Critical Race Theory

Important Note

Bear in mind that when conservatives and parents movements' oppose CRT, they are opposing an actual practice and ideology, but that these critiques are aimed as CRT as it appears today not as it was originally constituted.

To understand this, see: Realist vs Idealist Interpretations of CRT

Contextual Quote

"Embarrassed that I was railing against CRT without completely understanding it, I read “Silent Covenants,” a book about education by Derrick Bell, who, along with Kimberlé Crenshaw and others, was one of the originators of critical race theory. I was surprised to read Bell’s argument promoting school choice for black and white Americans alike. Bell also laments what he calls “racial balance remedies,” or the conflation of equality of opportunity with the notion that racial parity (the idea that an institution should perfectly match the racial breakdown of the community it serves) as the only measure of “anti-racism.”

This overlap between traditionally conservative views about education and critical race theorists can be helpful to those, like me, who are trying to fight racism by avoiding the temptation to caricature others. A vision of anti-racism that genuinely seeks to refrain from demonizing our differences has to begin with finding common ground."

- Chloé Valdary [1]

Typology

Realist vs Idealist Interpretations of CRT

Patrick Anderson:

"Recent discussions on the left have focused on debunking insipid conservatives’ perspectives on CRT, but this is low-hanging fruit. The most difficult challenge lies in debunking the liberal narrative about CRT, a task that can only be achieved through careful historical analysis.

To truly understand the current state of CRT, it is necessary to understand the difference between the realist school of CRT and the idealist school of CRT. Furthermore, it is necessary to acknowledge the historical process by which the realist school of CRT—the original school of critical race theory—was gradually displaced and replaced by the idealist school of CRT. Today, the realist school is so small and marginalized that the paradigms of the idealist school of CRT pass for CRT as such.

Richard Delgado—who, alongside Derrick Bell, is one of the founders of the Critical Race Theory tradition—explains the distinction between realist and idealist versions of CRT.

As Delgado writes, the idealist school of CRT “holds that race and discrimination are largely functions of attitude and social formation. For these thinkers, race is a social construction created out of words, symbols, stereotypes, and categories. As such, we may purge discrimination by ridding ourselves of the texts, narratives, ideas, and meanings that give rise to it and that convey the message that people of other racial groups are unworthy, lazy, and dangerous. These writers analyze hate speech, media images, census categories, and such issues as intersectionality and essentialism. They analyze unconscious or institutional racism and show how cognitive theory exposes a host of preconceptions, baselines, and mindsets that operate below the level of consciousness to render certain people consistently one-down.”

By contrast, the realist school of CRT argues that “racism is a means by which our system allocates privilege, status, and wealth. They point out that the West did not demonize black or native populations until it determined to conquer and exploit them, and that media images in every period shift to accommo­date the interests of the majority group, now for reassurance, now for vindication. Racial realists examine the role of international relations and competition, the interests of elite groups, and the changing demands of the labor market in hopes of understanding the twists and turns of racial fortunes, including the part the legal system plays in that history.”

The difference, then, between realist and idealist approaches to CRT is clear. While the realists argue that economic structures are the foundations for structural racism and that economic interests are the primary motivating factor when it comes to white and elite racism, the idealists argue that racism is largely a function of language, symbols, and psychology. While the realists view domestic structural racism as a manifestation of the patterns of U.S. empire and capitalism, the idealists view racism as a psychological deficiency of whites that prevents (middle class) non-whites from joining imperialist and capitalist institutions. Realists do not deny the importance of language, symbols, and psychology, but as Delgado notes, for the realists, “material factors such as profits and the labor market are even more decisive in determining who falls where in that system.”

Despite its philosophical importance, the realist/idealist distinction within CRT is completely missing from the current debate. For instance, many contemporary media accounts of CRT rely upon the book Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, which is authored by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic. Like Delgado’s other works, the realist/idealist distinction is prominently discussed in this introductory text, yet every media outlet that cites this text in its articles on CRT neglects this realist/idealist distinction.

To be sure, there are immediate economic and political reasons why this is the case. Both liberal media outlets and right-wing media outlets erase the realist/idealist distinction because they want contemporary CRT to appear more radical than it actually is. Liberals want CRT to appear more radical so they can trick leftists into joining their Democratic Party coalition; conservatives want CRT to appear more radical so they can fear monger their reactionary audiences with a make-believe boogieman. But there are also historical and intellectual reasons for this erasure as well.

Two trends in the history of CRT explain why the realist school of CRT is completely missing from the current debate. First, as Delgado explains, there is the fact that university deans and wealthy donors sought to de-radicalize CRT by funding idealist CRT scholarship and defunding realist CRT scholarship. The realist school of CRT dominated the movement’s first two decades, roughly from the early 1970s to the early 1990s. But as CRT gained academic legitimacy in the mid-1990s, the idealist school, which emerged in the late 1980s, began to grow. By the early 2000s, the idealist school had almost completely overtaken CRT intellectual circles.

The process by which idealism came to dominate CRT can be found in the publication record. In 1995, Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement—the first major collection of foundational CRT writings—was published. While this anthology features an approximate balance between realist and idealist CRT scholarship, CRT’s realist roots are firmly acknowledged. As Cornel West writes in his Foreword to the collection, “When Derrick Bell, Jr. began to question the basic assumptions of the law’s treatment of people of color in the leading law reviews—the essays that open this collection—he was virtually the lone dissenter in the arena of legal scholarship.”

By 2003, when Crossroads, Directions, and a New Critical Race Theory was published , realism had been completely excised from the CRT movement. Delgado criticized the book, arguing that “Ideas, words, categories, and symbols [had] replaced nationalism, interest convergence, history, and similar tools that had served as Critical Race Theory’s stock in trade until then.” Instead, collection features jargon-heavy essays by academics writing about their tenure struggles and white authors apologetically joining the conversation. The entire collection was about individual psychologies, not social structures.

Kimberlé Crenshaw, who has been treated as the foremost authority on CRT as of late, embraced this idealist turn, expressing her hope that, in ten or twenty years time, the CRT movement might hold an event titled “Discursive Disobedience: Critical Race Theory Stages a Virtual Sit-In in American Consciousness. ”

For Delgado, this “idealist turn ” in CRT (to borrow a phrase from Tommy Curry) was the product of reactionary financial and political interests. Money began to flow into CRT scholarship, publications, conferences, and tenure-track faculty appointments, but only those scholars who were deemed non-threatening and only that scholarship that was deemed politically appropriate received such funding. As Delgado pointedly asks: “Might it be the lure of easy publication, not to mention that of attending an annual conference where one might meet one’s friends and relax in spa­ like splendor, that accounts for the proliferation of discourse scholarship during the period in question? And, from the dean’s perspective, is it not safer to fund scholarship that examines literary tropes than that which has the effrontery to propose that America’s proudest moment—Brown v. Board of Education—came about because white folks decided to do themselves a favor?”

The use of university funds and endowments to de-radicalize scholarship was nothing new. As early as 1974, Robert L. Allen observed white-controlled financial interests interfering with and undermining the autonomy of Black Studies departments. As he explains: “By selecting certain programs for funding while denying support to others, government agencies and foundations could manipulate the political orientation of these programs and the direction of academic research…Departments which were thought by the establishment to be dangerously independent or radical could thus be crippled or destroyed without the necessity of resorting to violent repression.” Delgado simply observed the same phenomenon happening to CRT in the 1990s.

In addition to the financially-motivated de-radicalization of CRT, there is a second trends in the history of CRT that explains why the realist school of CRT is completely missing from the discussion today. In “Will the Real CRT Please Stand Up? ,” philosopher Tommy J. Curry shows that the term “Critical Race Theory”—which originally referred to a distinct intellectual movement in legal studies, rooted in the work of Derrick Bell—was hijacked by philosophers and used as a slogan to market any scholarship that “critically” examined the phenomenon of “race.” In 1990, the term “Critical Race Theory” referred only to the tradition of legal scholarship that examined the relationship between structural racism and the law; by the early 2000s, the term “Critical Race Theory” was being used to describe nearly any paradigm or theory that examined race, from early-nineteenth century views to contemporary social contract theory and phenomenology. In other words, during the same period in which the idealist school eclipsed the realist school in the field of legal studies, the term “Critical Race Theory” was increasingly used to describe almost any scholarship that took an interest in race, no matter its methodology.

Let’s recap this history: CRT originated in the realist scholarship of Derrick Bell and Richard Delgado, who argued that structural racism is grounded in economics and racist attitudes motivated by economic self-interest. Later on, an idealist school of CRT emerged, focusing on language and discourse as the primary cite of racial conflict. Because idealist CRT was perceived as less threatening to the ruling political, economic, and academic powers that be, the idealist school was promoted and funded at the expense of the realist school. Simultaneously, as the term “Critical Race Theory” transformed into a valuable marketing tool for emerging philosophical scholarship, the term gradually lost its grounding in the CRT tradition of legal studies. By the start of this century, the phrase “Critical Race Theory” no longer had anything to do with its racial realist origins.

The history of CRT presented here provides a much-needed corrective to the explanations of CRT as they currently appear in the media. For example, in CNN’s extremely unhelpful and inappropriately titled article “What critical race theory is—and isn’t,” author Faith Karimi explains that Critical Race Theory is “a concept that’s been around for decades and that seeks to understand and address inequality and racism in the US.” “Critical race theory recognizes that systemic racism is part of American society and challenges the beliefs that allow it to flourish,” she adds.

It is difficult to get more benign that that. Not only does Karimi’s description of CRT overlook the realist/idealist division in CRT, it presents CRT as just another theory of race in America. This approach, however, fails to capture the original distinctiveness of CRT as a theoretical and philosophical paradigm. As Curry reminds us, “CRT’s theoretical distinctiveness does not reside in its general interest in the study of race, but rather in the approach and descriptive foundations that lie beneath CRT’s encounter with racism in American society. Because racism is taken to be permanent, CRT maintains that very different strategies be utilized to combat whiteness.” Yet Karimi and CNN can publish such vapid explanations because, under the obfuscated of the realist/idealist debate, the idealist schools become synonymous with CRT—and the realist schools is all but erased from the historical and intellectual record."

(https://www.blackagendareport.com/realism-idealism-and-deradicalization-critical-race-theory-rethinking-crt-debate-part-2-0)

Three Competing Definitions of what is wrong with U.S. Society

Gus diZerega:

"There are three different broad definitions commonly employed by advocates of CRT. One is insightful, one is bad history and bad social science, and one is worse than this. Blurring them in discussion discredits the first and ultimately strengthens the power of genuine racists. The third has been used by CRT’s enemies to discredit its most powerful variants.

I. American Society is systemically racist

At its best, CRT goes beyond examining the history of racism and how it is rooted in individual psychology. This kind of CRT explains how there are systemic features of American society that embed racism within what can appear, on the surface, to be racially neutral institutions. Institutional racism exists when race causes a different level of access to the goods, services, and opportunities of society.

Importantly, racist patterns emerge from the interactions of people within a system at least somewhat independently of their having racist values. Systemic racism can exist within specific institutions, such as the police, or within more encompassing social structures, such as the economy­­­­­. It often happens unconsciously and is invisible to those not injured by it. This CRT approach to understanding American racism examines entire systems, and how they can act independently of individual intentions. As such, institutional racism is not confined to African Americans. Native Americans continue to suffer from it, and it was a mainstay of much colonization by Europeans. It also exists in non-Western nations, such as Japan with respect to the Ainu and Koreans.

Social systems incorporate people within society into a network of relationships that is much like an ecosystem. These relations mutually influence one another, but not equally. I influence the price of milk when I buy or do not buy it, but compared to the dairy industry, my influence is minimal, and requires millions of similar choices by others to be felt. Because not all influence is equal, over time some attitudes and values will be reinforced by this system and some will be weakened. Slavery, the attitudes it encouraged, and the institutions it supported or modified, played an important role in American history. The institutions that rose after it had been abolished were often shaped by the cultural residue it left behind.

If racism is a personal failing, and not a systemic condition embedded in society and its institutions, nothing is required of Euro-Americans, or of our institutions, we need do little to combat it beyond personally rejecting racism and ensuring laws are formally race neutral. But, if racism is systemic, because it is to some degree removed from individual choice, bigger changes are needed. Absent them, existing institutions can undermine the intentions of those seeking to end racism.

I think this perspective is true.

Consider that the same neutral and procedural rules apply to Euro and African Americans for buying a house, and yet African Americans have more difficulty in buying one. This is not simply because they make less money. It was only during my life that these basic rules actually became more race neutral. Neighborhoods had long been long defined based on racial categoriesand FHA loans depended on meeting racist requirements. The result was segregation based on race that often also reflected large differences in income.

A great many White homeowners benefit from inheriting a house or wealth for at least a down payment from their parents. I am among them. This good fortune is exceptionally rare among African Americans. Even when Euro- and African Americans are earning the same income, their other means of support usually vary widely. The result is that a major part of the “American dream” is inaccessible to many African Americans. Today only 43% of black householders own their home vs 72% of white householders.

Patterns of living powerfully influence who we know and with whom we associate. I am on friendly terms with all the people who live in my cul de sac of modest homes here in Taos. I know hardly anyone else within a several block range and my broader social circle is shaped by shared interests.

American prosperity was based in part on entrepreneurial spirit, creativity, and hard work. This part of the national image is true, but it is not the whole truth. It was also partly based on exploiting others. Africans and Indians were the principal victims, and here I focus on Africans. Much of the wealth early ancestors produced was obtained directly or indirectly through slavery. Setting aside broader moral issues, slave labor was unpaid, its value appropriated by the slave owner who was essentially parasitical on the slave. Early Northern economic development depended on formally free labor, but also often depended on slave-produced cotton sold to Northern textile mills. New England shipping was deeply involved in the slave trade, even after it became illegal. When slavery formally ended, other exploitive economic arrangements followed, influenced by the culture it helped produce, such as share cropping and chain gangs.

Many – not all of course, but many – Euro-Americans benefit today from inheriting wealth they themselves did not create. A much smaller percent of Native, Asian, and African Americans do as well. Their ancestors’ work was usually genuine, but often occurred in systems where, on balance, African Americans were denied similar opportunities. This history creates the context within which neutral rules of buying and selling operate in ways that do not impact everyone equally. The median wealth for a single black woman is $100 vs $41,000 for single white women. This pattern persists no matter the level of education and value of their skills. For example, the median wealth of black college graduates is $23,400 vs $180,500 in white college graduates. The average Black college graduate leaves a public four-year institution with $111,486 in debt; 55% more debt than the average white college student. How much money one has available influences how easily we can start a small business or take chance on a promising opportunity when we have a family to support.

American school districts are locally funded, and poorer districts have fewer resources for educating their children. A neutral rule – local funding – has very unneutral consequences in an American context, and African American kids are among the biggest victims. If neighborhoods reflect differing racial mixes based on the impact of policies that have been abolished for decades, the pattern is being reinforced systemically. It is significant that when wealthy philanthropists offer to pay college expenses for young black kids in a neighborhood with a high dropout rate, the number graduating from high school increases dramatically.

These factors tend to create a society where Euro-American kids, especially from prosperous families, grow up with minimal interaction with African American kids. Since one of the largest dissolvers of racism is friendship, this reduces opportunities for overcoming ingrained attitudes based more on habit than deliberate choice. In addition, networks of friends are an important avenue by which people become aware of opportunities they might otherwise miss.

But systemic racism is more than economic. It shapes life in many directions. For example, defenders of statues of Confederate generals erected by racists around the end of WWI. claim these statues honor ‘history.’ But they had little to do with history and lots to do with reminding everyone who dominated these places. Once erected, as decades passed many white people came just to think of them as ‘history.’ But African Americans saw them as honoring people who killed others to preserve slavery. So long as they stood without challenge, the message went out that this was the dominant point of view, honoring important historic personages. Absent were statues of abolitionist leaders of both races, slaves who resisted their enslavement, or honoring Southerners who stayed loyal to the union and opposed slavery, as with the state of Jones. Think of the message sent if we only had statues of people who had fought against the American Revolution, such as Benedict Arnold.

Because causality flows in both directions, with institutions shaping people, but people shaping institutions, the outcome can be counter intuitive. A number of experiments have demonstrated if no one has any problem living in a culturally or racially diverse neighborhood, but everyone has even slight preference to not be a minority, as houses are sold and apartments are rented, over time, very segregated neighborhoods inevitably arise for mathematical reasons. Yet everyone could in practice prefer more integrated neighborhoods. (Thomas Schelling, Micromotives and Macrobehavior, pp. 142-3)

In this case, individual psychology meets systemic dynamics where neutral rules generate nonneutral outcomes not desired by anyone. In this case a reasonable argument can be made that as people of different races interact less, racist stereotypes can be strengthened. To the degree this is true, a neutral rule can operate within a system in such a way as to increase racist views. Were they practical, these biased rules would make a majority of both races happier within inter-racial communities than would less biased rules tending towards segregation.

Schelling described this dimension of how systems work long before the issue of systemic racism became a topic of public conversation: (p. 149)

Some of the processes may be passive, systemic, unmotivated but nevertheless biased. If job vacancies are filled by word of mouth or apartments go to people who have acquaintances in the building, or if boys can marry only girls they know and can know only girls who speak their language, a biased communication system will preserve and enhance the prevailing homogeneities.

An institution’s neutrality regarding race depends on the context within which it exists. Equal opportunity is not just an issue of healing psychological attitudes and abolishing explicitly racist laws. Human systems are complicated. CRT has drawn our attention to this as nothing else has.

But there are other interpretations of CRT.

II. American society is fundamentally racist

Some CRT advocates argue racism has been the underlying value behind our basic institutions. For example, while the Electoral College (EC) is very harmful in modern contexts, this approach to CRT claims it is rooted in racism. This claim is bad history and employs bad logic.

The EC was developed when there were no political parties and people were concerned over who would follow after George Washington, who most imagined would be our first president. After him, no likely Presidential candidate would have a truly national reputation. The idea behind the EC was that local notables would be chosen as electors by state populations who knew them. They would have a wider view as to who could best serve as president. It never worked as intended, as political parties emerged almost immediately, and took over selecting electors, as they do today.

To be sure, the 3/5 rule that allowed a slave to count as 3/5th of a citizens for purposes of representation did beef up Southern influence in Presidential elections, as it also beefed up Southern presence in the House of Representatives. But that rule existed separately from the EC and once slavery was abolished the EC remained unchanged. Further, not all who opposed slavery regarded the rule as pro-slavery. Frederic Douglass considered this aspect of the Constitution to be anti-slavery, writing “A black man in a free State is worth just two-fifths more than a black man in a slave State, as a basis of political power under the Constitution. Therefore, instead of encouraging slavery, the Constitution encourages freedom by giving an increase of “two-fifths” of political power to free over slave States. So much for the three-fifths clause; taking it at is worst, it still leans to freedom, not slavery; for, be it remembered that the Constitution nowhere forbids a coloured man to vote.”

Ironically, much of the EC’s current damage was rooted in an effort to reduce the influence of former Confederate states once they were readmitted. By adding a bunch of Western states far removed from Southern culture, and where slavery had never been important – like the Dakotas, Wyoming, and Montana – the South’s once powerful influence would be permanently reduced. But in time, for unrelated reasons, this change increased the influence of slavery-rooted authoritarianism and racism in the Senate and the EC, the opposite of why it was instituted.

The Electoral College example illustrates the failure of this second version of CRT. At least in part, this second version equates systemic patterns with the intentions of those who first designed the institutions. Sometimes this is true, but sometimes it is not. As the history of the EC demonstrates, institutions can function independently of intentions- and sometimes in opposition to them.

This error is compounded by arguing that racism is the foundational value of our institutions when it was a value among others. The reality was far more complicated. For example, John Jay, a major revolutionary figure, became an important early voice for abolition. In 1788 he wrote the President of the English Society for Promoting the Manumission of Slaves:

Prior to the great revolution, the great majority or rather the great body of our people had been so long accustomed to the practice and convenience of having slaves, that very few among them even doubted the propriety and rectitude of it. Some liberal and conscientious men had, indeed, by their conduct and writings, drawn the lawfulness of slavery into question, and they made converts to that opinion; but the number of those converts compared with the people at large was then very inconsiderable. Their doctrines prevailed by almost insensible degrees, and was like the little lump of leaven which was put into three measures of meal: even at this day, the whole mass is far from being leavened, though we have good reason to hope and to believe that if the natural operations of truth are constantly watched and assisted, but not forced and precipitated, that end we all aim at will finally be attained in this country.

Alexander Stephens, the Confederacy’s first and only Vice-President said in 1861:

- "The prevailing view entertained by [Thomas Jefferson] and most of the leading statesmen of the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature, that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with, but the general opinion of the men of that day was that, somehow or other in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away."

Again, human systems are complicated. Linear reasoning based on a single standard – racism in this case, but class, religion, and geography have all been similarly employed – cannot comprehend them. Good historical studies and competent social science demonstrate cultures are shaped by many factors, some contradictory and others paradoxical. In the United States racism is an important element long minimized, and needs to be more widely recognized. But racism is embedded within and exists in various degrees of tension and harmony with other beliefs and institutions, and has never been unchallenged.

III. All White Americans are racist

Some CRT advocates take a still darker road: you are a racist if you are ‘White.’ I try and avoid the term “White” because it is, first, false- we are more beige or pink than white. Second, it changes with the times. As a young man, Benjamin Franklin argued most Germans were not white. More recently Italians and Jews were denied that term. Third, many of its nonracial meanings carry a moral weight absent in this context, but which nevertheless spills over. So, I prefer the term Euro-American.

That said, for this third kind of CRT, all who are of European descent, and are considered ‘white,’ are “racists” in the sense that we participate in and benefit from systemic racism. Euro-Americans all benefit from ‘white privilege’ and systemic racism. Even a poor Euro-American man rarely has to worry about being pulled over by a cop because of the color of his skin, nor need he worry much about being shot afterwards. When all else is equal, being Euro-American is better, healthier, and safer than being African American. All ‘white’ people are therefore in some important sense “racists.”

Some of these CRT advocates insist calling Euro-Americans racist is not a personal attack, but it very often is expressed in very personal ways. I have been accused of such by a half Hispanic half Euro-American woman here in Taos who is a well-known advocate for this approach. As she put it, “I have no patience with white people dragging their feet when they fight tooth and nail to deny racism at every turn, splitting hairs and raising endless arguments – I just get pissed. The moderate racist is the protector, the enabler without which the lynch mob could not get away with terrorism. You are one of the majority who will not protect me or stand up for me.”

In an online discussion an academic friend wrote “We’re just suggesting that everybody – including the baby white boys – ought to help repair the damage that was done and definitely avoid doing that sort of thing again.” But beyond asking babies to get involved, this is hardly a new suggestion, and many of us taking a more traditional liberal approaches to combating racism have said and acted on the same point for years. ‘Racist Whites’ in some cases gave their lives during the Civil Rights movement in the 60s."

(https://www.dizerega.com/2021/06/28/getting-clear-on-critical-race-theory/)

Characteristics

1. Steven J. Lawrence:

"First, I want to reiterate that there is a difference between the theoretical framework of Critical Race Theory that was developed by Kimberlé Crenshaw, Derrick Bell, and others in the context of legal studies that analyzied the impact of racial bias on criminal law and societal norms in the United States and the "Pop CRT" that is now practiced in a growing number of schools, colleges, and workplaces.

The specific Pop CRT practices :

a) segregated "trainings" that separate people according to racial "affinity groups" (and other groupings, too)

b) group identity essentialism..... i.e. the explicit teaching that there is an inherent character (good or bad) inside individuals that we can assume based on their skin color or gender

c) collective guilt and non-redemptive blame... i.e. the explicit teaching that individuals who belong to disfavored identity groups must take responsibility for crimes committed by ancestors or must atone for the actions of a gender that has traditionally held power in certain sectors of society

All of the above is not "teaching Critical (Race or Gender) Theory". They are practices that have come out of severely distorted versions of the ideology known as Critical Theory. They are happening in K-12 schools and in workplace Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion trainings. And these practices and the ideas they are based on are worthy of rigorous analysis and critique. We also need to conduct an honest appraisal of the long-term outcomes of these practices.

Most importantly, there needs to be rigorous search for alternative approaches that do not engage in these abusive and unintelligent practices that purportedly seek to achieve the goals of an equitable, just society.

In today's McCarthyite climate, you are branded a racist/white supremacist for even suggesting that employees and school kids should not be subjected to the dehumanizing (and currently illegal under the 1964 Civil Rights Act) practices of racial/gender grouping and ill-treatment for what should be a laudable cause (ending bigotry).

That's a problem that the 'Critical Social Justice' ideology followers need to own and fix."

(https://groundexperience.substack.com/p/whats-missing-in-the-pop-crt-debate?)

2. James Lindsay:

"Critical Race Theory…

• believes racism is present in every aspect of life, every relationship, and every interaction and therefore has its advocates look for it everywhere
• relies upon “interest convergence” (white people only give black people opportunities and freedoms when it is also in their own interests) and therefore doesn’t trust any attempt to make racism better
• is against free societies and wants to dismantle them and replace them with something its advocates control
• only treats race issues as “socially constructed groups,” so there are no individuals in Critical Race Theory
• believes science, reason, and evidence are a “white” way of knowing and that storytelling and lived experience are a “black” alternative, which hurts everyone, especially black people
• rejects all potential alternatives, like colorblindness, as forms of racism, making itself the only allowable game in town (which is totalitarian)
• acts like anyone who disagrees with it must do so for racist and white supremacist reasons, even if those people are black (which is also totalitarian)
• cannot be satisfied, so it becomes a kind of activist black hole that threatens to destroy everything it is introduced into

Details below are excerpted from James Lindsay.

3. John McWhorter:

"In their book, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, researchers Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic have summarized the major themes common to CRT. They include:

(i) Cultural nationalism, the idea that oppressed groups should ask not just for reparation of past wrongs, but actively engage in separatism from the oppressing culture (e.g., black nationalism). This is clearly at odds with the liberal / cosmopolitan view that cultural differences should be respected but not elevated to yet another source of division among human groups, since historically such divisions have only bred mutual incomprehension and even violent conflict.

(ii) Critique of liberalism, which means a rejection of the Enlightenment ideal of rationality, of the idea of Constitutional neutrality, and of the incrementalist approach to civil rights.

(iii) Intersectionality, the recognition (correctly, in my mind) that the needs of, say, a black woman are different from those of a white, Latina, or queer woman. This, however, comes at the cost of fracturing the sort of cross-sectional solidarity that was so effective during the civil rights movement of the ‘60s.

(iv) Revisionist understanding of the history of American civil rights legislation, whereby progress during the ’60s and thereafter is (rather unconvincingly, I think) reinterpreted as being in the self-interest of white elites.

(v) Standpoint epistemology, the idea that oppressed people have a privileged perspective on their own condition. This is, of course, true. But it is often used to disallow other points of view, which impoverishes social discourse. Also, while it is certainly the case that if I experience something I should be a primary source of insights into that experience, it is just as true — as evidence from cognitive science clearly shows — that individuals can misunderstand or misinterpret their own experiences, at least to an extent, which is why input from the outside can be beneficial.

(vi) Story-telling and naming “one’s own reality.” This is often couched in terms of a re-evaluation and validation of story telling traditions in Indigenous Americans and other people, but it implies a downplay, or outright rejection, of systematic, scientific approaches to inform our understanding of systemic racism, sexism, etc.

(vii) Structural determinism, the notion, mentioned above, that the root causes of discrimination are systemic, and not a function of individual psychologies. As I said, there is clear empirical evidence that this assumption is false and that both systemic and individual factors are at play."

(https://philosophyasawayoflife.medium.com/the-real-problem-s-with-critical-race-theory-e960a41731b4)

1) Critical Race Theory believes racism is present in every aspect of life, every relationship, and every interaction.

Critical Race Theory begins from the assumption that racism is an ordinary part of every aspect of life in our societies. Foundational Critical Race Theory scholars Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic write, “First, that racism is ordinary, not aberrational—‘normal science,’ the usual way society does business, the common, everyday experience of most people of color in this country,” on page 7 of the standard introductory textbook on the subject, titled Critical Race Theory: An Introduction.

Notice that these scholars list this assumption first among the “basic tenets of Critical Race Theory” in the introduction of their book. Understand also that what they mean by “racism” isn’t even what most people think racism means. It is not prejudice based upon race or believing some races to be superior or inferior to others that they mean by “racism.” It is, instead, the “system” of everything that happens in the social world and beyond that results in any disparity that works in the favor of “racially privileged” groups (on average) or any “racially oppressed” person claiming they experience racial oppression.

These assumptions lead people who take up Critical Race Theory to look for racism in everything until they find it. That is, after all, the job of a “critical” theorist or activist: to look for the hidden problems that they assume must be present in whatever they scrutinize.

In the workplace that adopts Critical Race Theory, this means that it’s only a matter of time until someone with that worldview finds out how your entire company and its culture is “racist.” At that point, they will cause a meltdown that forces everyone to take sides and demand a reorganization of the entire (now divided) office culture and management.

In schools, it will mean teaching our children to think this way and always be looking for racism in every situation and interaction. In our personal relationships, it means that friends and even family members—especially our kids who have already been educated with Critical Race Theory ideas that have been incorporated in our schools—will eventually call each other out and reject one another, because tolerating racism is also considered a form of racism that would have to be discovered and stopped.

2) “Interest convergence”: White people only give black people opportunities and freedoms when it is also in their own interests.

One of the founders of Critical Race Theory, a (now deceased) scholar at Harvard Law named Derrick Bell, made his “Interest-Convergence Thesis” central to the Theory. Turning to Delgado and Stefancic again,

The second feature, sometimes called “interest convergence” or material determinism, adds a further dimension. Because racism advances the interests of both white elites (materially) and working-class people (psychically), large segments of society have little incentive to eradicate it. Consider, for example, Derrick Bell’s shocking proposal (discussed in a later chapter) that Brown v. Board of Education—considered a great triumph of civil rights litigation—may have resulted more from the self-interest of elite whites than a desire to help blacks. (p. 7)

It isn’t hard to see how paranoid and cynical this idea is, but it’s also horrible when you pause to consider some of its implications. Take the demand that also comes from Critical Race Theory that everyone should be an anti-racist. This sounds good on the surface but is horrible underneath. If someone with “racial privilege” (including white, Asian, Hispanic, Arab, Indian, and lighter-skinned black people) decides to become an anti-racist in accordance with this request, the Interest-Convergence Thesis would say they only did so to make themselves look good, protect themselves from criticism, or to avoid confronting their own racism. This isn’t a fringe idea or possible gap in the concept, either. The academic literature on “whiteness studies” is filled with this notion, including book-length treatments by academic scholars, for example one titled Good White People that was published in 2018 by the State University of New York Press.

The Interest-Convergence Thesis makes it literally impossible for anyone with any racial privilege (again, as outlined by Critical Race Theory) to do anything right because anything they do right must also have been self-interested. If Critical Race Theory makes a demand of people with any form of racial privilege and they comply, they just make themselves more complicit in “racism” as Critical Race Theory sees it. By giving people no way out, Critical Race Theory becomes deeply manipulative and unable to be satisfied in its lists of demands.

3) Critical Race Theory is against free societies.

Believe it or not, Critical Race Theory is not a liberal idea. It is, in fact, critical of liberal societies and against the idea of freedom to its core. Critical Race Theory sees a free society as a way to structure and maintain inequities by convincing racial minorities not to want to do radical identity politics. Since Critical Race Theory exists specifically to agitate for and enable radical racial identity politics, it is therefore against free societies and how they are organized. (In this way, it is very different than the Civil Rights Movement it incorrectly claims to continue.)

Turning to Delgado and Stefancic, a critical stance about free societies and their norms is again central to Critical Race Theory: “critical race scholars are discontent with liberalism as a framework for addressing America’s racial problems. Many liberals believe in color blindness and neutral principles of constitutional law” (p. 21). The famous “critical whiteness educator” Robin DiAngelo (author of the now overwhelmingly famous book White Fragility) puts it even more plainly, writing with a colleague named Ozlem Sensoy in a widely read education book called Is Everyone Really Equal?,

These movements [Critical Theory movements upon which Critical Race Theory is based] initially advocated for a type of liberal humanism (individualism, freedom, and peace) but quickly turned to a rejection of liberal humanism. The ideal of individual autonomy that underlies liberal humanism (the idea that people are free to make independent rational decisions that determine their own fate) was viewed as a mechanism for keeping the marginalized in their place by obscuring larger structural systems of inequality. In other words, it [free society] fooled people into believing they had more freedom and choice than societal structures actually allow. (p. 5)

In other words, Critical Race Theory sees free societies and the ideals that make them work—individualism, freedom, peace—as a kind of tacit conspiracy theory that we all participate in to keep racial minorities down. When its advocates accuse people of being “complicit in systems of racism,” this is part of what they mean. Obviously, they would prefer that we do not have free societies and would rather arrange society as they see fit and make us all go along with their ideas.

4) Critical Race Theory only treats race issues as “socially constructed groups,” so there are no individuals in Critical Race Theory.

Critical Race Theory isn’t just against free societies and the individualism that enables them, but it also doesn’t even believe individuals meaningfully exist at all! In Critical Race Theory, every person has to be understood in terms of the social groups they are said to inhabit, and these are determined by their identity, including race. “A third theme of critical race theory, the ‘social construction’ thesis, holds that race and races are products of social thought and relations. Not objective, inherent, or fixed, they correspond to no biological or genetic reality; rather, races are categories that society invents, manipulates, or retires when convenient” (p. 7), write Delgado and Stefancic.

Under Critical Race Theory, races are categories that society invents and that we impose entirely through social assumptions (mostly stereotypes), and people are members of those racial categories whether they want to be or not. Moreover, they argue that society is “socially stratified,” which means that different social groups (like these racial groups) have differentiated access to the opportunities and resources of society. While this bears some truth on average, it ignores individual variations that are obvious when considering examples of powerful, rich, and famous black people like Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey, and Kanye West. Critical Race Theory forces people into these averages, though, and considers them primarily in terms of their group identity rather than their individual identity. This is part of why they use the word “folks” instead of “people”—it designates a social group.

Thus, in Critical Race Theory, the goal of ideally treating every person as an individual who is equal before the law and meant to be judged upon the contents of their character and merits of their work is considered a myth that keeps racial minorities down. Instead, it sees people according to their racial groups only. This is why it is so common that progressive racial programs end up hurting the people they’re written to help most. “Racial justice,” in Critical Race Theory, means getting “justice” for the group, which it says is a social construction, not for the real person, who is just a member of that group. As Lynn Lemisko writes on page 193 of Educator to Educator, another education manual in Critical Social Justice programs: “If democracy is about individual rights (justice for individuals), then social justice is about group rights (justice for groups). And for me there is a fundamental difference between the general notion of justice and the notion of social justice.”

5) Critical Race Theory believes science, reason, and evidence are a “white” way of knowing and that storytelling and lived experience are a “black” alternative.

Remember above, where Delgado and Stefancic said that “normal science” is a part of the everyday, ordinary racism of our societies? That’s because Critical Race Theory is not particularly friendly to science, residing somewhere between generally disinterested in science and openly hostile to it (often depending upon the circumstances). This is because Critical Race Theory, using that “social construction” thesis, believes that the power and politics of cultural groups make their way intrinsically into everything that culture produces. Thus, science is just politics by other means to Critical Race Theory.

Since modern science was predominantly produced by white, Western men, Critical Race Theory therefore views science as a white and Western “way of knowing.” Critical Race Theory therefore maintains that science encodes and perpetuates “white dominance” and thus isn’t really fitting for black people who inhabit a (political) culture of Blackness.

This is obviously a horrible sentiment, and it is one that goes against one of the very first pillars of science: universality. Universality in science says that it doesn’t matter who does an experiment; the result will always be the same. This is because science believes in objectivity, which Critical Race Theory also calls an oppressive myth. For example, Robin DiAngelo and Ozlem Sensoy write,

One of the key contributions of critical theorists concerns the production of knowledge. Given that the transmission of knowledge is an integral activity in schools, critical scholars in the field of education have been especially concerned with how knowledge is produced. These scholars argue that a key element of social injustice involves the claim that particular knowledge is objective, neutral, and universal. An approach based on critical theory calls into question the idea that objectivity is desirable or even possible. The term used to describe this way of thinking about knowledge is that knowledge is socially constructed. When we refer to knowledge as socially constructed we mean that knowledge is reflective of the values and interests of those who produce it. (p. 7)

Sensoy and DiAngelo also claim that science “presume[s] superiority and infallibility of the scientific method” (p. 5) (by the way, this is false), and therefore we should be asking “whose rationality” and “whose presumed objectivity” underlies the scientific method. Then, even more cynically, they insist that we must ask whose interests are served by science, as though that’s the relevant question to ask of a universalist method. Critical Race Theory falsely asserts that white people’s interests are primarily served by science. This isn’t all just wrong (and genuinely racist!), it’s dangerous.

Continuing the genuinely racist thinking that black people aren’t suited to or served by science, Delgado and Stefancic say that storytelling about their “lived experience” is the primary mode by which black people and Critical Race Theory produce and advance knowledge. Importantly, these lived experiences are only considered valid if they agree with Critical Race Theory. They write,

Critical race theorists have built on everyday experiences with perspective, viewpoint, and the power of stories and persuasion to come to a better understanding of how Americans see race. They have written parables, autobiography, and “counterstories,” and have investigated the factual background and personalities, frequently ignored in the casebooks, of well-known cases. (p. 38)

While stories can be informative, to create a position that science is a “way of knowing” for white, Western people (especially men) and storytelling is one more suited to racial minorities, Critical Race Theory is itself racist (against racial minorities) and cripples the people it claims to help. This happens in multiple ways, including by undermining their capacity for critical thinking, teaching them to see the world in an us-versus-them way that oppresses them, and associating them with harmful, negative stereotypes that rigorous methods are what white people, and not black people, use.

6) Critical Race Theory rejects all potential alternatives, like colorblindness, as forms of racism.

Critical Race Theory is completely against the common-sense idea that race becomes less socially relevant and racism is therefore diminished by not focusing on race all the time. Where liberalism spent centuries removing social significance from racial categories once it had been introduced in the 16th century, Critical Race Theory inserts it again, front and center.

In fact, as you might guess now, it sees the idea of “colorblindness” as one of the most racist things possible because it hides the real racism from view. “While colorblindness sounds good in theory, in practice it is highly problematic,” write Sensoy and DiAngelo (p. 108). As we read from Delgado and Stefancic,

Color-blind, or “formal,” conceptions of equality, expressed in rules that insist only on treatment that is the same across the board, can thus remedy only the most blatant forms of discrimination, such as mortgage redlining or the refusal to hire a black Ph.D. rather than a white high school dropout, that do stand out and attract our attention. (p. 7)

While there is a point here—that being too colorblind can cause someone not to see racism at all, even when it is a real problem and especially when its influence is subtle (this is called “racism-blindness”)—the remedy Critical Race Theory gives to this imperfection in the colorblind approach is to do exactly the opposite. Thus, racism has to be made relevant in every situation where racism is present, which is every situation, as we saw in point #1 above, and it has attached incredible amounts of social significance to race and how it factors into every interaction. That means you have to find and focus upon the “hidden” racism in your workplace, your school, your society, your neighborhood, your books, your food, your music, your hobbies, your faith, your church, your community, your friends, your relationships, and yourself (and everything else too) all the time, according to Critical Race Theory.

This has the opposite of the putatively intended effect. Although it does cause people to see some legitimate racism that they would have otherwise missed, it makes all of our relationships and social systems extremely fragile and tense, ready to explode over a highly divisive issue. It also diverts resources from doing real work or building real relationships because looking for and thinking about racism all the time takes effort. (Critical Race Theory says minority races already have to think about racism all the time and only white people have the privilege not to, but this is, again, more sloppy analysis that ignores the reports and experiences of every racial minority who disagrees.)

7) Critical Race Theory acts like anyone who disagrees with it must do so for racist and white supremacist reasons, even if those people are black.

Following the “social construction” thesis discussed above in point #4, Critical Race Theory has outlined what the essential experience of each racial group is. It then judges individual people (especially of minority races) on how well they give testimonial to that experience—which is to say, they judge individual people based on how well they support Critical Race Theory. This makes it impossible to disagree with Critical Race Theory, even if you are black.

Before we discuss the case of how impossible disagreement is for white people (and other “racially privileged” people) consider a few poignant examples. The black superstar musician Kanye West famously donned a “Make America Great Again” hat and said he thinks for himself. In response, the poet laureate of Critical Race Theory, Ta-Nehisi Coates, wrote a widely read article suggesting that West is no longer really black. The black musician Daryl Davis, who is most famous for talking hundreds of real white supremacists out of their Ku Klux Klan hoods, once tried to invite a conversation of this sort in 2019, and members of the nominally “antifascist” group “Antifa” called him a “white supremacist” for being willing to associate with (rather than fight or kill) the people he invited to have a conversation.

This phenomenon can be explained. As Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of the New York Times Magazine 1619 Project (a Critical Race Theory historiography—not an article of history), tweeted (and then deleted) that there is “racially black” on the one hand, and “politically Black” on the other. Critical Race Theory is only interested in the identity politics associated with being “politically Black,” and anyone who disagrees with Critical Race Theory—even if “racially black”—does not qualify. The common way to phrase this is that they are “not really Black.” This means that in Critical Race Theory, diversity (which it calls for often) must be only skin deep. Everyone’s politics must agree and must agree with Critical Race Theory.

This is obviously much worse a problem for white people or others who are said to have “racial privilege.” There are more concepts in Critical Race Theory to deal specifically with how and why white people are racists for disagreeing with Critical Race Theory than perhaps any other idea. Charles Mills claims that all whites take part in a “racial contract” to support white supremacy that is never discussed but just part of the social fabric. Barbara Applebaum says all white people have “white complicity” with white supremacy because they automatically benefit from white privilege and “white ignorance” which is a way for them to willfully refuse to engage (and proper engagement can only be proven by agreeing). Robin DiAngelo says white people enjoy “white comfort” and therefore suffer “white fragility” that prevents them from confronting their racism through Critical Race Theory. (Therefore, she says, anything that maintains white comfort should be considered suspect and in need of disrupting.) Alison Bailey claims that when racially privileged people disagree with Critical Race Theory, they are engaging in a “defensive move” called “privilege-preserving epistemic pushback,” which means that they are just arguing to keep their privilege and could not possibly have legitimate disagreements. All of these ideas implicate racially privileged people in racism anytime they disagree with Critical Race Theory.

8) Critical Race Theory cannot be satisfied.

We have already seen how Critical Race Theory cannot be disagreed with, even by black people. We have also seen how it rejects all alternatives and how it believes any success that it has comes down to “interest convergence.” Because it rejects science, it cannot be falsified or proven wrong by evidence, and because it assumes racism is present and relevant to all situations and interactions, even the acceptance of Critical Race Theory must somehow also contain racism. Therefore, Critical Race Theory cannot be satisfied. It is, in this way, like a black hole. No matter how much you give to it, it cannot be filled and only gets stronger—and it will tear apart anything that gets too close to it.

This means that if your workplace takes up Critical Race Theory, eventually activists will start to make demands and will threaten to make trouble if they do not get their way. (They usually do not ask.) If you give into them, you will not satisfy them, however, because Critical Race Theory cannot be satisfied. It is guaranteed, before you do anything at all, that you will do it wrong because of your racism. You did it out of “interest convergence,” to make yourself look good because of your racism. You did it in a way that just created new problems that amount to racism. You didn’t do it sooner, faster, or better because of your racism. No matter what you do, the resulting situation must contain racism, and the Critical Race Theory activist’s job is to find it and hold you to account.

Therefore, giving into a demand made by Critical Race Theory cannot appease it. It can, however, signal that you will give into their demands, which will then continue to come and to escalate. As we have seen in countless examples across the corporate world recently, this will include demands for you to step down from your job and give it to activists, and even that won’t satisfy them. And if the venture fails as a result of all of this disruption, racism was the cause of that failure too." (https://newdiscourses.com/2020/06/reasons-critical-race-theory-terrible-dealing-racism/)

Discussion

James Lindsay:

"And that’s not all!

This is a grim but fair description of Critical Race Theory, and, what’s worse, it’s woefully incomplete. There are other horrible ideas at the very core of Critical Race Theory that fall in this same mold that we do not have time to list here. These include the idea that racism barely gets better, if at all, that equality is a source of racism, that people who benefit from “racism” have no incentives to be against racism, that racism is a zero-sum conflict that was arranged by white people so that no one else can have a real chance in society, that the races cannot truly understand one another (while demanding that they must and that racism is the whole cause of the inevitable failure), that racially privileged people are inherently oppressors and everyone else is inherently oppressed (this is derived from Marxism applied to racial groups), and that the only way to end racism is through a social revolution that unmakes the current society entirely and replaces it with something engineered by Critical Race Theory. It is easy to see what kinds of problems these doctrines will create in practice, and it’s horrible how Critical Race Theory consistently preys upon the best parts of our natures to achieve its goals (which, if it were correct (and it’s not), mostly leaves only the worst candidates to oppose it—real white supremacists—which it then uses as evidence of its bogus claims).

Therefore, there are many good reasons that have nothing to do with real racism to reject most of what Critical Race Theory teaches. Good people have every reason to reject Critical Race Theory for better alternatives, and the main reason they don’t is because they don’t know what it is and see what what it offers kind of sounds right and sort of seems good.

In summary, we can see that Critical Race Theory is a truly horrible way to deal with race issues and racism, and that would be true even if every problem (or “problematic”) it points out were 100% true." (https://newdiscourses.com/2020/06/reasons-critical-race-theory-terrible-dealing-racism/)

Critique

Cathy Young:

"The CRT framework cannot explain, for instance, why many “communities of color”—not only Asian-Americans but some black populations, e.g., Nigerian-Americans and Guyanese-Americans—have outpaced white Americans in median earnings, while others such as West Indian and Jamaican-Americans or Palestinian-Americans are close to the white median. (Obviously, this does not mean that the racial gaps that leave U.S.-born black Americans worse off are their own fault; it does suggest that these disparities are shaped by far more complex historical and cultural forces than “baked-in” racism and white supremacy.)

This framework cannot explain why white Americans today have a lower life expectancy than Hispanics and especially Asian-Americans, though higher than blacks and Native Americans. It cannot explain why Asian-Americans increasingly dominate elite educational institutions, and the clearest bias against them comes in the form of efforts to promote more “diversity” of underrepresented groups. It cannot explain why, while the risk of being shot by police is far greater for black males than white males, the risk for black women is only slightly higher than for white women—and between 7 and 16 times lower than for white men. (Intersectionality generally does not deal very well with male disadvantage, since the burden of sexism, in its progressive framework, can only fall on women.) It cannot explain why racial gaps in incarceration have narrowed steadily since 2000, with fewer blacks and Latinos but more whites going to prison." (https://cathy.arcdigital.media/p/the-fight-over-critical-race-theory)

The relationship between CRT and wokism

Cathy Young:

"While “CRT” is far narrower than “wokism,” it is easy to see that its tenets do in fact underlie the brand of “anti-racism” that not only conservatives but liberals such as John McWhorter have criticized as toxic. To take just one example: the scholar most responsible for popularizing the concept of “microaggressions” (small and unintentional insults, or at least perceived insults, based on racial, gender, and other biases) is Derald Wing Sue, who is not a critical race theorist as such but a clinical psychologist at Columbia University. However, the concept of microaggressions is also very much a part of critical race theory, as a look at the academic literature will show; a search for “microaggressions” and “critical race theory” on Google Scholar yields nearly 29,000 titles, some going back to the 1990s (e.g., “Critical race theory, race and gender microaggressions, and the experience of Chicana and Chicano scholars,” from 1998). The introduction to the latest edition of the definitive volume Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, by prominent Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic (2017), opens with an account of “microaggressions”: how slights that may feel trivial or mildly annoying if you’re white (a cashier being surly, sales clerks snubbing you, a passing jogger failing to acknowledge your greeting) may be demoralizing or infuriating if you are a minority and feel that racial bias is involved.

Or take an example from the current CRT debate. It’s true that, as philosophy doctoral student Sam Hoadley-Brill points out in a blogpost that deconstructs “anti-wokist” James Lindsay’s critique of CRT, White Fragility author Robin DiAngelo is not a “critical race theorist.” But is her line quoted by Lindsay as the essence of CRT—“The question is not, ‘Did racism take place?’ but, ‘How did racism manifest itself in this situation?’”—really far removed from CRT?

...

Is “Critical Race Theory” a misnomer for many of the practices targeted by the anti-CRT backlash? Sort of; but CRT is more connected to those practices than the counter-backlash is often willing to admit.

Are most of the anti-“critical race theory” bills just as crude and illiberal as the ideology they target? Probably. Are many of them unconstitutional, in that they can be easily read as restricting the academic teaching of “divisive concepts”? No doubt.

Are some or even many people involved in the backlash racist to some degree, or easily outraged by perceived slights to white people in a way that mirrors “woke” hypersensitivity, or invested in a crude version of patriotism that sees any discussion of America’s racist history or current racial problems as (to quote old Soviet lingo) “slander against the Motherland”? No doubt.

But this backlash is also a pushback against some genuinely terrible stuff, in schools or in workplace diversity training: obsessive focus on race, insidious racial stereotyping in progressive guise, “privilege-checking” that can amount to browbeating the “privileged” and patronizing the “marginalized,” language-policing that goes as far exhorting children to avoid “gendered” words like “Mom” and “Dad,” hyperawareness of “microaggressions,” etc. Just because people oppose this brand of “anti-racism” does not mean they oppose all discussions of race or all acknowledgment of enduring racial problems.

We need a better pushback. But we also desperately need a better approach to racial and gender equity." (https://cathy.arcdigital.media/p/the-fight-over-critical-race-theory)

How One Version of CRT Has Muddled the Debate on Racism

Gus DiZerega:

"The meaning of “racism” has been unilaterally changed by those advocating this final version of CRT. For them, emphasizing the systemic racism within racist societies has replaced rather than enriched the earlier focus on individual racist attitudes and their historical foundations. Racism has traditionally referred to believing core racist values and an understanding about how to realize them, as with liberalism, Marxism, capitalism, socialism, and other ‘isms.’ Take some time to look up the word’s meaning and it always refers to a belief.

A racist shares at least some racist beliefs and so approves of the institutions reflecting them. In the United States most Americans consider being a racist a bad thing, and they are correct in doing so. But they will be distributed along a continuum of what they believe qualifies someone as racist. There are many racist beliefs, some far more toxic than others. Opposing a son or daughter marrying an African American is on a different level from joining the Ku Klux Klan. This continuum enables mild forms of racism to be challenged by emphasizing their compatibility with more toxic forms already rejected by the person adhering to milder forms, such as those saying “I am not a racist, but….”

In response, my friend wrote “Nobody has changed the meaning of racism. It’s still about privileging one group over another. It’s that instead of looking at it as a problem caused by prejudiced individuals, we now look at it as a systemic problem.” My friend added “All of us who are of European descent and appear white are racists in the sense that we participate in and benefit from systemic racism . . . It’s challenging to own up to the ways we benefit from white privilege and systemic racism. It can feel like a personal attack, especially if we have also been victims of other kinds of discrimination (class, gender, sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity). It helps me to consider that this statement (that I am racist by virtue of appearing white) not a personal insult, but an acknowledgment of privilege. And that privilege is always intersectional and contextual.”

But this way of putting the issue exemplifies the change in meaning I am describing. Racism in its original meaning was not about privileging one group, it was about demeaning another group. It was less about privileges for one’s own group- though that is part of it, than about denying rights to others. Not having to fear being shot by a cop is not a privilege, it is a right that should apply to all. Out of racism both genuine privileges and violations of rights, arise, but rights are not privileges. This shift replacing the language of rights with that of privileges carries other implications, mostly bad.

If we are ALL racists because we live in a racist society, and benefit personally from living in this society, then ‘racism’ becomes a simpler way of saying “Euro-American.” Part of being a Euro-American is being a ‘racist.’ Eliminating blame from adhering to racism eliminates its moral dimension.

V. Shifting Meanings

We may now take a step deeper. My friend wrote “It’s that instead of looking at it as a problem caused by prejudiced individuals, we now look at it as a systemic problem.” The prominent Taos advocate of CRT I mentioned above wrote me racism is “systemic, constant, and inescapable even for presidents. ‘Prejudice’ is a personal negative feeling, and yes it can range from murderous hatred to mild revulsion – but it is personal, isolated and occasional. People of color can be prejudiced – but only white people can be racists – because the system backs white supremacy in all things, all the time . . .”

Again, what differentiates a system from traditional Western linear analysis is that causality flows both ways. If explicit attitudes and racist laws were all that was involved, changing laws and attitudes would solve the problem. The second version of CRT reduces all of American history to a working out of racism’s implications, describing a deeply reductionist model of history that does not fit the facts.

The third, that ‘Whites’ are unavoidably racist, takes this error much farther, eliminating contemporary human agency entirely. We are nothing but the expression of racist ‘systems’ and so are racists regardless of our beliefs. But a system has no moral sense, only individuals do. By eliminating human agency and responsibility, human morality is eliminated as well. And yet, paradoxically, these advocates rely on our morality in order for us to care about ending racist society. If someone asks “Why should I care?” they have no answer beyond their own preferences.

Changing the meaning of the term shifts from individual attitudes to systemic patterns, from violations of rights to acquiring systemically provided privileges independent of rights. A right refers to something an individual has as a member of society. A privilege refers to something that differentiates a class of people from another. In this context a right has always has moral weight, a privilege does not. When racism is divorced from attitude and only concerns context it loses its power as a critique. When the reason I am not shot by a cop is “White privilege” the moral condemnation involved in violating a right is replaced by membership in a privileged group. A KKK member and a liberal Democrat are both “racist.” A Nazi thug and a Euro-American beaten by him because he is a “race traitor” are both racist. The murderer, Derek Chauvin, and those of us who joined African Americans demonstrating for BLM are all racists.

This is an (unintended) attack on morality as well as clear communication.

To claim “prejudice” means what racism used to mean is false. Prejudice has a wide range of meanings, and some are laudatory in ways “racist” never is among decent people. I am prejudiced in preferring one style of art over another or dogs over cats, or vice versa. A person can have an at least initial sexual preference for blonds or red heads and not be called racist for being so. However, a personal ‘prejudice’ towards favoring ‘Whites’ over ‘Blacks’ because there is something inferior about them is morally wrong. It is morally wrong because of the racist character of the prejudice.

VI. With ‘friends’ like these…

A person’s social context can explain why someone is racist, as an ecosystem can explain why a tree has the characteristics it has, but it is the tree that has the characteristics. My friend responded: “To use your analogy, you can look at a tree as having certain characteristics (for example, being stressed by drought or pests), but if you divorce it from the system that is causing the characteristic (say, climate change), you cannot really address the problem. It’s not enough to change individual attitudes; we also have to change the system in which racism is baked in.”

This is an example of shifting definitions of CRT from the third to the first: there are racist attitudes, and racist institutions within which people live. It takes individual actions to deliberately change the system because, left to itself, the system may perpetuate racism. Slavery was such a system. It was abolished because enough Americans believed it was so immoral as to require deliberate action to abolish it. Even at the cost of their lives. For this third kind of CRT thinking, those who fought and died to end slavery were racists, at least if they were Euro-Americans. African Americans motivated by the same values were not.

The first version of CRT is a powerful corrective to blind spots in American individualism. Individualists ignore or deny the systemic insight individuals are who they are because we live in specific social systems. But the second and third kinds of CRT are collectivist theories, treating individuals entirely the product of their social relations, be they class, race, religious, or some other group or groups. If you live in a racist society and you are of the dominant race, you are a racist regardless of what you believe, as a kind of original sin.

If racism is ultimately entirely divorced from individual attitudes, as the third class of CRT advocates claim, on what grounds can individuals be urged to battle it? I am a racist because I am a Euro-American, and I can do nothing about it. If racism is divorced from my beliefs and actions, and if prejudice is not racism, why not consider it my fate, and worry about issues over which I have greater influence?

From this it is a small step to arguing “OK, I am a racist and my race has done these good things- so I will defend it. What my race did to others that was not so good would also have been done by other races in our situation- as much world history abundantly demonstrates. That’s the way of the world.” Better to be part of a hammer than a nail.

What argument can the third group of CRT advocates offer against that position? None of much weight. In a world like this, why should I support the weak instead of the strong, since no matter what I do the weak will call me a racist, privileged, member of the strong, and were they in my position, the weak would do the same to me.

The original and coherent meaning of racism answers this question clearly, but it has been dissolved away.

There is another dimension to the harm this third use of the term does. It discredits legitimate CRT in the eyes of many who resent being condemned for who they are (Euro-Americans) rather than what they do. The excesses of the third’s advocates opens all critics of racism up to attacks by the political right wing, as we see today being orchestrated by the Republican Party and even further right organizations. Indeed, because the racist right never defines “Critical Race Theory” it can even include the historical studies of the past that racists now seek to keep from entering education." (https://www.dizerega.com/2021/06/28/getting-clear-on-critical-race-theory/)

The conservative interpretation of CRT

Benjamin Wallace-Wells on the campaign by Christoper Rufo:

"If people were upset about the seminars, Rufo wanted them also to notice “critical race theory” operating behind the curtain. Following the trail back through the citations in the legal scholars’ texts, Rufo thought that he could detect the seed of their ideas in radical, often explicitly Marxist, critical-theory texts from the generation of 1968. (Crenshaw said that this was a selective, “red-baiting” account of critical race theory’s origins, which overlooked less divisive influences such as Martin Luther King, Jr.) But Rufo believed that he could detect a single lineage, and that the same concepts and terms that organized discussions among white employees of the city of Seattle, or the anti-racism seminars at Sandia National Laboratories, were present a half century ago. “Look at Angela Davis—you see all of the key terms,” Rufo said. Davis had been Herbert Marcuse’s doctoral student, and Rufo had been reading her writing from the late sixties to the mid-seventies. He felt as if he had begun with a branch and discovered the root. If financial regulators in Washington were attending seminars in which they read Kendi’s writing that anti-racism was not possible without anti-capitalism, then maybe that was more than casual talk.

As Rufo eventually came to see it, conservatives engaged in the culture war had been fighting against the same progressive racial ideology since late in the Obama years, without ever being able to describe it effectively. “We’ve needed new language for these issues,” Rufo told me, when I first wrote to him, late in May. “ ‘Political correctness’ is a dated term and, more importantly, doesn’t apply anymore. It’s not that elites are enforcing a set of manners and cultural limits, they’re seeking to reengineer the foundation of human psychology and social institutions through the new politics of race, It’s much more invasive than mere ‘correctness,’ which is a mechanism of social control, but not the heart of what’s happening. The other frames are wrong, too: ‘cancel culture’ is a vacuous term and doesn’t translate into a political program; ‘woke’ is a good epithet, but it’s too broad, too terminal, too easily brushed aside. ‘Critical race theory’ is the perfect villain,” Rufo wrote.

He thought that the phrase was a better description of what conservatives were opposing, but it also seemed like a promising political weapon. “Its connotations are all negative to most middle-class Americans, including racial minorities, who see the world as ‘creative’ rather than ‘critical,’ ‘individual’ rather than ‘racial,’ ‘practical’ rather than ‘theoretical.’ Strung together, the phrase ‘critical race theory’ connotes hostile, academic, divisive, race-obsessed, poisonous, elitist, anti-American.” Most perfect of all, Rufo continued, critical race theory is not “an externally applied pejorative.” Instead, “it’s the label the critical race theorists chose themselves.”

Last summer, Rufo published several more pieces for City Journal, and, on September 2nd, he appeared on “Tucker Carlson Tonight.” Rufo had prepared a three-minute monologue, to be uploaded to a teleprompter at a Seattle studio, and he had practiced carefully enough that when a teleprompter wasn’t available he still remembered what to say. On air, set against the deep-blue background of Fox News, he told Carlson, “It’s absolutely astonishing how critical race theory”—he said those three words slowly, for emphasis—“has pervaded every aspect of the federal government.” Carlson’s face retracted into a familiar pinched squint while Rufo recounted several of his articles. Then he said what he’d come to say: “Conservatives need to wake up. This is an existential threat to the United States. And the bureaucracy, even under Trump, is being weaponized against core American values. And I’d like to make it explicit: The President and the White House—it’s within their authority to immediately issue an executive order to abolish critical-race-theory training from the federal government. And I call on the President to immediately issue this executive order—to stamp out this destructive, divisive, pseudoscientific ideology.”

The next morning, Rufo was home with his wife and two sons when he got a phone call from a 202 area code. The man on the other end, Rufo recalled, said, “ ‘Chris, this is Mark Meadows, chief of staff, reaching out on behalf of the President. He saw your segment on ‘Tucker’ last night, and he’s instructed me to take action.” Soon after, Rufo flew to Washington, D.C., to assist in drafting an executive order, issued by the White House in late September, that limited how contractors providing federal diversity seminars could talk about race. “This entire movement came from nothing,” Rufo wrote to me recently, as the conservative campaign against critical race theory consumed Twitter each morning and Fox News each night. But the truth is more specific than that. Really, it came from him." (https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-inquiry/how-a-conservative-activist-invented-the-conflict-over-critical-race-theory)

The Racist and Colonialist Intellectual History of Kimberley Crenshaw's Intersectional Theory

Thesis: "behind the progressive veneer of intersectionality lies an unquestionable racist and colonialist intellectual history, a history that is only beginning to be excavated and acknowledged."

Patrick Anderson:

"When the scholarly origins of Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality are excavated, it becomes clear that it is rooted not only in philosophical idealism but also in racist and colonialist ideology.

The first step in understanding Crenshaw’s version of CRT and the intellectual origins of intersectionality is to understand her as part of the idealist strain of CRT. Unlike the realist theorists of CRT, such as Derrick Bell, who place racism in an economic context, approach the study of racial histories from an empirical perspective, and present anti-colonial and anti-imperial critiques of Amerikan society, idealists like Crenshaw argue that racism is largely a psychological issue, a problem with white consciousness that is best addressed through education and the evolution of language and symbols. Idealists also tend to be more reformist than radical, preferring to claim so-called “American Values” as their own, rather than fundamentally question the nation’s imperial history and present.

Such idealism and reformism are both present in Crenshaw’s work.

...

Such idealism and reformism are both present in Crenshaw’s work. In her 1988 essay “Race, Reform, and Retrenchment: Transformation and Legitimation in Antidiscrimination Law ,” a foundational text of the CRT tradition and one of Crenshaw’s earliest publications, Crenshaw unquestionably stakes out her political reformism and idealist methodological orientation. Much of the article is dedicated to criticizing the Critical Legal Studies (CLS) scholars of the day for neglecting the role of race in social oppression and for too quickly dismissing the utility of liberal legal reforms, including rights-based reforms, for Black people in the U.S.

As Crenshaw explains, CLS scholars wanted people to question the structure of society from the ground up, and according to the CLS writers, the only way to get people to question society in this way was to disabuse them of all the illusions of the liberal capitalist order. This process included disabusing the public of the idea that law is socially and politically neutral. For this generation of CLS scholars, if people continue to think that claiming rights is a viable strategy for liberation, then (as Crenshaw puts it) “the legitimacy of the entire order is never seriously questioned.”

According to Crenshaw, this radical demand to fundamentally question Amerikan society requires us to overlook “the transformative potential that liberalism offers.” Claiming that “People can demand change only in ways that reflect the logic of the institutions they are challenging,” Crenshaw concludes that a “pragmatic use of liberal ideology” can help protesters and scholars resolve the racial contradictions of Amerikan society and advance the cause of Black freedom by winning and defending Black “rights.”

How would such a transformation commence? In Crenshaw’s view, it “must begin with beliefs about Blacks in American society, and how these beliefs legitimize racial coercion,” especially white race consciousness. She distinguishes between “symbolic subordination,” which denies Blacks social and political equality, and “material subordination,” which denies Black economic, health, and other material benefits of society. Importantly, in a direct inversion of the materialism of realist CRT scholars like Bell, Crenshaw says that the former causes the latter: “Symbolic subordination often created material disadvantage by reinforcing race consciousness in everything from employment to education.” In other words, if we change white people’s minds and rid them of anti-Black ideas, material change will necessarily follow.

In Crenshaw’s idealist worldview, then, CRT is about demanding that “America” become what is (supposedly) truly is: a diverse and inclusive democracy. And this goal is achieved by using law strategically and teaching white people not to be racist. It is from within this idealist, reformist context that intersectionality emerged.

Since Crenshaw coined the term “intersectionality” approximately three decades ago, it has become a lexical staple of much left, progressive, and liberal politics. For most such groups today, those who refuse to be “intersectional” have morally failed to be properly inclusive and have epistemically failed to adopt the most advanced social scientific paradigm.

But behind the progressive veneer of intersectionality lies an unquestionable racist and colonialist intellectual history, a history that is only beginning to be excavated and acknowledged.

Crenshaw originally developed the theory of intersectionality in two law papers. In the first, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics ” (1989), Crenshaw sets out to solve a very specific legal problem, namely, that “women” and “Black” are considered protected classes under anti-discrimination law, but “Black women” are not. In a review of relevant court decisions, Crenshaw observed that the courts rejected Black women’s claims of discrimination unless they could show that they were victims of more general discriminatory practices against “women” as such (including white women) or against “Blacks” as such (including Black men). So to the courts, if Black women claimed racial discrimination but Black men in the same workplace did not, the case was dismissed. Likewise, if Black women claimed sex discrimination but white women in the same workplace did not, the case was dismissed. Crenshaw’s solution was to “acknowledge” that Black women had been and could be discriminated against as Black women. To remedy the problem, the law should account for the “intersection” of race and sex and make Black women a protected class distinct of women of other races or men of the same race. As a reformist legal strategy, intersectionality is not only a clever solution to the problem it is meant to address, but it is also consistent with Crenshaw’s overall liberal philosophical perspective.

However, intersectionality become seriously problematic in her follow-up paper, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color ” (1991), where Crenshaw attempts to take intersectionality out of the realm of law and transform it into a generalized theory of society. The basic assumption of intersectionality is that all “previous” theories are “single-axis” that account for only one dimension of oppression at a time. Feminism accounts for sex or gender. Critical Race Theory (of the original realist school) accounts for race. And Marxism account for class. The innovation of intersectionality, as we are told, is that it brings together the insights of these theories to account for “race, gender, and class” simultaneously (though class is never present in so-called intersectional analyses). And notice the title: intersectionality is no longer about Black women; it is now about that ever-nebulous and ill-defined group “women of color.”

Notwithstanding the absurdity of the claim that Feminism, Marxism, and realist CRT are “single-axis” theories in the way that Crenshaw describes them, there are even more problematic aspects of intersectionality, problems that originate in the history of feminism. Drawing on the recent scholarship of philosopher Tommy Curry, we can trace out the racist and colonialist origins of intersectionality.

Crenshaw’s “gender” analysis is derived from her reliance on the work of Catherine MacKinnon, a leading second wave feminist legal scholar who argued that the basic power dynamic of society is grounded in sex difference. This male dominance theory claimed that, in Amerikan society, (all) men had structure power over (all) women. This structure is usually called patriarchy. Crenshaw believed that MacKinnon’s male dominance theory provided a theory of sex domination similar to Derrick Bell’s realist CRT theory of racial domination, which posits that the basic power dynamic is white over Black, and perhaps other racial minorities. Even though the basic assumptions of MacKinnon and Bell’s respective theories are fundamentally contradictory, Crenshaw sought to combine them. This contradiction has never been resolved, which is why so many scholars and intellectual today claim that neither race nor gender is “foundational.” Such platitudes merely allow the speaker to leave the contradiction within intersectionality unresolved.

The interesting thing is that this theory of patriarchy, this idea that all men have power over all women, was invented by white women in the 1950s to claim that they were just as oppressed as Black men in a society run by white supremacy. In books and essays including Alva Myrdal’s “A Parallel to the Negro Problem” (1944), Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949), and Helen Hacker’s “Women as a Minority Group” (1955), white women scholars observed the conditions of Black men under western colonialism and racism and said: white women should think of themselves as a similarly oppressed group. Before the essays, white women were seen primarily as members of the dominant race, even by white women themselves. In fact, even white feminists saw themselves in this way, as historian Louise Michelle Newman demonstrates in her book White Women Rights. Yet in the 1950s, white women began to claim that they were oppressed in a manner analogous to Black men.

For the idea that “women” as such constituted an oppressed class subjected to “men” as such to become the dominant paradigm, feminists needed to discard the kinship theory of patriarchy.

Even into the 1970s and 1980s, feminist anthropologists and sociologists adopted the classical social science view that patriarchy had a familial and generational aspect to it. However, while this kinship view was compatible with the earlier theories that saw white women as part of the dominant racial group, it was incompatible with the idea that women constitute a singular coherent class of oppressed people. Why? Because if patriarchy depends on family relations, and Black people (especially Black men) are prohibited from joining the family relations of whites, then Black men cannot be members of a generally patriarchal class of “men.” The paradigm text where this argument is made is Sylvia Walby’s Theorizing Patriarchy (1990), which was published in the very same intellectual milieu and shared the same assumptions as MacKinnon’s male dominance theory.

As Curry summarizes, “the white woman used the body and experience of the Negro, specifically the Black man, as the template by which she created the idea that she was in fact a minority group despite the power and violence she imparted on racial and ethnic groups such as Blacks and Jews.” Curry adds that “the definition of patriarchy that emerged from these debates were driven by the need white feminists had in constructing themselves as a class external to—and victimized by—white patriarchy. The feminist definition of patriarchy was constructed to protect feminist ideology, not to explain the oppression of various groups throughout history.”

Thus, Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality relies on a paradigm of feminist ideology that constructed by white women to minimize attention to their racial power and amplify attention to their sexual vulnerability. And to construct this view of patriarchy, they had to throw out decades of social scientific scholarship even though there was no empirical evidence that debunked that former scholarship.

As if this were not enough to question intersectionality, there are more problems with Crenshaw’s formulation of this now-popular theory. Like MacKinnon, Crenshaw argued that when power is based on biological sex, the sex in power—males—use sexual violence as a means of social control. To put it in no uncertain terms, men rape women as a means of perpetuating their control over women.

In her 1991 essay, Crenshaw states that “the use of rape to legitimize efforts to control and discipline the Black community is well established in historical literature on rape and race.” Though she claims this fact is well established, she cites only Joyce Williams and Karen Holmes’ 1981 work The Second Assault: Rape and Public Attitudes. As with MacKinnon’s theory of patriarchy, however, we can trace the history of Williams and Holmes’ work back to fundamentally racist origins.

In their 1967 book The Subculture of Violence, Martin Wolfgang and Franco Ferracuti introduced the “subculture of violence” theory, which argues that subordinated groups, such as Black people in Amerika, had a distinct culture separate from mainstream white culture, and that this Black subculture was the cause of Black men and women’s supposed pathologically self-destructive behavior. Anyone familiar with right wing politics in the United States today should find this argument familiar, for the subculture of violence theory is the basis for all right-wing apologetics regarding police murders of Black people (“They are killing each other” etc.).

In 1971, Wolfgang’s student Menachem Amir expanded the subculture of violence theory in his book Patterns of Forcible Rape. According to Amir, Black men become rapists because “Negro culture” was pathological and the Black family structure was improper. Because Black fathers were absent, because Black mothers were unfit parents, and because Black culture prioritized sensual pleasures over civilized ones, Amir claimed that Black men developed a psychological need to overcompensate for their feminized self-image. Thus, they became rapists. If this also sounds like a contemporary right wing racist view, it’s because it is.

“White feminists adopted Amir’s view of Black masculinity throughout their texts,” Curry explains. In Against Our Will (1975), Susan Brownmiller insisted that “The single most important contribution of Amir's Philadelphia study was to place the rapist squarely within the subculture of violence.” This book is considered a classic and still-relevant feminist text today.

Interestingly, Amir rejected the 19th and early 20th century view that Black men primarily raped white women. Yet he replaced that view with a new theory which claimed that Black men primarily raped Black women. This transition from view Black men as inter-racial rapists to viewing them as intra-racial rapists is a key development in this racist history. Yet one more transformation in this feminist ideology was necessary.

In the mid-1970s, Lynn Curtis published several works, including the book Violence, Rape, and Culture, transforming the subculture of violence theory into a theory of Black male pathology. Unlike Amir, who argued that Black male rapists were the product of the savagery of Black culture, Curtis argued that Black male’s became rapists because in their quest for masculinity, the emulated white male patriarchy and the sexual violence such patriarchy relies upon. Unlike Amir’s theory, in which Black women play a role in transmitting the supposedly deficient values of Black culture, Curtis’ theory positions Black women as neutral or innocent bystanders to the brutality of pathological Black males trying desperately to join the patriarchy they have been excluded from. On this view, white male patriarchy is more sophisticated and Black male attempts at patriarchy are more savage—but they are fundamentally the same.

When Williams and Holmes wrote The Second Assault, they cited the work of Curtis and developed it further. In their own articulation, Williams and Holmes states that Black men became rapists not because Black culture is savage but because Black men imitate the patterns of white male patriarchy. The supposed sameness of Black males and white males (a male body) was thought to be the grounds for such imitative behavior, and the supposed sameness of Black women and white women (a female body) was thought to be the grounds for their respective vulnerability to sexual violence. Interestingly, The Second Assault was poorly received by scholars, with one reviewer noting that the quantitative data presented in the book did not support—nay, contradicted!—the conclusions presented.

Thus, when Crenshaw cites Williams and Holmes to claim that “the use of rape to legitimize efforts to control and discipline the Black community is well established in historical literature on rape and race,” she is relying on a book that not only emerges directly out of white supremacist theories of Black life (perpetuating the myth the Black male rapist in a new form) but a book that presents conclusions in contradiction with its evidence.

Again, Crenshaw’s “gender” analysis is not revolutionary, nor progressive—it is barley liberal. It is based in racist scholarship that was motivated by the political needs of elite white women rather than historical and sociological evidence. And it is only a few degrees away from the racist bile spewed by contemporary anti-Black right-wing pundits.

The racist, colonialist mentality embedded in Crenshaw’s intersectionality should not surprise us. Remember what she said in 1988: People can demand change only in ways that reflect the logic of the institutions they are challenging. Because intersectionality was created to make change within racist and colonialist institutions, it is only fitting that intersectionality reflect that racist and colonialist logic. This is where idealist versions of CRT take us.

Intersectionality is not going away. Since their publication, Chrenshaw’s 1989 and 1991 articles have approximately 21,000 citations and 27,000 citations respectively. Now that intersectionality has been hitched to the current CRT wave of popularity, and given that Crenshaw is widely considered the foremost authority on CRT, we should expect calls for this theory of intersectionality to spread even more.

To be sure, almost no present-day proponent of intersectionality knows anything about the history of the term or the roots of the theory. Almost none of these self-described advocates of intersectionality knows how to perform an “intersectional analysis.” For most, the word “intersectionality” is—like “critical race theory” itself—an empty slogan used to signal that they have the right moral orientation; many people say “intersectionality” to prove they oppose racism, sexism, and so on. But when Black feminists of the 1990s are caught repackaging white supremacist ideas from the 1890s, we should probably reconsider not only the slogans we think are progressive but also the scholars we think are authorities on radical change. "

(https://www.blackagendareport.com/theory-intersectionality-emerges-out-racist-colonialist-ideology-not-radical-politics-rethinking)

More information

* A Beginner’s Curriculum on Critical Race Theory. JUNE 23, 2020. By HELEN PLUCKROSE AND JAMES LINDSAY.

URL = https://newdiscourses.com/2020/06/beginners-curriculum-critical-race-theory/

* Three-part intro to the original CRT of Derek Bell:

"By highlighting three of the most dominant themes in Bell’s CRT—materialism, realism, and anticolonialism—it becomes possible to understand the aspects of Bell’s philosophy that make it far more radical than the watered-down liberal ideology being trafficked as CRT today."

https://www.blackagendareport.com/conspicuous-absence-derrick-bell-rethinking-crt-debate-part-1