Sure, and for about the 4th time - the part of CRT that advocates listening to personal narrative to gain insight into social issues is absolutely extremely valuable. Nobody in this thread is disputing that.
The part of CRT that is dubious is the edifice of dogmatic social theory that it has erected, its rejection of traditional liberal values, its rejection of Enlightenment rationalism.
Turn Bell’s story on its head for a second. What if the aliens were interested in white folks this week and approached black people (through a representative of some prominence) and offered the same deal? I think that they (the aliens) would get the same answer in either case.
I don’t think that’s true. Anecdotes can be codified into buckets, and you can measure differences in outcomes between the “used faith healing” vs “used modern medicine” approaches, as in this random study that popped up in Google Scholar.
Using anecdotes as data in a scientific and scientific context presents challenges in codifying and sampling, but it’s not impossible.
It’s also completely missing the point of CRT, I think. It’s not trying to convince scientists, but pointing out that systems of power rely on shared narratives, many of which have become racist over time.
The OP states “I think for some people it has become the central philosophy of their world view” (whereas I think the implication is that science ought to be, instead). It seems to me, not knowing either CRT worshippers or the OP, that there is a false dichotomy here.
Science just isn’t a particularly useful tool for minorities to use to address power imbalances. CRT isn’t a particularly useful tool for physicists. But so what? They’re not even after the same problems. There doesn’t have to be a coherence in methodology because they’re not going after the same targets.
When traditional liberal values haven’t addressed the issue sufficiently and thinks rights are the main concerns to be addressed and not systemic problems why would you expect folks to question them?
As for rejection of rationalism, it seems a number of CRT thinkers are using data and rational debate (but also questioning starting positions) in addition to narrative. So why focus on those who do not and ascribe it to the entire group?
This is a straw man that has been repeated a couple of times. The point is not that the traditional scientific establishment can or should address social justice issues. The point is that, in the same intellectual tradition as Marxism and Critical Theory, CRT has developed social theories that make substantial truth claims about reality, and - based on these theories - about how to enact social justice. Yet little of what it claims has much real evidence to support it; and indeed CRT explicitly rejects the validity of reason, rational analysis and objective evidence to evaluate truth claims.
Riemann, it’s a short story. He is not presenting this as fact. It’s an exaggerration for the purpose of illustration. An allegory. Ya know, fiction.
This just isn’t true.
I have a hard time understanding why you think this. Is there some central organizing group dictating from on high that all CRT must enforce dogmatic groupthink? Or else what? Is there a Pope of CRT that commands this?
If not, isn’t CRT just one of many bazillions of social theories, ranging from high-browed academia to conspiracy theories, that occasionally offer useful insights? Why do you feel a need to dress it up as maniacal religion hellbent on destroying rationalism – as if 'rationalism" itself were popular outside academia? Rationalism’s chief enemy, I posit, isn’t CRT but evolutionary biology. So why blame it on CRT? Did some CRT rep come knocking on your door to force-feed you the latest issue of the Racetower or something?
Well, no. CRT and related theories are the dominant mainstream paradigm in the modern social sciences.
I’ve already responded to an identical comment above. Read the thread.
Agreed. And it seems a lot of the CRT theorists in academia are discussing things on the terms of rationalism (at least the academic papers I’ve seen) while challenging the underlying assumptions and starting positions of Enlightenment rationalism. Things which should be asked of it - and a questioning that I think the original Enlightenment thinkers would welcome in the discourse.
So help me understand. Breaking it down:
Is that a fair summary?
If so… I think the response is the same: So? We already know that humans aren’t particularly scientific, and have a hard time testing our hypotheses. Do CRT users rise above the baseline level of irrationality present in our species? And are they pushier than any other group about it?
Like Marxism, it’s a set of claims about the world, many of which found mass appeal because they resonated with emotional truths that people held to be self-evident. Some of those may have been wrong, others still may have been entirely unfalsifiable to begin with, but nonetheless they appealed to our primate brains. Isn’t that just the standard way of communicating that our species does? You can’t force rationalism on humans, no matter your political ideology.
Is this true? Do you have evidence for that? I will admit I am not in touch with the sociology departments of modern educational facilities.
However, even if that were the case among certain prominent US universities, I doubt it is true across the world, or that it would remain true across time. Academics, being people like the rest of us, face influences and biases from social trends. CRT certainly wasn’t the predominant issue 100, 200, 1000 years ago. We’ll probably have moved on to some other issue a decade or two later. Ideologies come in and out of fashion, like anything else.
I guess I just don’t understand your gripe with it. Are you arguing that CRT is insufficiently scientific, and thus should not be used as one basis of social movements? That’s just completely at odds with how social movements or humans work. We don’t live in a rational world because we are not a rational species, a select few thinkers aside. If religiosity is a proxy for lack of rationality, that seems to be a much bigger threat to the Enlightenment than race theory of any sort. Why don’t we start with that? Or anything else that humans utilize with limited scientific rigor, which is to say most of everything?
Sure, but you’re basically taking something that’s a narrative, and trying to fit it into something quantifiable. IMO, it’s trying to make the best of a bad situation after the fact.
I mean, if you took 1000 people with the same knee injury (as determined by modern diagnostic tests like MRI, etc…) and asked them about their experience with the injury and with their recovery, you’d get 1000 different answers. Some would say “it healed great!” when in fact it might not have done so relative to others. Some would say that it was a long and painful recovery, when it wasn’t long. Some would say that they lost range of motion, when in fact they did not, as measured by a PT’s protractor. And so on.
That’s WHY we have stuff like the protractor, and actual rigorous data points that are collected, rather than vague anecdotal stuff. I mean, you can get some fairly soft stuff about the experience itself, but you’re not liable to get very good actionable information about the actual healing process, or the actual injury itself (both in a medical sense). Where it would be most helpful would be trying to identify the circumstances- “my cleats caught and I spun”, or “I planted my foot to make a cut, and…” That sort of thing can be extremely useful, but it’s not actually “data” in the sense of something that can be used for statistical or mathematical analysis, or even something that can easily be put in computer systems for analysis or correlation type work.
And how did things work out for Marxism? Marxism was pretty exciting, but I think most people would now agree that Marxist is a failed ideology, and principally because the Marxist model for social dynamics was deeply flawed.
Surely it matters whether the social theories upon which we pursue social justice and try to work toward a better society are valid theories, not just whether they seem motivating and appealing. CRT certainly grants some deep insights, but as a broad social theory, the objective question is how well does CRT really model the essence of human nature?
Skin colour has nothing to do with the use of the term, And it certainly isn’t bullshit as in its general application it is obviously true.
And I’m not passing judgment on any aspect of CRT, I was merely passing comment on how that saying can be used and more generally interpreted. And of course your reference to the fact that
only goes to show that, the anecdotes on their own are not enough, the supporting evidence is needed. Which was exactly the point I was making.
Subjective experiences aren’t “a bad situation” or somehow inferior pieces of information. They are data. To use your analogy, recording subjective pain alongside objective measurements of injuries is useful in analyzing how different populations experience pain. As with redheads and pain, if all your scientists preassumed that subjective experiences were worthless, such a correlation may never have been identified. Similary, by ignoring anecdotes instead of developing better statistical methods to incorporate them, we risk excluding the reality of certain populations just because they were self-reported. That’s not science, that’s scientific hubris on the part of the researcher. Or, structural racism not much different from phrenology.
Not to say that critical race theory is either for or against the scientific method, but scientists absolutely should be incorporating anecdotes into research where possible, as one but not the sole data point, in fields from racial theory to political science to climate science to artificial intelligence. What is an anecdote if not a data point from one observer? Even if you were just sampling, say, air quality across a city with different point monitoring stations, some of them will be outliers, others may be equipment failure, but once in a while you’ll find novel insights too – but only if you had the foresight to collect and record and perform different analyses on them, instead of just assuming you already knew everything.
In the case of race, the very thing you are studying IS subjective – how minorities are affected. To measure that you of course need to use a mixture of subjective and objective measurements, and try to form some cohesive result set out of it. And different researchers will be asking different questions and coming to different conclusions out of those, but indubitably the data, be they anecdotes or census demographics, is important.
Is your underlying goal here to try to equate and invalidate CRT via an appeal to right-wing disdain for Marxism? 
Are you sure it’s not your own biases talking?
Is there really any social theory, aside from the arrogance of its author, that ought to “model the essence of human nature?” Why would there be just one Grand Unifying Social Theory? That’s more the stuff of religions. Humans and societies both evolve over time, and are studied and recorded by the flawed hands of a flawed ape. If you come hoping for Truth, capital T, you’re going to leave disappointed.
I just don’t think it’s useful to say a theory of X is entirely true or false. Instead, I’d say utilitarian value is sufficient? Take what is useful from any social theory, or religion for that matter, or Newtonian physics, combine it with other useful theories, and leave the rest to attrition away over time. What’s the problem?
Both CRT and Marxism have granted socially useful insights (yes, some even persist today). Some of their claims may have been wrong or unscientific/unfalsifiable. Others have been correct or useful. Others still may simply be awaiting more corroborating science and data, and maybe you could be the next great CRT scientist to propel sociology into a brave new post-race frontier. But in the meantime, it’s useful as one more set of insights into a very complex and nuanced world, despite your misgivings about its scientific purity.
Anecdotes are as good as data that’s how i know homeopathy works lol
Try again.
It’s weird that you started the OP asking what it was, and then jumped straight into judging that everyone is wrong about it.
I also judge things to be crap when they displease me and I lack much familiarity with them. But it’s not exactly something I would brag about.