have you seen his Wakanda T Shirt?
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Seems kind of circular to me.
Here is an interesting article by Ayaan Hirsi Ali with another perspective on this topic:
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The Opening Arguments podcast recently did two episodes on the subject. Here’s the first one (link below).
Critical Race Theory came out of critical legal theory, an approach to the instruction and practice of law that says we should go beyond asking “Were the rules followed?” and ask “Was justice done?” Because all know, or at least we all should know, that the law and the justice system generally can be deeply, profoundly unjust.
Part of the reason Rufo and Lindsay et al have been so successful at demonizing CRT is that they’ve taken the approach of supposedly “decoding” antiracist terminology, which means they redefine common terms to suggest they really mean something hateful/stupid/incoherent. Rufo convinced the damn president that CRT is about hating America, and it’s only gone downhill from there.
You may have heard the term intersectionality, for example, which came from Kimberlé Crenshaw, full-time professor at the UCLA School of Law and Columbia Law School. Intersectionality refers to the societal framework in which we exist, where multiple axes of oppression can act on the same person at the same time. Crenshaw uses the example of how laws requiring arrests in the case of domestic violence cases were intended to help women by removing the man (assumed to be the abuser) from the household rather than the cop just walking away, but this backfired in that in many cases cops took this as a license to arrest the victim of domestic violence, who might be male or female but who was more often arrested if she was black and female, because of a prejudice against the stereotypical “angry black woman.” It’s also pretty easy to see how oppression stacked against black women when the 15th Amendment granted black men the right to vote, but women largely had to wait for the 19th Amendment, and black women still didn’t have that right acknowledged in some places.
Systemic racism is not “everybody in this system is racist.” It’s not even “some people in this system are racist.” Systemic racism refers to bias baked into the structure of a system, such as laws that have the effect of disproportionately penalizing black people more than white people, or the enforcement and punishment of those laws disproportionately penalizes black people. That’s in the criminal justice system which is what most people focus on, but there’s also systemic racism in healthcare, for example when there’s an observable trend of black patients getting less attention from doctors, shorter visits, inaccurate or no diagnosis for existing health concerns, etc.
A person can be biased unknowingly, and yet there’s an objectively observable impact of that bias visible in their actions. The same can be true of systems, which are after all designed, maintained, and constituted of people. When evidence of this bias is observed, that doesn’t mean you have to throw out the system-- it doesn’t even mean you have to fire anybody, and in fact conducting a hunt within an organization to ferret out all of the “racists” and get rid of them is misguided and will not solve your systemic racism problem. Which is too bad, because it would be a lot easier than the actual solution, which takes work-- identify the problem, acknowledge it, devise ways to counteract it, follow through on them, and then reevaluate.
Another thing that doesn’t work, of course, is denial, and that’s what anti-CRT folks seem to be pushing for the most part. They want to believe, and for their children to be taught (up through when they’re no longer children, in college and law school) that America was founded as a country that recognized the equality of all, and that there may have been a few blips of oppression along the way but that’s all history with no residual effects and no new forms of oppression cropping up that anyone need worry their pretty heads about.
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As one of those against the teaching of CRT, I’m going to disagree. Not wanting the world to be looked at through the lens of color does not equate to casting a blind eye on the wrongs of the past.
This country has made great strides throughout it’s history. Huge changes in my lifetime. Race is again forefront because it is being pushed. Why? At this point we’ve started to fight racism with racism.
We’re collectively better than this.
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Seems to be a labelling issue then. What if they called it critical bias theory?
I hope this thread can stay on topic and serious. Race relations, for whatever reasons this old white dude cares, is an area close to my heart. I know how I’ve raised mine and where their hearts are.
I’m seeing a level of divide not known since my youth.
@Lant3rn Looking at the world through the lens of color is not the answer. Racism is not the cure to racism.
As a childless middle aged white man with discretionary income I have nothing to say on this, have actively avoided learning about CRT and have no interest in having it explained to me by anyone.
Not my wheelhouse, not my wheel.
Summoning @IiF. We had conversations many years ago via PM. It was he that pointed out to me that reverse racism is just racism.
I don’t understand why identifying bias in a system; be it the racial kind or other can be a bad thing.
The findings are supposed to be neutral observations.
The actions taken because of the information seems to be problem some people here are taking issue with.
Yeah. But are we talking like fuck all white people by numbers?
So say 1% are the richest. And those 1% are white. That is not the same thing as saying white people are rich.
So say I came up with the critical musk theory and looked at the figures to find out if people with the surname musk were disproportionately wealthy.
Would those results mean anything?
Say it thrice backwards whilst looking in a mirror
Here’s a fun game: Name some contexts in which these terms could come up in classroom discussions that are not about critical race theory.
I’ll start-- good luck talking about World War 2 without using the word “ally.”
Not a very good example.
Russia started by invaded Poland, enslaving the population, helping to wipe Polish ethnic identity from the face of the Earth and ended the war after doing the same damn thing to almost every Eastern European country held by the Nazis, their original ally.
What cultural resources in occupied countries they could not rob for wealth, they destroyed in every nation. They looted all nations gold and cash reserves. They immediately executed the intelligentsia of every single occupied country. Doctors, lawyers, historians, artists, engineers… who they could not take as a prize pig for Moscow they shot in the street to utterly destroy that nation’s identity and sense of identity. Patriots of their countries had to die. All industry was repurposed for Moscow. They destroyed the cultural artifacts, burned books, gutted national archives and replaced their landmarks with statues built to commemorate Russian supremacy in the form of Joseph Stalin. We can still see the strategy alive today if we look with the right eyes toward Crimea and Uyghur.
Russia was never anyone’s ally but they were willing to play the part to get what they wanted for a time.
Address racial divide by honest accounting of who actually profited. Most white people were harmed by slavery in their community because it destroyed the local economy but it’s very easy to say that they did and plant the seeds of future division for the personal gain and unlimited resentment of the aggrieved.
Listen, there’s only one way out of the cycle of abuse. Somebody has got to forgive the other, acknowledge the horrors of the past and both sides need to put it behind them as soon as they can or it never stops.
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I think you missed the point. The meme says nothing about how the word is used. That is, actually, a big part of the problem. None of these words are problematic in and of themselves, which is why trying to use them as signs of something nefarious is so fucking stupid, and leads to censorship of a fucking stupid nature.
*profits
The horrors of the past and present actually, not to mention the foreseeable future if people insist on failing to acknowledge this.
There’s nothing problematic with “n****r” or “caspah” or any other racial epithets, if used in academic contexts (yes, I self-censored, there). There’s nothing problematic with those words used in comedic contexts, either. The only problem with words is the interpretation of the listener/reader.
Raising one’s hand to be a voluntary victim is the problem with all of language in society.
To wit: the person who wields such terms is not offended or perplexed by the words, only by actual or perceived retribution for using them.
If the only problem is with the interpretation of the reader/listener, then no word should be considered problematic, in any context. But neither clause of that sentence is true. Words can definitely be problematic, due to context as well as arguably on their own, and listeners/readers are never the only ones responsible for the content they consume.
After all, when someone says or writes something and you hear or read it, your only option is to interpret it to the best of your ability. That’s how communication works-- somebody says a thing, and they have a responsibility to say it in a way that it’s clearly understood and not easy to misinterpret. Then someone who consumes that content has a corresponding responsibility to try and interpret it accurately.
Misunderstandings still occur, of course, because none of us are actual mind-readers. But it’s definitely not the job of the listener/reader to determine the meaning of the speaker/writer’s words, as we should recognize easily since that robs the speaker/writer of having their own interpretation of their own words.
Personal responsibility means owning your shit, right? That includes what you say. And if you screw up your responsibility to say it clearly and somebody interprets it (reasonably) to mean something bad, you’re at least partially responsible for that interpretation. Once the words leave your mouth/keyboard/whatever, you no longer wholly own them. You become co-owner with whoever happens to pick them up.
So if you say something that sounds really shitty, and somebody says “Hey, that sounds really shitty,” you don’t get off the hook by insisting “I didn’t mean it that way.” You said the thing, and it landed the way it did, and that’s your problem. However, your intent isn’t irrelevant. In fact, you should be grateful when someone points out that something you said sounded shitty if you didn’t mean it to, because that gives you the opportunity to say “Oh shit, that’s not what I meant, sorry. I meant _________.”
People are generally not offended or perplexed by words when they’re the ones wielding them. You know what your sword can do. It’s your responsibility not to offend or perplex people by stabbing them with it.
I disagree, wholeheartedly.
I’ll throw you a bone, though. If you use language in a way that you KNOW will provoke a reaction… well, you made a conscious decision to do so, and reap what you sow. However, the recipient can also make a conscious decision to not be offended. That would be the better person, of the two.
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If this were true, we wouldn’t have a million white people screaming their fool heads off about CRT right now.
Being offended sucks-- nobody would choose to be offended if they didn’t have to be. Some people, however, do not perform due diligence in their responsibility to listen/read for comprehension (or in some cases, listen/read at all), and thereby get offended unnecessarily through their own (in)actions.
Others get offended by stuff that shouldn’t offend them, like the existence of gay people. That is usually because somebody they respected, at some point, told them that this is offensive. Probably lied to them in the process, and now they believe those lies and get offended by the thing they were lied to about.
There’s a difference between legitimate and illegitimate offense, in other words. You can frequently see it when you ask someone why they’re offended, and see whether they respond with sputtering and/or lies, or a coherent explanation.