’t such things as sufficiently regular and controllable social science phenomena to permit conclusive scientific falsification of complex social science theories.
Horseshit. There have been tons of real-world economic situations widely labeled “failures of Keynesian economics”, and yet the theory of Keynesian economics is still alive and kicking. As Caldwell points out in “Some Problems with Falsificationism in Economics”, you can always potentially identify some particularity of a complex social-science situation that escapes the putatively controlled conditions.
Claiming that social-science theory must be falsifiable (but conveniently ignoring or denying the practical problems with falsificationism in social-science theories that one happens to like) is just an excuse for refusing to pay attention to social-science theories that one happens not to like.
Please cite where I’ve said that racism by whites against blacks doesn’t exist or shouldn’t be worked against.
I notice your paraphrase carefully omits the term “systemic” in my question. Sure, a lot of the fragile snowflakes I mentioned above are fine with acknowledging that some white people—the classic “few bad apples”—are racist against blacks and that such racism should be opposed. Which, y’know, great, as far as it goes. Cookies all round, I guess.
But this thread is about the concept of systemic racism in a historically and persistently racist society, and the ways that such racism can influence attitudes and outcomes even among people who are not consciously endorsing racist beliefs.
That’s the systemic-problem phenomenon that discourses like CRT are addressing, analyzing and critiquing. And that’s the phenomenon that you seem very resistant to acknowledging, as long as you can deflect the discussion to addressing, analyzing and critiquing systemic problems within black communities instead.
AFAICR that vodka study was not an easy thing to do, but they found ways to do it. As I expect, new ways can be found that will be used in future research.
Well, you can go to China to see that the researchers mentioned in the paper that were in China investigating the Uighurs are free and did not disappear, you can also find that the Uighurs are doing ok and what the Asian CRT researcher found or investigated was not true.
Falsifying CRT is trivial - come up with an alternative explanation for the observed racial disparities other than White supremacy, and prove it.
You realize, of course, that the usual “alternative explanation” offered up is simply that black people really are intellectually inferior and naturally prone to criminality and moral bankruptcy. And the people who make that argument point to all the same statistics about arrests and academic achievement and career success that the CRT people use as their “proof”.
It’s not a very nice (or accurate or scientifically rigorous) argument, but it’s the one they’ve got and they seem to like it.
Of course - but that’s not something that flies in GD anymore.
Hence all the dancing around “falsifiability” and also bringing up Black culture as though it was somehow an independent factor from White supremacy.
Trivially easy to falsify (in theory):
- Demonstrate the biological accuracy of racial categories. Show, for example, a greater than 99% correlation between a particular gene marker and social identification of an individual as White or Black. This will falsify the idea that race is a social construct.
- Unearth persuasive historical records showing that our Constitution wasn’t written by enslavers, nor did it contain the 3/5 compromise.
- Demonstrate, via the use of bank records and other documentation, that redlining did not occur.
- Demonstrate, via the use of bank records and other documentation, that Black Americans had the same opportunities as White Americans to accumulate generational wealth.
- Demonstrate, via the use of judicial and prison records, that Black Americans are incarcerated at rates proportional to White Americans.
and so on.
The canard that this is all some sort of navel-gazing academic exercise is as absurd as the rest of the conservative attack on Critical Race Theory. It’s ground on overwhelming historical documentation, and denying this record approaches Holocaust-Denial levels of toxic silliness.
It is possible. But it’s also possible, in fact not only possible but highly likely, that those damaging aspects of “black culture”* are that way because of the damage done to the culture(s) by centuries of slavery, Jim Crow racism, and ongoing contemporary racism.
*. There’s more than one Black culture. The Black people of suburban Atlanta have a different culture than the Black people of inner city Chicago, and both of those are different than the culture of the Black people of rural Mississippi, and so on.
ETA: admitting that there are problematic behaviors more common in Black people isn’t what makes it racist. The racism comes in when (generic) you deny that those problematic behaviors are due to something other than the cultural damage caused by centuries of racism.
The racism also comes from when it’s brought up. When people are saying, “Let’s look at this approach to being anti-racist” and someone responds with “Piffle! Why aren’t we allowed to talk about how Black people abuse their children?” it’s pretty clear what’s going on.
If, in a conversation among Black families about child-rearing, someone brings up the research about corporal punishment, that’s not racist.
In the example I used, I specifically pointed out how the problem DOES originate in slavery, but that doesn’t seem to make any difference at all. CRT isn’t interested in, to use that example, “the higher tendency towards child abuse in black families, which is ultimately caused by white slaveowners, causes negative outcomes for black people and should be addressed.” It’s extremely interested in “pointing out the higher tendency towards child abuse in black families is racist” as if acting as the goddamn lobbyist for child abuse is somehow helping anyone. Forget the demonizing white people stuff, this ideology is really harmful to black people.
CRT is the ideology that sees “let’s do this thing that will markedly help black people achieve more equal economic and social outcomes with white people” as being somehow completely disconnected from and even antagonistic to its concept of “anti-racism.”
Once more, with feeling: what you’re claiming has no relationship to reality.
No, the writings that I have seen make the point that the harm comes from the “normal” default position to separate black families from seemingly bad environments. The point they make (And it is not just CRT scholars) is that it remains less likely for child services to remove kids when white parents are involved with the same or similar issues.
This has become even more noticeable when there is less of a call to remove kids from white families affected by the current opioid crisis while in other past drug panics black families were separated with very little recourse to show that they were innocent or not as bad as some painted them. (Notice that they had to demonstrate that early reports were not accurate but many times they could not afford to do so). Now it should go without saying but what I have seen this can be misinterpreted as being against removing kids from dangerous situations, it is not.
The main complaint is not that child services should be out of separating kids from abusive parents, but that many times the reasons to separate black kids from families is not given much attention regarding if it will be more harmful to remove kids from a family that needed help in other ways just like white families can.
This. AFAIK, we used to do the same in Europe, at least in the Netherlands, where scholars structurally ignored poverty as a confounding factor and major cause when researching perinatal deaths, malnutrition, less than ideale child rearing etc. among the poor factory workers in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. They attributed poorer outcomes among factory workers as compared to middle class workers to moral deficit, lack of education and pigheadedness among the proletariat instead of actually looking at the circumstances people were supposed to make a living in, with absolutely horrible housing most of the time, very little money for 12+ hour workdays for both parents, and simply not enough means to sustain a family. The same probably goes for a lot of POC in the US nowadays.