I'm starting to get the feeling that the conservative right is winning

Politics & Elections
363

For one thing, this person you’re citing is a psychoanalyst, and psychoanalysts are full of unscientific bullshit. I have no idea why this particular person is choosing to frame it this particular way. It has echoes of Derrick Bell and Critical Race Theory, not in the implication that whiteness is a disease, but in the implication that racism is not aberrant, but is rather endemic to America. While I think this abstract is pretty melodramatic, I don’t believe the author is racist. While I’ve never encountered this specific framing, as I said, it’s resonant with stuff I have studied, and since the specific stuff I have studied was not racist, it’s a reasonable conclusion that this also isn’t racist. You see, people would read the stuff I have studied and call it racist, and they would also be wrong. Because to a significant subset of Americans, talking about racism at all is racist. They can’t sit down and have a mature conversation about this without becoming apoplectic. And you know why that is? Wait for it…

Whiteness. White fragility in particular.

You see, some left-wingers crumble emotionally when their orthodoxy is challenged, but they are not alone in this. The majority of Republican voters in the United States cannot have a mature discussion about race. You need only look to the recent outrage that The Falcon and the Winter Soldier talks about (gasp!) a Black man’s experience in the US to be assured that whiteness is alive and well in US society. And as long as that’s the case, there will probably always be people on the internet saying things like whiteness is a disease.

What I don’t understand is why people take offense to this kind of stuff when I don’t. I’m a very white person, and I’m not sitting here thinking “ommmmg this person thinks I’m a disease.” I know what these things mean, I know what the author is getting at, however hamfistedly, and I’m not bothered. Why do you suppose that is?

364

Great post.

365

Again, you get that stomach curling because you are describing the caricature that right wing sources of information use to look at CRT.

Modern right-wing media have periodically attacked and misinformed about both cultural and legal civil rights accomplishments in this country, and their current attempt to falsely brand all anti-racism efforts as “critical race theory” is a tactic out of that tested playbook. Brainwashing white students to obscure the long history of institutional racism in this country, which is now being not only proposed but legislated in response to this manufactured panic, is also nothing new.

Same too with semi-organic, or purely astroturfed, Republican voter groups and PACs promoted by Fox News for electoral gain and mobilization. These have been organized regularly since the tea party movement of the Obama years, and right-wing media were doing it even earlier for conservative groups attacking so-called “political correctness” in the 1990s.

Whether or not this current backlash, the political weaponization of white grievance by opportunists eager to push a right-wing agenda, ends up being part of something more violent, more influential, and more antidemocratic than similar periods past, is irrelevant to the fact that we are – yet again – at a moment of reckoning for the viability of our multiracial democracy.

And something is different now about this same old struggle over history, over the acknowledgment of white supremacy, over state-sanctioned violence and voter suppression against persons of color, over what it means to be American.

In part, it is environmental: our obsessive interconnectedness, our ability to mobilize online at unprecedented speed, a growing right-wing media ecosystem that propagandizes for every slight electoral advantage with scary effectiveness. And maybe Trump really was worse than the other white nationalists with fascist tendencies that litter our history, and these are uniquely dangerous times.

Whatever the factor that allowed it to spread, opposition to critical race theory (which is not, in fact, running rampant through our schools’ curriculum) has become a new battle flag, a very effective catalyst of multiple lost causes driven by veteran right-wing operatives and funded by far-right dark money. It might not be the defining strand of this new neo-confederate resistance – storming the U.S. Capitol in support of white nationalism is tough to top – but no anti-civil rights campaign has ever spread this fast, this effectively.

Blame Fox News.

But as it needs to be mentioned too, the main idea from the right wing media and politicians is not to ban CRT, it is to lie to their readers and viewers about the teaching of social justice in medicine, the history of race relations in the past and many other subjects by accusing all that of also being CRT.

366

Bull. I’ve read enough spurce material to know what CRT is. What’s happening now is that the left has realized just how unpopular these ideas are, and are rapidly backtracking and trying to erase their own history of support.

The same thing is happening with ‘defund the police’, which Democrats are now trying to hilariously spin as actually meaning they want MORE funding. Because defunding the police is poison at the polls, and violence is spiking everywhere where the police actually have been cut back.

367

I don’t think talking about racism is racist. Would reasonable people who knew nothing about CRT and intersectionality and whatever else you studied call it racist?

Because you have spent years learning about and internalising and having reinforced by everyone around you a set of beliefs and theories and assumptions that make this sort of thing seem acceptable. Many people in this movement claim that it is impossible to be racist against white people, and the ‘white fragility’ thing serves to delegitimise your natural reaction to criticism on the subject.

Without that training, things look very different.

368

As cited, that is not the case. The right wing sources have lied to you. There is no need to backtrack as CRT is a framework used a bit in Universities and colleges in a law setting. The big lie from the right here is that it was taught at the high school level too.

As cited already, the intention from the right wing is becoming more clear, lessons that were already in place that deal a bit about history about race relations and abuses from the past are being banned or protested about (mostly at with AstroTurf efforts that are also supported by FOX news and others, what a racket) regardless if no CRT scholar was involved in those lessons.

369

And this shows that you did not read the thread, It was already cited and pointed at that Biden and most of the democrats were not in favor of “defund the police”

370

It should be acceptable to talk about the history of slavery in the US and the whole host of social policies and laws used to hold black people back for centuries. It should be acceptable to talk about how many white people struggle to acknowledge the reality of racism in the US even as it continues to occur. And it should be acceptable to name the thing that keeps many white people from having a mature conversation about race. There’s nothing objectionable about any of that.

371

The real problem with ANY system that has sweeping characterizations based on skin color or any other immutable characteristic is that within-group variation is much higher than between-group variation, meaning that anything you can meaningfully say about the population groups as a whole has NO relevance when talking about indiciduals.

Take ‘white privilege’. Are white people in general more likely to have privilege than black people? Sure, I can believe that. But when you shift to talk about specific person A vs specific person B, their individual characteristics and backgrounds will swamp any difference based on race. I daresay Obama’s daughters will go through life with a hell of a lot more privilege than my kid will ever have. Any black kid going to Harvard or Yale has infinitely more privilege than a white kid working on a farm in Arkansas. The life experience of a black kid living in a middle class shuburb is very different than a white kid living in the inner city - and probably more privileged.

We all have strengths and weaknesses. Many of them completely swamp any effects generated by racial issues.

As someone raised poor by a single parent, who never got any help from family and lived on the ‘wrong side of the tracks’, I am more sensitive to being lectured about my ‘privilege’ from some rich kid with professors for parents who never worked a day in their life but thinks they can pass judgement on me with one look based on the color of my skin.

Pointing out disparities between group outcomes and wanting to fix that is fine. Telling an individual they were born a racist with extra privileges and have to atone for the sins of of their skin color by being ‘anti-racist’ is staight-up racism. And it will end in tears - either for the left when the normies figure this out, or for everyone if this madness continues because it will tear society apart and set race relations back decades.

Also, if you are bound and determined to separate mimority people into identity groups and use that for power over others, you should not be surprised when white people start to do the same out of self defense. That will get you the White Nationalism you are so afraid of. That would be a very bad outcome for everyone, but it appears that may be where we are headed. Unintended consequences happen.

372

Not really. The cops who pull that back kid over don’t know where he went to college. The manager of the sure he shops at won’t know. The couple who decided to cross the street rather than wall past him won’t know where he went to college. They’ll just see a black kid who they assume is a “thug”.

373

No, Biden wasn’t, because Joe Biden is an old man with racist attitudes who until very recently thought the problem with drugs and violence was that we just weren’t cracking down hard enough on inner cities. He was co-author of the 1994 crime bill that put so many young black men in jail for minor offenses, was the architect of asset forfeiture laws, and basically represents everything the left says is wrong with the justice system. If he were anyone but Joe Biden, he’d already be canceled by the left.

But your loudest mouthpieces in the Democratic party joined in on Defund the Police, and no one shut them up. Democratic pundits joined the chorus. The DSA wing of the party was fully on board - you know, the ones you wished had more power. Democratc mayors actually DID defund police, leading to violent crime apikes in their cities.

Now that you’ve discovered that only 18-24% of the public supports the idea (i.e. the hard left, and no one else), Democrats are trying to run away from it as fast as they can.

374

As pointed already, that is not what CRT scholars deal with:

“Any decent critical race work doesn’t focus on the individual, it focuses on the system, the structure,” says race critical scholar Alana Lentin, an associate professor at the University of Western Sydney. “As soon as we can see that, we also see that no one benefits from a divided society.”

375

As noted already, it was a minority of Democrats who did that. Your demands that most others be ashamed when they didn’t support that are really silly. And I did know about what Biden and others thought about that, I still voted for him. BTW it is really gross to blame seemingly racist behavior of Biden for his position, it is like you do want to ignore that most democrats did see early on how extreme that slogan/request was.

And by contrast, and pointed already, the majority of the current Republican Party, both at the government and the rank and file level, still follow the big lie that Trump did not lose fair and square. Among many other things, were most Republicans are being misled.

376

I didn’t say it shouldn’t be. I don’t think the white fragility concept is very helpful, but it should certainly be acceptable to talk about it.

It’s not just factual learning though. It’s also new axioms, a different way of thinking about the world, different values. Does it help you see more clearly? Who can say. It certainly makes you see things differently, like any other belief system would.

377

And the poor kid in Arkansas is likely to be a poor farmer his entire life and never get the chance to see the inside of a college, and no hope of getting any sort of professiinal job at all.

My grandfather on my Dad’s side was a poor coal miner who died young of black lung. On my mother’s side we were poor farmers. My father was a miner as well, until he was injured and became a drunk who died at 60. My mother then had a boyfriend who was also a miner, and he died of brain cancer in his 40’s, probably from carcinogens in the coal mine.

You’d have to look long and hard to find any ‘privilege’ there. I went to work at age 12, and paid for my own education through mostly menial labor. I got harassed by the cops a lot, because we lived in a crappy neighborhood with lots of drugs around. I can’t count the number of timea I got pulled over for no reason and had my car searched. I once got a ticket for having ‘improper mud flaps’ because they didn’t quite reach the sides of the wheel wells, after a search turned up nothing. When you are poor, a $100 ticket for bullshit really hurts.

378

One key drawback of CRT or all this focus on whiteness is also that it takes us further and further away from MLK’s ideal about people not being evaluated on the basis of skin color.

379

Well, if that is not a big sign of not being aware of what is happening in the state.

Communities of color in Arkansas are struggling the most. One in three (33.9 percent) African-Americans live in poverty in our state. About one in three (33.1 percent) Hispanic people in Arkansas also live in poverty. Poverty rates for white Arkansans are less than half, comparatively (15.5 percent). Arkansas has also historically paid African-American and Hispanic workers lower wages than white workers. Recent data shows these disparities remain: Median household income in Arkansas is about $27,250 a year for African-Americans, $37,050 a year for Hispanics, and $46,050 for whites.

380

MLK said much, much more than this. He was particularly critical of white “moderates”.

In order to get to that promised land, we need to actually deal with racism in society and institutions. Without dealing with it (which requires dealing with systems like “whiteness”), there’s no chance we’ll ever get there.

381

That is usually coming from what researchers are seeing locally, but as noted, CRT also looks at what Chinese are doing to the Uyghurs, And what the Hutus did to the Tutsi in Rwanda.

Point being that eventually, if there are injustices going on from (in a very possible future) former minorities towards white minorities, CRT can be used to examine any abuses of power by them. Showing that, once again, there is a lot of misinformation going on about CRT.

Currently, though, researchers and scholars are not forbidden from using CRT to look at the effects of poverty among white students too.

Analyzing Poverty, Learning, and Teaching through a Critical Race Theory Lens

Milner, H. Richard, IV

Review of Research in Education, v37 n1 p1-53 Mar 2013

In this article, the author explores poverty as an outside-of-school factor and its influence on the inside-of-school experiences and outcome of students. He considers the interconnected space of learning, instructional practices, and poverty. In particular, he uses critical race theory as an analytic tool to unpack, shed light on, problematize, disrupt, and analyze how systems of oppression, marginalization, racism, inequity, hegemony, and discrimination are pervasively present and ingrained in the fabric of policies, practices, institutions, and systems in education that have important bearings on students–all students–even though most of the studies reviewed did not address race in this way. He analyzes the interrelationship between race and poverty. His point in using race as an analytic site is not to suggest that people are in poverty because of their race but to demonstrate how race can be a salient factor in how people experience and inhabit the world and consequently education. His point is that those in education and who care about it should work to eradicate poverty for all students, not just students of color.

Now, take into account that in several states teachers and professors (who most of them are minorities) are being banned from teaching CRT. And, what most right wing media forgets too to inform their readers or viewers: the wide brush that they used to make the new laws banning the teaching of CRT, also ends up banning a lot of history and social studies that dealt with similar issues.

As noted before, it is a bit meta, but the result of the efforts to ban history that is inconvenient are also a perfect item for CRT to study to demonstrate how very conservative politicians can use the system to continue to commit injustice, in this case to researchers and professors who by “coincidence” include many minorities that succeeded in academia.

382

To be sure, and I frequently do look at alternative perspectives. As @Sam_Stone said, white privelege doesn’t really leave a lot of room for white people living in poverty. Like any ideology, it’s incomplete, and dangerous when taken to extremes. But, I’m not an extremist. I’m just a person who saw a lot of inequality in the world and wanted to know why. And when I found out why, I wanted to do something about it. And I will add, when people claim progressives are out of touch academic elitists, they are negating that the majority of people coming up with these hoity toity theories are black professionals who faced discrimination themselves and who wanted a framework to understand what had happened to them, just as feminism gave me a framework for understanding what happened to me. A lot of the theory comes from boots on the ground research in communities of color.