A practice of interrogating
Continuing the effort to pin down what Critical Race Theory actually is, I find an explainer from the American Bar Association (which I figure is establishment enough that it won’t be accused of Marxist postmodernism or modern postMarxism).
CRT is not a diversity and inclusion “training” but a practice of interrogating the role of race and racism in society that emerged in the legal academy and spread to other fields of scholarship. [ Kimberlé ] Crenshaw—who coined the term “CRT”—notes that CRT is not a noun, but a verb. It cannot be confined to a static and narrow definition but is considered to be an evolving and malleable practice.
Yeah that’s not a good start. It is a noun; if you want to have a verb for it then make one. And saying it can’t be confined to a static definition sounds like…what’s the word? Oh yes, bullshitting. [Updating to add: I took her too literally; see Harald’s reading in comment #12.]
It critiques how the social construction of race and institutionalized racism perpetuate a racial caste system that relegates people of color to the bottom tiers.
I see no problem there, and I certainly think that job needs doing. (On the other hand isn’t that something that activists and scholars have been doing for some time? Is it really particular to CRT?)
CRT also recognizes that race intersects with other identities, including sexuality, gender identity, and others.
Uh oh.
Notice that sex – the one that relegates women to the bottom tiers – is hidden in “and others.” Why isn’t sex important enough to be named while “gender identity” is? Maybe the ABA isn’t so establishment after all (or it’s a different kind of establishment).
CRT recognizes that racism is not a bygone relic of the past. Instead, it acknowledges that the legacy of slavery, segregation, and the imposition of second-class citizenship on Black Americans and other people of color continue to permeate the social fabric of this nation.
But surely it’s not alone in that. The problem here seems to be not that CRT is wild and crazy but that there’s nothing particularly new about it.
Then it gets more specific.
While recognizing the evolving and malleable nature of CRT, scholar Khiara Bridges outlines a few key tenets of CRT, including:
Recognition that race is not biologically real but is socially constructed and socially significant. It recognizes that science (as demonstrated in the Human Genome Project) refutes the idea of biological racial differences. According to scholars Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, race is the product of social thought and is not connected to biological reality.
What are they scholars of? Biology or something else?
Acknowledgement that racism is a normal feature of society and is embedded within systems and institutions, like the legal system, that replicate racial inequality. This dismisses the idea that racist incidents are aberrations but instead are manifestations of structural and systemic racism.
Is that wrong? It doesn’t seem wrong to me. Of course racism is embedded within systems and institutions (in the US at least); it would be strange if it weren’t.
Rejection of popular understandings about racism, such as arguments that confine racism to a few “bad apples.” CRT recognizes that racism is codified in law, embedded in structures, and woven into public policy. CRT rejects claims of meritocracy or “colorblindness.” CRT recognizes that it is the systemic nature of racism that bears primary responsibility for reproducing racial inequality.
Is that wrong? I don’t think so.
Recognition of the relevance of people’s everyday lives to scholarship. This includes embracing the lived experiences of people of color, including those preserved through storytelling, and rejecting deficit-informed research that excludes the epistemologies of people of color.
Oh yes that one – we’ve seen that one before. Standpoint epistemology yadda yadda. That I do think is a crock of shit. By all means embrace lived experiences and storytelling, but don’t claim they’re the same thing as systematic inquiry and testing.
Thank you for listening to this episode of Trying to Figure It Out.
There are, I’m sure, plenty of better references, but the Wikipedia article seems like a reasonable starting point.
Kevin Drum writes about the “national conversation on race”, and wishes that it just that, rather than an argument about CRT, especially because conservative arguments about CRT are not made in good faith. He wishes that there were more discussions about institutional/systemic racism and less about “raking individuals who display racist behavior”. I agree emphatically with that point.
I’m also in the category of “trying to figure it out”. A relative of mine used to teach college philosophy, and she commented recently that she taught critical race theory. I don’t know if she dealt with the epistemology problems, but she seems the type to see power relationships as paramount, so she might have been perfectly fine with those aspects of CRT. There are certainly good aspects of the principles in CRT, but there are problems as well, and maybe they can be separated.
I keep thinking about osteopathy. Various people I know in the health field speak well of Doctors of Osteopathy; they are very hands-on, their training emphasizes listening and patient-centering. There is also a bunch of nonsense, that some osteopaths hate to be reminded of and disavow entirely. If only there were a way to get the good aspects of typical osteopathy training without having to deal with the nonsense parts.
I too may be the type to see power relationships as…not paramount, I guess, but certainly hella important.
They shift a lot though, too. Power can shift around just in a conversation. It’s complicated.
I still want to know what “deficit-informed research” is.
So I thought, hey, my Google-fu is pretty good; I should be able to figure this out. No. The first five pages of search results for a Google search on that exact quoted term return nothing but the text above that it appears in. This is some serious ouroboros here: no reference to external reality at all.
I got just a couple of hints suggesting that it refers to research that assumes that people in minority communities are disadvantaged. I guess the idea is that if you go in expecting to find deficits, you find deficits, and this ill-serves the people you are studying. OTOH, minority communities are disadvantaged; if you won’t acknowledge that, how can you make progress?
This may be uncharitable, but I’ve seen this kind of thing with other fringe groups and theories. It seems to me that what drives it is people who would rather build castles in the sky than deal with hard problems on the ground.
‘Race is not connected to biological reality’ is a thing I read from time to time, and it seems more like piety than philosophy or science. Sure, ‘race’ is a social construction, but that doesn’t signify much–so are all classifications. I do see that ‘race’ is a label with a lot of baggage, and I understand why people want to dump that label, but the kind of thing the label describes is real—it has some biological basis (which is very different to no biological basis). There are fuzzy boundaries (like with lots of classifications), but there is an objective reality to various clumpings of people based on phenotype/genotype. These clumpings (whatever we call them) are useful categories (e.g. some groups are more prone to sickle-cell anaemia, vitamin D deficiency) and they don’t necessarily lead to racism.
As you note, something that is not peculiar to CRT. Is the way we conceive of race (in America) hierarchical with white people at the top? Why yes, obviously. You’ll find that much of CRT seems benign when considered individually. It’s when you start weaving the threads together that you start to see unpleasant patterns. In this case, we might consider the significance of caste under a critical theory analysis.
Yeah.
This is where I point to Bell Hooks and Judith Butler and note that all the subfields of critical theory are interrelated.
You’ll notice when reading CRT a certain linguistic peculiarity. I’d call it Meaning Precisely That. For instance, a natural reading of, “racism continues to permeate American social fabric,” is something like, “there is still significant racism around that needs to be dealt with”. The thing is, critical race theorists don’t mean it like that, like a flourish of emotive prose. When they say that racism permeates, they Mean Precisely That. Racism permeates: it penetrates and is diffused into everywhere and everything and everyone, leaving nothing unspoiled.
This is what they were talking about in Higher Superstition. (Thanks for pointing me to that, btw.)
The critical theory subfields take from each other, transposing observations from one domain to another regardless of whether it makes sense.
Recognition that gender/sex is not biologically real but is socially constructed and socially significant. It recognizes that science (as demonstrated in the Human Genome Project) refutes the idea of biological gender/sexual differences. According to scholars A and B, gender/sex is the product of social thought and is not connected to biological reality.
They mean it more expansively than one immediately intuits. It’s another case of Meaning Precisely That. Remember what I said about weaving the threads together? Combine this with the permeation of racism, and we get the DiAngelo bit about it not being whether but instead how racism manifests in any interaction. When they say racism is a normal feature of society, they also Mean Precisely That. Not that racism is common in American society, but instead that it is a normal feature (i.e., normatively organizing principle) of society. Some theorists are more radical than others and apply this to any society, but I’m pretty sure the majority “just” apply this critique to all current and past societies.
There’s a tendency to read something like, “CRT rejects claims of meritocracy,” and interpret it as, “CRT rejects claims that meritocracy is/has been achieved.” It’s less exposing corruption and more Harrison Bergeron. Also worth noting is how similar this constant use of “recognize” is to what the genderists do with their “reminders”.
Worth noting is how it’s only possible to recognize that this is describing standpoint epistemology because you’re familiar with it. Otherwise, the description seems better than benign; it seems positively just. SE is an amazingly insidious concept. It sneaks in when you’re not looking, because most of us don’t want to reinscribe injustice by invalidating potentially relevant experience.
Here again we go back to previous ideas and see what image emerges. What do we get when we add standpoint epistemology to explicit caste hierarchies that are pervasive throughout society? White minds, privilege preserving epistemic pushback, white tears, and all the rest are immediately derivable. In fact, there’s probably a book in analyzing the role of standpoint epistemology in the generation of such ideas. Does accepting it always guarantee such things as decolonizing math (2+2=5) and white fragility?
Heather Cox Richardson (historian) posted her take on CRT in yesterday’s daily email; let me know if you want me to send it to you or post it here (it’s not super-long, but posting it without your explicit permission would feel to me like spamming).
@3 the book Whistling Vivaldi uses this heuristic, though the author distinguishes between ‘observer’s perspective’ and ‘actor’s perspective’ rather than using the phrase ‘deficit-informed research’.
Jean Stefancic and Richard Delgado are professors of law. So, yeah, they are totally qualified to comment on biology. /s
Well, “race” as constructed currently really isn’t grounded in the biological reality of “landrace” or “cline”. Is a Melanesian “black”? Not in any sense that includes Africans, biologically speaking, except in that all humans are Africans, but almost everyone in the USA would consider them the same “race” as African Americans, despite the disconnection from biology
Similar to Sackbut, but I was thinking of chirocpractic. Though to be fair, it sounds as if CRT started out on a very sound basis but then expanded into all sorts of dubious areas, while osteopathy and chiro took the reverse arc. Arguably anyway, assuming you accept that osteo and chiro have any sound medical application at all.
I keep seeing this “a few bad apples” thing, and it really annoys me so I’m going to vent – does nobody know how the expression goes, and what it means? It keeps popping up as if it means “a few exceptions that don’t mean we should write off the whole thing” but that is precisely what it means: Corruption spreads. One bad apple spoils the whole barrel. If racism (or any other Bad Thing) is just “a few bad apples” then it means that we have to throw out everything and start again. Oops, that’s not what people mean when they say it.
On verbs vs nouns: I have seen the same thing said about science: Science is a verb, not a noun.
Now I think that is meant metaphorically, not literally. What they are really saying is that science (or CRT) is more a process, a way to find things out (hopefully without fooling yourself, at least in science). In other words, it’s more about the doing than about the results. Hence “a verb, not a noun”. Which is okay, if you think of it as a metaphor.
The idea, at least for science, is that it is too common to see all science as cast in stone. But even the best, most well established, parts are constantly subject to reexamination* and reinterpretation. Even the basics of gravitational theory are being retested from time to time, as advances in metrology (not a misprint) allows for more accurate measurements.
* would the New Yorker write that as reëxamination?
PS. There is of course the hero in a certain sci-fi movie, when stranded on Mars, saying “I’ve got to science the hell out of this”. That’s the only legitimate use of science as a verb (literally) I can recall encountering.
Re bad apples, I was involved in a discussion about this the other day. I usually see “bad apple” used in a rejection of the aphorism, perhaps in a manner popularized by the 1970 song One Bad Apple. I associate the song with the Jackson Five, and it was indeed written for them, but they never recorded it; the famous recording was by the Osmonds. I have no idea other than confusion why I thought it was the Jackson Five.
The situation also makes me think of “the exception proves the rule”, which is often used to claim that an exception demonstrates that a rule is true, when it actually means an older sense of the word “prove”: the exception probes or tests the rule, possibly invalidating it or weakening it.
I found this to be an intersting take >> https://mobile.twitter.com/ambermruffin/status/1403683507474354182
guest @ 6, thank you for that. I’ll do a separate post on it. I need to remember to read her.
Here’s a course description from UCLA Law >> https://curriculum.law.ucla.edu/Guide/Course/52 It is not a requisite course there. Looks interesting though.
It does, and not particularly crackpottish that I can see. Thank you; useful.
Harald @ 12 – Yes that makes sense. I misunderstood her then.
Nullius @ 5 –
Well, maybe, but then weaving and pattern-seeing are themselves fallible. Anyway why do we have to reify it that way at all? Especially when the right-wing virtue-signalers are so busy doing it? Why weave? Why not unweave, instead, and make use of the better threads?
Catwhisperer, Sackbut, those are complaints I’ve had for a long time, too, especially the “exception that proves the rule” (which merely means an exception tests the rule, not makes it valid). Another that annoys me is “the proof is in the pudding”, which should be “the proof of the pudding is in the eating“.
Ooh, I feel a list coming on ;)
The “exception that proves the rule” thing always seemed stupid to me, it’s nice to finally know what it’s supposed to mean. I had a whole book that explained the origins of various expressions – “cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey” and such – it was fascinating. I seem to have lost the book and have no idea what it was called, which is a shame. I keep half-remembering things from it that I would like to look up.
Re: exceptions proving rules. It’s the same as in some other inherited uses, such as proving in a crucible, or even 80 proof.
Ophelia @ 20: Of course, nothing stops us from extracting the ore. We absolutely should, for to not do so would be a waste. There’s a point where we wouldn’t be doing critical race theory anymore, though. Discard or modify enough of a game’s rules, a religion’s doctrines, or a culture’s norms and what remains is no longer the same game, religion, or culture. The individual threads are not critical race theory; the threads compose critical race theory. CRT is the whole, and the whole is CRT.