A wonderful new foil
Philip Bump in The Washington Post last February:
Fox News’s incessant focus on “critical race theory” (CRT) over the past few years — a term derived from an academic discipline that has been inflated to cover a wide range of race-focused issues — has evolved along with the discourse to focus on “diversity, equity and inclusion” (DEI). The thrust of each, in the presentation of Fox News and its allies, is that the toxic left is seeking to divide the United States by race.
Critical Race Theory is not the same thing as Diversity Equity Inclusion. Yes the same brand of excitable zealot is often enamored of both of them, but all the same they don’t go together like sugar & spice or bread & butter.
I’m tired of seeing the epithet CRT/DEI thrown around, and I might even decide to banish it, the way a certain “website”-haver banished the word “blog” from his blog.
Republicans are as likely or more likely to say that Whites face discrimination in the United States than they are to say that gay or Black people do. The idea that Whites are a target of discrimination was a potent contributor to Donald Trump’s support in 2016.
That sentiment, stoked by Trump, Fox News and others, was an outgrowth of the surge in attention paid to immigration and race in 2014 and to increased awareness of the country’s changing demography, as illustrated above. The election of Barack Obama was an immediate presentation of that change: a young non-White guy taking power.
A young non-White guy who is vastly more intelligent and eloquent than the loudmouth from Queens. That’s the part that really burns Trump and the Foxers. How dare he?? How dare he be so good at thinking on his feet, be a former editor of the Harvard Law Review, be slim instead of bloated? Does not compute; must be blamed on crtdei and her evil plots.
Trump grudgingly left office, and a new administration — one sympathetic to racial justice arguments — took power. The right had a wonderful new foil. Discussions of “critical race theory” blossomed on the right generally and on Fox News specifically.
Again, the criticisms of CRT were not about CRT as such but of an intentionally constructed caricature of CRT aimed at tying together a wide (and often cherry-picked) array of race-tangential issues as useful targets. Like “woke,” “CRT” came to mean a vague sense of race- or diversity-related things and, therefore, bad things.
And so a new kind of tedium was born.
Which I find extremely bothersome, because Critical Race Theory as such is terribad. There’s no need to reach toward its offshoots like Critical Whiteness Studies just to find something prima facie intolerable. I understand the impulse to just bring everything under one label for rhetorical simplicity, but the inherent imprecision of that tactic plays directly into the framing that any opposition is due to opportunistic racism.
@Ophelia:
CRT is the underlying ideas, while “DEI” is what it gets called when implemented as policy, for example when universities appoint DEI administrators with substantial powers.
One is not allowed to called it “wokeness”, one is not allowed to call it “CRT” and one is not allowed to call it “DEI”, and definitelty not “CRT/DEI”, and yet this ideology is currently dominant in universities. There are universities with literally hundreds of administrators charged with DEI missions, and they have way more power than the faculty.
As Freddie deBoer wrote (he, of course, is not right/Fox/Republican, he’s a traditional-left Marxist): “Please Just Fucking Tell Me What Term I Am Allowed to Use for the Sweeping Social and Political Changes You Demand”.
I hesitated before sharing this, because James Lindsay can be such a stinker. Which is not very critical thinkery (small-c critical) because the important thing is the argument, not who makes it.
But here’s Lindsay, being interviewed by a libertarian legal group, the Pacific Legal Foundation, on Critical [big-C] Race Theory:
(Emphasis added by me.)
When people oppose CRT–the smart ones, not racists treating it as a vague boogeyman–this sort of thinking is what they’re talking about.
https://pacificlegal.org/a-primer-on-critical-race-theory/
Given the mainstreaming of post-truth politics and activist journalism, on the Left as well as the Right, I suspect I’m not the only one who’s been unsure what to think with respect to Critical Race Theory. In an attempt to remedy the situation, I recently finished reading both The Identity Trap by Yascha Mounk and Cynical Theories by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay (currently working on a review of the latter), and found both books quite illuminating (and, at times, annoying as Hell). As Mounk points out, there is a tendency on the Right to conflate any talk of the legacy of Western imperialism, slavery, segregation, Jim Crow laws etc. with “Critical Race Theory” [1], but there is also a tendency on the Left to say that Critical Race Theory only means talking openly and honestly about the role that racism has played, and continues to play, in Western societies etc. According to Mounk, Pluckrose and Lindsay, both sides are wrong.
Both books trace Critical Race Theory, along with Post-Colonial Theory, Gender Studies [2], Queer Studies, Disability Studies, Fat Studies etc., back to the postmodernist tradition of French intellectuals like Michel Foucault and Jaques Derrida. Whereas the Civil Rights Movement, 1st and 2nd wave Feminism, the original LGB movement etc. were all rooted in classical liberalism, advocated equal treatment and universal rights, and sought to get away from boxes and labels and sweeping, essentialist generalizations about whole demographics of people, postmodernism and its offshoots explicitly rejected liberalism, as well as any appeal to common values, universal rights, or even objective knowledge, as oppressive metanarratives that only served the interests of the powerful.
While the various sub-fields of Critical Theory (or just “Theory”) – what Pluckrose and Lindsay call “applied postmodernism” – have kept many of the original features of postmodernism (its rejection of science and reason, its hostility to liberalism, the Orwellian idea that language, or “discourse” – the way we talk about things, limits what people can think, thus rendering them virtually incapable of questioning the self-serving metanarratives of the powerful [3] etc.), they have abandoned postmodernism’s skepticism toward stable identity categories, as well as the universalism of classical liberalism, in favor of a return to rigid boxes and labels and different rules for different groups of people. Indeed this is what distinguishes “identity politics” in particular from a general commitment to social justice (small s, small j). They have also abandoned postmodernism’s radical skepticism towards truth claims and pessimism about the possibility of progress in favor of a more explicitly activist, goal-oriented approach (hence the “applied” part) as well as a dogmatic, inflexible, certainty that tolerates no dissent, leaves no room for legitimate differences of opinion, and sees anything other than unquestioning agreement as proof of (conscious or unconscious) bigotry.
Until relatively recently, however, these ideas were largely confined to the humanities and social sciences departments of universities. What has happened with the rise of “wokism”, or “Social Justice” (capital S, captital J) activism, is that applied postmodernist ideas (or a grossly oversimplified, vulgarized, or “memefied” version thereof), have escaped university campuses and began to leak into, and ultimately take over, schools, the mainstream media, non-profit organizations, private companies, public institutions etc. The result is only too familiar.
1. Indeed, I seem to remember Helen Pluckrose mentioning in an interview that Cynical Theories is among the books that would be banned from universities as “Critical Race Theory” under some of the proposed Republican anti-CRT bills!
2. Gender Studies grew out of, and has now largely replaced, what used to be known as Feminist scholarship.
3. Pluckrose and Lindsay describe it as a “conspiracy theory without conspirators”.
Why do we need a name for “it”? Because it is a different and distinct ideology.
We could fairly describe it as a “group-equity-seeking ideology”, where “equity” is equal outcomes at the group level for all identity groups.
This “critical social justice” is very different from traditional social-justice ideas, which wanted equality of opportunity (as opposed to equality of outcome), with the emphasis on treating people fairly as individuals (as opposed to seeing them as avatars of groups).
You cannot have both. Fair, equality-of-opportunity treatment of individuals does not lead to group-level equality of outcome. Hence, pursuing the latter requires a rejection of the former.
For example, pursuing admissions to elite colleges that match the population requires racial quotas. That means discriminating against Asian-American individuals to prevent them rising over quota. These effects are not minor, they amount to factor-of-ten differences in an applicant’s chances owing to their “identity”. And the only way that that can be sustained is by authoritarian processes and taboos on debate and questioning the ideology.
This is why “whatever you want to call it” is radically different from (and incompatible with) traditional left-wing, social-justice aspirations. This is why we need a name for it. That’s why I echo deBoer’s plea.
Oh, my. Jerry Coyne shared this yesterday:
https://x.com/DrJacobsRad/status/1727910596224405580?s=20
Good god.
Oh, look: medical Lysenkoism.
What a non-surprise.