What is Critical Race Theory?

I think that this is a partially valid criticism, but doesn’t mean that CRT should be rejected entirely any more than we should reject the theory of evolution simply because there are a lot of evolutionary just so stories.

Like evolution the basic premises and mechanisms of CRT are pretty much unassailable.

  1. Racism has been a huge part of our nations past.
  2. The effects of racism in one area can self perpetuate and also have an impact in other areas that can permeate throughout the system.
  3. Therefor the effects of our historical (and current) racism permeates the system.

One can argue about the magnitude of the effect and whether this or that condition is attributable to racism. but pretending that the our society is color blind except for those overt racist acts performed by individuals, is beyond belief.

That is a rich thing to say when one big example CRT mentioned and deals with was the huge disparity observed when minorities are dying at higher rates than their population in the pandemic. Clearly only by abandoning empirical data, logical thought and deductive reasoning is that one can then agree with the ones that think that there is nothing wrong there.

My take? It’s a very complicated re-evaluation of history, sociology, politics, and similar concepts that includes narrative and similar info (including statistics like polling data) and casts a skeptical eye towards the white-washing and apologism of abominations like slavery and white supremacism in past historical renderings. CRT is not the final, complete, and only interpretation of history/sociology/etc. that should be considered. But it’s a useful one in many circumstances, IMO. It’s certainly a far more accurate rendering of history than, say, the Lost Cause history, or the current MAGA nonsense history. Crucially, it doesn’t just assume that everything’s okay. It doesn’t see an institutional statistic (say, crime statistics) and just default to “this must necessarily be an accurate and complete rendering of the behavior of black people”. It recognizes that these institutions have agendas, histories, biases, etc., just as much as our whole society does. IMO it’s a natural evolution of skepticism when applied to history, politics, and the like. I’m skeptical that what we were taught as kids has much to do with how things actually were, when it comes to the real lives of black people. And I should be, as should you. If you’re skeptical too, then congratulations! You’ve bought into at least a part of Critical Race Theory – being skeptical of the “system’s” teachings on our history with regards to race.

This is just a nonsense criticism. Gobbledygook that can mean anything or nothing. If you object to something in CRT, then point it out specifically, with cites/links, and explain why you think it’s wrong.

The word “theory” when used in regards to evolution carries a completely different weight than when used in Critical Race Theory.
One is the equivalent of “law” (as in the the theory of gravity) the other, at best, is the equivalent of “hypothesis”.
You can’t put the latter on the same level as the former.

The definition of CRT I got from this thread.

Start with the fact that everyone and everything is racist. Everything follows from there.

Add to that the burden of proof here is not on the accuser, it’s on the accused to try and defend from something that is un-defendable.

I don’t think these ideas are exclusive to crt, nor did crt discover these ideas. The problem is the lack of reason and logic allows you to attribute almost infinite significance to racism. It allows you to explain away everything without any serious thought or evidence.

I think most people, certainly most liberals agree that racism is part of our history and the ripple effects of racism are still felt today.

I will also note that much of crt is focused on white supremacy and the advantages of being in the dominant group. In what way are asians in the dominant group? Crt folks have tried to shoehorn asians into the white category with notions of “white adjacency” to justify discriminating against them (or at least to explain away their success. This is designed to preserve the notion that white supremacy prevents other large groups from succeeding, and it definitely makes it harder, but it makes it harder for all minorities, including asians. And rather than applauding asians for their success in the face of racism, they pile more racism on top of the white supremacy, almost as if asian success is an insult to other minority groups that are not as successful.

They’re not merely saying that white adjacency allows asians to be affected by racism to a lesser degree than other minorities, they are saying that somehow white supremacy allows these white adjacent asians to do even better than whites (at least in academics). This seems like utter bullshit to me.

And liberals generally do not argue about the existence of racism, I certainly don’t pretend that society is colorblind towards any minority. But the crt folks seem to think that society is at least partially color blind towards asians, which allows them to succeed (and even exceed white academic performance), and this is the justification that some crt folks use to justify discriminating against asians. Sure racism exists and it affects different groups differently but notion that these effects are so overwhelming that it justifies racial preferences for groups outside the descendants of slaves and american indians (e.g. hispanics) is much harder to justify on a reasoned and rational basis. The arguments put forward seem to be that there is a racial disparity in achievement (by hispanics) so the disparity must be a result of racism and therefore we must correct for that by discriminating in favor of hispanics and against asians. You don’t get there by arguing that hispanics have suffered significantly more discrimination and racism than asians, noone has ever tried to make that argument to me. The argument is that hispanics are not doing well academically and it must be because of racism. Asians are doing well so they must not be suffering from racism (see white adjacency). The only way you get to this conclusion is by casting aside logic, empirical evidence, and rational thought, in favor of anecdotes and parables, in other words it requires a level of religious thinking.

Unless you are intent on attributing every disparity to racism, this can largely be attributed to poverty rates.
The CDC ratios seem to correlate more to poverty rates than anything else.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/investigations-discovery/hospitalization-death-by-race-ethnicity.html
https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/poverty-rate-by-raceethnicity/?currentTimeframe=0&sortModel={"colId":"Location","sort":"asc"}

And sure, poverty is one of the legacies of slavery and segregation in the black community and genocide in the native american community. I’m not sure why racism would cause more poverty among hispanics than asians?

You’re setting a pretty low standard for yourself.

And I completely agree that in the context of criminal justice and the white supremacist architecture of society (just how society is built with white people, white families and white culture in mind), crt served a useful purpose in providing an additional perspective, an additional gloss but that is not what is happening. It is not an additional gloss on how to view empirical data and the underlying assumptions of rational arguments, it has become the central philosophy of many crt folks to the exclusion of data and logical reasoning. Under this philosophy, there is no need to think things through, it’s all just racism. Under this philosophy, there is nothing racism cannot explain and very little that racism cannot justify.

There is a long history of legal thought on race and criminal justice. One of my favorite books as a child was “to kill a mockingbird.” This book clearly addressed how racism and the criminal justice system might interact. This is not an invention of crt. What crt brings to the table (at least these days) is permission to ignore facts and logic in favor of anecdote and parable.

Of course its a good criticism. I am not the only one making it. It is a common criticism of crt. Crt is undisciplined, unaccountable and proves waaay too much.

Christians do it all the time with creationism. You just have to have the will and determination to believe.

Not only is everything racist. Racism explains everything.

That is your opinion, not what the studies reported. BTW it is underwhelming to dismiss one very basic point made early, so as to get your incomplete opinion, poverty among minorities is a result of the systemic racism seen.

Very ignorant thing to say, that was a straw man. So much for logic.

You are not sure because that line was also reaching for your ignorance; it is more complicated than that, most Hispanics, specially white Hispanics, make more than Asians.

MARTIN: Mr. Austin, you’ve just mentioned that a third of Asian-Americans live in some of the most expensive places in the country, New York City, Los Angeles and San Francisco. You started to tell us why that factors into these poverty rates. Does that mean that, if these people lived somewhere else, they wouldn’t be poor or is it that people are concentrated in places where poverty is more prevalent, anyway? What’s the impact of that?

AUSTIN: No. The impact is simply cost of living. So by the official poverty rate, the Asian-American poverty rate is higher than the non-Hispanic white poverty rate. But that official rate does not take into account cost of living and when you factor in the fact that it costs more to live in San Francisco than in Topeka, Kansas, for example, then you see that those rates are considerably higher.

One important factor in the poverty rate that we see - the high poverty rate goes back to what I said before, that there are significant numbers of Asian-Americans who did not complete a high school diploma, so that’s a factor.

The other thing to keep in mind, even at the high end, when you compare Asian-Americans individually by educational attainment, you still see that they earned less than non-Hispanic white males, for example. Particularly at the high school level, there’s a significant difference, so white men earn about $10,000 more than Asian men with just a high school diploma.

When others make calculations about overall poverty rates Asians overall rank as the highest earning racial and ethnic group in the U.S., but it is not a status shared by all Asians: From 1970 to 2016, the gains in income for lower-income Asians trailed well behind the gains for their counterparts in other groups. I do remember that a goon number of Asians that do succeed come from high income families that came to America, they already had a lot of advantages before hand.

So pick something specific, and take it apart. Not your own interpretations of CRT, but the real deal, and take it down. So far, it seems like you don’t like this thing you call CRT that appears much closer to Rush Limbaugh’s understanding of CRT than that of proponents/experts of CRT.

I had never heard of critical race theory until reading this thread (which I’ve not read more than a few posts of since it started to seem repetitive). But just two days I came on this manifesto signed by most if not all of the leaders of the Math. Assoc. of America. I should clarify that this is the organization devoted to math education, in contrast to the Amer. Math. Soc., whose primary interest is research. Anyway, the MAA released a statement on racism that included the following:

“It is time for all members of our profession to acknowledge that mathematics is created by humans and therefore inherently carries human biases. Until this occurs, our community and our students cannot reach full potential.”

I won’t say this is the biggest pile of hogwash I have ever seen, but it is pure BS.

For the full statement, see

You have to add in that everything is controlled by whites to be racist against blacks - cheerleading overt racism against Asians and Jews is an important part of CRT.

I find absurd the notion that one should define a belief system, let alone its social effects, based solely on what its most zealous proponents say it is. No one is going to accept as axiomatic that North Korea is a “democratic republic” or that Donald Trump’s only goal is to “make America great.” It’s inherent in the notion of serious discussion that we bring some sort of skepticism to claims and try to match them with reality. What set of principles best predicts how a CRT proponent will actually evaluate and act in a given situation - their stated claims about what they believe and want, or a summary such as the below?

*Race is the fundamental fact of reality and society. There is lip service paid to the older, liberal notion, easily supported by history, that race is socially constructed, but there’s no attempt made to resolve the contradiction between the actual meaning of this assertion and the CRT belief in race as a metaphysical fact of the universe - like most extreme ideologies, yelling at anyone who articulates the contradictions is part of the point.

*The basic theory of motivations is a funhouse mirror of the Mein Kampf way of looking at the universe, in which the Marxist oversimplification of behavior (“everything is actually about economics and every other supposed reason for any individual behavior or social structure is either a lie or a self-delusion to cover up a true economic motivation”) is just swapped out wholesale for another base factor (“everything is actually about race and every other supposed reason for any individual behavior or social structure is either a lie or a self-delusion to cover up a true racial motivation”).

*The idea that every political and social decision is a contest between races in which one race must lose for another to win is also taken in common with white supremacist ideology, just with the rooting interests reversed. This can equally be viewed as the rotation of Marxism - instead of “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” CRT posits that “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of race struggles,” with the same unfalsifiable, circular reasoning applied to events that were not actually about race that Marxists apply to events that were not actually about class.

*There are “really” only two races, black and white, and everyone else is either basically one or basically the other in a system of hierarchy and alliance. Asians and Hispanics exist only as tools for one side of the perpetual race war to wield against the other. Jews don’t really exist, they’re just extra white white people or a religion within white people.

I would say that was worded in a nonsensical way, but the context points at what happens in education, I would had said “taught by humans” instead of “created by humans”.

A new study in the journal Educational Researcher, led by Yasemin Copur-Gencturk, assistant professor and math education expert at the University of Southern California, finds both white teachers and teachers of color interpret boys’ math ability as higher than girls’ and white students’ math ability as higher than that of black and Hispanic students, even when the educators had judged students’ math performance as equal.

All of the teachers received three student responses, which included a variety of correct and incorrect answers to problems of different difficulty levels culled from the National Assessment of Educational Progress. The responses were randomly labeled with names associated with black, Hispanic, and white boys and girls.

Teachers didn’t favor any gender or racial group when evaluating whether each answer was fully, partially, or not at all correct. But bias showed up when teachers tried to interpret students’ math ability from their answers, particularly when students had received partial credit.

Teachers, particularly white teachers, consistently rated “boys” as having higher math ability than “girls” for the same partially correct answer, and rated boys as having higher math ability even for incorrect answers. And when students answered incorrectly, researchers found white teachers judged “white girls’” math abilities much more negatively than they did those of students with names that sounded male, black or Hispanic.

Teachers of color also rated students with white-sounding names as having higher math ability than students with black- or Hispanic-sounding names for the same partially correct answers, and they rated “white boys’” math abilities higher than white teachers did. This finding runs somewhat contrary to other studies which have found, for example, that black math and reading teachers had higher college-going expectations for black students than white teachers did.

No idea who is summarizing like Proust there. :slightly_smiling_face:

Looking at academia there are more understandable summaries:

https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/subject_specific_writing/writing_in_literature/literary_theory_and_schools_of_criticism/critical_race_theory.html

Critical Race Theory, or CRT, is a theoretical and interpretive mode that examines the appearance of race and racism across dominant cultural modes of expression. In adopting this approach, CRT scholars attempt to understand how victims of systemic racism are affected by cultural perceptions of race and how they are able to represent themselves to counter prejudice.

Closely connected to such fields as philosophy, history, sociology, and law, CRT scholarship traces racism in America through the nation’s legacy of slavery, the Civil Rights Movement, and recent events. In doing so, it draws from work by writers like Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King, Jr., and others studying law, feminism, and post-structuralism. CRT developed into its current form during the mid-1970s with scholars like Derrick Bell, Alan Freeman, and Richard Delgado, who responded to what they identified as dangerously slow progress following Civil Rights in the 1960s.

Prominent CRT scholars like Kimberlé Crenshaw, Mari Matsuda, and Patricia Williams share an interest in recognizing racism as a quotidian component of American life (manifested in textual sources like literature, film, law, etc). In doing so, they attempt to confront the beliefs and practices that enable racism to persist while also challenging these practices in order to seek liberation from systemic racism.

As such, CRT scholarship also emphasizes the importance of finding a way for diverse individuals to share their experiences. However, CRT scholars do not only locate an individual’s identity and experience of the world in his or her racial identifications, but also their membership to a specific class, gender, nation, sexual orientation, etc. They read these diverse cultural texts as proof of the institutionalized inequalities racialized groups and individuals experience every day.

As Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic explain in their introduction to the third edition of Critical Race Theory: The Cutting Edge , “Our social world, with its rules, practices, and assignments of prestige and power, is not fixed; rather, we construct with it words, stories and silence. But we need not acquiesce in arrangements that are unfair and one-sided. By writing and speaking against them, we may hope to contribute to a better, fairer world” (3). In this sense, CRT scholars seek tangible, real-world ends through the intellectual work they perform. This contributes to many CRT scholars’ emphasis on social activism and transforming everyday notions of race, racism, and power.

More recently, CRT has contributed to splinter groups focused on Asian American, Latino, and Indian racial experiences.

Most CRT scholarship attempts to demonstrate not only how racism continues to be a pervasive component throughout dominant society, but also why this persistent racism problematically denies individuals many of the constitutional freedoms they are otherwise promised in the United States’ governing documents. This enables scholars to locate how texts develop in and through the cultural contexts that produced them, further demonstrating how pervasive systemic racism truly is. CRT scholars typically focus on both the evidence and the origins of racism in American culture, seeking to eradicate it at its roots.

Additionally, because CRT advocates attending to the various components that shape individual identity, it offers a way for scholars to understand how race interacts with other identities like gender and class. As scholars like Crenshaw and Willams have shown, CRT scholarship can and should be amenable to adopting and adapting theories from related fields like women’s studies, feminism, and history. In doing so, CRT has evolved over the last decades to address the various concerns facing individuals affected by racism.

Interestingly, CRT scholarship does not only draw attention to and address the concerns of individual affected by racism, but also those who perpetrate and are seemingly unaffected by racial prejudice. Scholars like W.E.B. Du Bois, Peggy McIntosh, Cheryl Harris, and George Lipsitz discuss white privilege and notions of whiteness throughout history to better understand how American culture conceptualizes race (or the seeming absence of race).

If it had said that, I would have no problem with it. But as worded, it seems to imply that from Thales on to me, all mathematics was created by and for the benefit of the whites and would have been different had it been created by blacks. This is pure BS.

I could say that there is pure BS in the constitution of the USA (and very appropriate to the subject at hand), but that did not stop us from amending it. I guess what I’m trying to say is that tossing the baby with the bathwater is also not a good tactic, what some guy posted (and it is not clear those Math guys are part of the ones directly involved in CRT) should not lead one to ignore the rest.

So again - when CRT activists lobby to destroy merit-based admission to elite high schools in New York and Virginia, often by using rhetoric against Asians that is indistinguishable from white supremacist language, is that “recognizing racism as a quotidian component of American life” and “attempting to confront the beliefs and practices that enable racism to persist” or is that the logical action of those who believe that everything is a war of race against race and there is no explanation for disparities in testing outcomes besides a conspiracy?

The idea that CRT is just a method of looking at history, one that DISCOVERED that racism sometimes exists when this was being denied by everyone else, is nonsense. It is a philosophy whose devotees act, in real-world ways that have policy effects, and it is directly opposed to traditional liberal principles of equality and to the prior ideologies which did, in fact, understand before 1980 that some things are racist.

What studies. The article you originally cited only said that there was a disparate impact betweenr aces. that disparate impact was largely due to things like:

“These lopsided outcomes are largely due to the higher likelihoods that racial minority populations will fall into groups considered at risk of serious COVID-19 cases. For example, incarcerated populations, essential workers, people with disabilities, and people with underlying chronic health conditions comprise relatively larger shares of people of color compared to white Americans.”
These are all things that are correlated to income.

It’s silly to get all huffed up about me attributing the death rate to income (which is clearly true) by saying “well income is also affected by racism” According to your philosophy everything is affected by racism. It is so overused as an excuse that it has become meaningless. Racism is clearly a factor in many things but it is not usually the only factor.

The article you cite here is mostly just addressing the black/white paradigm. I think I’ve already gone over why that paradigm doesn’t work. This isn’t to say that there isn’t a black/white issue but all the underlying assumptions for crt are fatally flawed when addressing the plight of anyone other than the descendants of slaves and native americans. It does not really do a great job of explaining why hispanics do so much worse than asians. It does not explain why asians outperform whites.

That is a bit overly simplistic, but essentially, yes.

Then why do they need affirmative action at the expense of asians?
BTW, I don’t see where in your cite it says that hispanic whites make more than asians. I see where it says that asians have higher poverty rates than other groups and this is true. In nyc for example, asians have the highest poverty rate.

I think you are misremembering.

From your wiki article:
" What is most arresting about critical race theory is that…it turns its back on the Western tradition of rational inquiry, forswearing analysis for narrative. Rather than marshal logical arguments and empirical data, critical race theorists tell stories – fictional, science-fictional, quasi-fictional, autobiographical, anecdotal – designed to expose the pervasive and debilitating racism of America today. By repudiating reasoned argumentation, the storytellers reinforce stereotypes about the intellectual capacities of nonwhites." -Judge Posner

So once again, my primary criticism is how crt discards logical arguments and empirical data for anecdote (lived experiences) and parables (narratives). It is not like the crt in the legal context, trying to add a perspective. It is a central philosophy that has foundation or underpinnings other than faith. In that way you are entitled to your religion but when your religion creates discrimination that did not exist before, then your religion should be cast aside in rational debate just as christianity is in debates regarding gay marriage or birth control. Your faith is not greater than reason.