A practice of interrogating
Janel George at the American Bar Association on Critical Race Theory:
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. 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. CRT also recognizes that race intersects with other identities, including sexuality, gender identity, and others*. 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.
*Note the non-mention of sex. Trans people and LGB people count but women don’t. Janel George is a woman but left women out.
That aside – again I ask – is this so crazy? There’s been some progress, but it’s far from complete. Is that a hideously woke thing to say? There are statistics that back it up – on health, education, income, wealth, incarceration, debt – basic stuff like that.
Some “key tenets”:
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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.
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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.
I’m guessing that’s where the conservatives ask to get off the bus. I’m guessing they’d rather think it’s individual Sin as opposed to socially embedded. I think that’s just fatuous. How could we possibly think it’s not embedded? Unless we live in the world with bags over our heads.
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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.
Ok that sounds like an opening to bullshit. If the idea is that storytelling should trump research, then no.
It could be a mixed bag – some reasonable claims and some groupthinky faddish crap.
No. No it bloody isn’t. It’s a noun. I’m not being pedantic. It simply isn’t a verb.
That’s not what a verb is.
Especially when the verb already exists – critical race theorize. Easy peasy.
Hahahaha.
I critical race theorize
Thou critical race theorizest
He critical race theorizes (or: -eth)
Ze/Xe/She/Qe/Bun critical race theorizes (or: -eth)
What, you thought “she” was going to get its own line on the conjugation chart? It belongs together with all the other non-he genders, no?
Where is racism embedded in the legal system? People of color may be more likely to be arrested and receive harsher punishments, but that’s not the law. Or does she mean something else?
Sastra, one compelling example of this is the failed New York City “stop and frisk”.
The majority stopped and frisked were non-white, and of those, over 80% were innocent of crime, past, present or future.
Of the minority non-whites that were stopped and frisked, around 90% were guilty of past, present, or future crimes.
Why this discrepancy? One group was stopped based on skin color, the other on probable cause.
Look, for example, into things like how school districts are drawn up and how schools are funded, particularly in Southern states. Also congressional districts. Racist outcomes are baked right in. I mean … I don’t even think acknowledging that sort of thing is even that controversial outside of rabid Trumper forums.
I think part of the problem is that people hear “critical race theory” and connect it with eyeroll-inducing garbage like Robin DiAngelo books and “diversity training”.
Well…this could be an opening to B.S. I don’t know what “deficit-informed” means, and I don’t care what color my epistemology is, I only care whether it gets me to truth. But I’m willing to give the passage a charitable reading.
Academic research slants towards the empirical and analytical and quantitative. This is built into the system. You can’t just go out and do generic “research”. You have to write a research proposal; it has to start with a question to be answered; there has to be some kind of data collection process. If it involves humans in any way, it has to get institutional review board (IRB) approval. It needs to get funded. The results are subject to peer review.
All of this is good and appropriate. Indeed, this kind of research is the basis of modern science. But…it can have blind spots. Things that are difficult to measure, or difficult to quantify, or difficult to analyze tend not to be investigated, because they don’t make good research proposals.
I imagine that the language about “lived experiences” is a reaction to this. It is perhaps an objection to research that may be valid on its own terms, but is nonetheless uninformed by the reality of life at the wrong end of a racial hierarchy.
The mention of storytelling is notable. Stories are a big part of how humans structure their world view. Listening to people’s stories tells you a lot about them. That’s one reason that classicists study myths: to understand the world views of ancient peoples. Perhaps this is an invitation to listen to the stories told by people of color so that we can better understand those people and their lives.
Here’s an example. When the unrest started up in Ferguson, Missouri, reporters went in to try to find out what was going on. One thing they found was that it wasn’t just the Michael Brown shooting. The city government was basically predatory: instead of funding itself with taxes (which white people would have to pay) it funded itself by citing and arresting and fining black people. One news story recounted that black people in Ferguson would car-pool to the convenience store rather than walk down the street, because they feared being stopped by the police if they walked.
I’ll admit I was shocked when I read this. I’m one of those privileged white people for whom getting arrested is not a primary concern when deciding how to get to the convenience store. And maybe the social scientists are way ahead of me on this. Maybe they have already researched this, and published papers analyzing the effects of predatory policing on choice of transportation modes in minority communities. But if they haven’t, maybe they should walk down the streets in those communities and listen to some stories.
Unfortunately stories are what get humans into trouble because by and large a good story is more convincing than whatever is actually happening. This is the whole core of the Woke goal: change the story -> change the world.
This far the world doesn’t much care what story is told but those who are having a story forced upon them tend not to be amused.
Not only is CRT (cathode ray tube? Ah, no) a noun, but it acts as a noun in Janel George’s text:
Me too, but I had an experience in Barstow (California) in about 1969 that gave me a feeling of how it would be to be an object of suspicion to the police. For some reason that I forget, we had parked about ten minutes’ walk from where we were spending the night. I went to the car to get something, and while I was walking back to the motel a police car drove past me very slowly, then made a U turn and drove past me very slowly a second time, then made another U turn and drove past me very slowly a third time. At that point they obviously decided that I didn’t look Black or Mexican, and continued on their way.
In a nutshell, CRT is a simplistic, single-lens ideology that divides everyone into “oppressors” (white people) and “oppressed” (people “of color”), and then denigrates everything about being white while lauding everything about being “of color”.
It’s a sibling ideology to dividing everyone into “oppressors” (“cis” people) and “oppressed” (trans and “non-binary” people), and then denigrating everything about being “cis” while lauding everything about being “trans” or “non-binary”.
Just because bans on teaching CRT in schools are being promoted by Republicans, does not mean they are wrong; just occasionally they may get something right.
@4 Here is an example. It reflects a discrepancy in sentencing, but the sentencing requirement is written into the law rather than left to the judge’s discretion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Sentencing_Act
I think that meritocracy/color blindness bit also deserves examining. Yeah, we’re definitely not a post-racial society, but it’s not like those are bad aspirations. With that sort of thing comes “blacks and Latinos don’t enter the Gifted program as often as white/Asian kids: we should scrap the Gifted program!”
Ruben Bolling’s cartoon in the Daily Kos today, The Astonishing Aunt Man gains a mysterious new ally, is about Critical Race Theory. It’s apropos.
I think there are some “motte-and-bailey” things going on. Ideas that have sense to them (there are lots of embedded racist structures in society; things like meritocracy and color-blindness have not actually been fully achieved and are sometimes touted where they don’t really exist; and scientific examination of things has blind spots that might sometimes be illuminated by people’s stories) and turn them into dogmas that outrank facts and logic and produce pernicious effects (because society is full of racism, BURN EVERYTHING DOWN!!!; meritocracy and color-blindness are inherently evil racist white supremacist concepts and everybody who supports them needs to be CANCELED; lived experience trumps everything else always).
#4 Sastra
One sneaky one I heard of was in the selective approval of bridges and overpasses of a certain height, giving too little clearance for tall vehicles to go under. Putting such bridges around a neighbourhood greatly limits the public transport options for all people living there, because buses are tall enough to be blocked. Apparently this has been inflicted on largely black areas of some cities, reducing transport options disproportionately without ever needing to mention race in any of the paperwork.
Sastra, another aspect that is written into the law is the three-stikes, you’re out rule, which often ends up sending young black men to prison for life for smoking a joint. Get caught three times, and bang! Your life is over. That was actually the intent of the law, I believe, though of course the noises made by lawmakers say something different.
ACB, some of that was driven home to me in the 90s. I have been aware of systemic racism, and the tendency to stop black people at a much higher rate than white people, but it’s hard to visualize until you see it. Knowing about this did not prepare me for the experience I had. I was living in poverty with a teenage son, and I bought a used car to get around. I had almost never been stopped by police in my life; driving that car, it became a frequent occurrence. I was never doing anything to be stopped for, though the police made up some sort of excuse. One of the excuses was so blatantly and obviously false that I suspect the policewoman was signaling that it had nothing to do with why I was stopped. The reason I was stopped is that the car I was driving met their profile of the cars driven by young black men. They stop the car and see a youngish white woman driving, and they don’t even give me a ticket.
The one blatantly wrong excuse was during rush hour on a crowded highway; cars were bumper to bumper. I was driving a beat up Chevy that got me around but was not souped up and wouldn’t accelerate particularly fast. I was in the lane between two others cars, one on either side of me. There were also cars in front and back, too close to even change lanes. She claimed I was going so fast she could barely catch me, when she didn’t even have to speed up to stay with me.
It was so obvious why I was being stopped. I experienced white privilege there, and was aware of it. Had I been a young black man the stop would not have gone so smoothly, and I would have, at best, gotten a ticket.
Not explicitly about racism and the law, but a great book about how the ‘war on drugs’ was a cover for something else.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoke_and_Mirrors%3A_The_War_on_Drugs_and_the_Politics_of_Failure
Robert Caro’s book The Power Broker describes Robert Moses’ urban design technique to segregate beaches.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_Broker
My PhD mentor told us about a study she or one of her students (I forget to what extent she was involved) conducted back in the nineties at a community college somewhere in the Philly area. Black students at the CC were complaining that their white advisors were patronizing, treating them as less intelligent in one-on-one meetings. So the researchers videotaped the meetings, and came to a rather surprising conclusion.
One aspect of conversation that we don’t pay a lot of conscious attention to is backchanneling–the verbal and non-verbal cues we give to indicate that we’re engaged and following along. All the “uh-huhs” and head nodding. These vary quite a bit by culture–if you’ve ever had an extended conversation with a Japanese person, for example, you’ve probably noticed that they do a lot more backchanneling than you’re used to (assuming you’re not Japanese). Anyway, when the researchers analyzed the videos, one thing they noticed was that the Black students tended to nod in a much more subtle way than their white interlocutors were used to–more of a slight thrust forward than an up-and-down movement. The white advisors weren’t picking up on those cues, and so they thought that the students weren’t following along. As a result, they repeated what they were saying, often slower and in simpler terms, which the students took as indications that the advisors thought they weren’t intelligent.
In itself, there’s nothing racist about this story, just a typical cultural misunderstanding that happens when people aren’t conscious of the norms of their culture, and how they differ from other cultures. But it had consequences that could potentially reinforce racism.
I don’t know whether this is the kind of story that fits in with CRT, but it is a case where academic (perhaps scientific, if sociolinguistics is a science) tools can shed light on one of the many nearly-invisible ways racism can be perpetuated even by well-meaning people.
This is good, this discussion. Helpful.
Coel @ 11 –
Is that true? It sounds like a generalization off the top of your head rather than an accurate account. Can you show us an example of something as simplistic and crude as that?
Me too, but I had an experience in Barstow (California) in about 1969 that gave me a feeling of how it would be to be an object of suspicion to the police.
I was stopped in OKC on a Saturday afternoon, walking from an auto repair shop to my brothers. In the 1980’s jeans with rips in them were temporary in style, but that’s the only reason I can think that I might have been singled out, walking while white in a white neighborhood. I was frisked and sat in the back seat of the squad for an interview. There as nothing on me so they begrudgingly let me go. The ostensible reason was that “someone had called to report a suspicious person in the neighborhood.
Part of me wanted to hear the call for myself, you know?
@Ophelia: #21:
It is my paraphrase, but it pretty much sums things up. As you’re likely aware “critical theory” arose in academia (originally in the Frankfurt School) as a method of analysing all social interactions in terms of power relations, in terms of oppressors and oppressed (originally from a Marxist perspective of capitalists exploiting workers).
As with many such things, to a degree this way of thinking starts off sensible enough. It goes wrong when it becomes the only way of thinking that one allows oneself. Thus, critical theory applied to race does indeed analyse everything in terms of oppressor/oppressed relations.
As CRT says: “the question is not *whether* racism manifested itself in this situation, the questions is *how* racism manifested itself”. Under CRT, any and all differences and inequalities between racial groups must result from “racism” (= must result from group oppressor/oppressed relations) because that’s the only mode of analysis they allow.
The word “woke” is then a claim to be “awake” to the operation of oppressor/oppressed relations in society, to which others are oblivious.
And from there, they genuinely do identify “oppressor” with “white” and “oppressed” with “of color”. Thus, under CRT, “white” has become as much a political identity as an ethnic one (which is why Chinese-Americans can be re-labelled as “white” simply because they do well in school and are successful).
Here’s an example of CRT thinking: https://nmaahc.si.edu/learn/talking-about-race/topics/whiteness This is the sort of thing that is being introduced into schools, and which the bans on CRT are seeking to disallow.
It goes way beyond simply wanting a proper and honest account of history, including slavery and Jim Crow, and wanting an honest discussion of whether and how that still affects outcomes today.
Thanks, Coel.
I’m not sure I’m as put off by the example you link to as you are. I’m a little put off, especially by the heavy quoting from both Peggy McIntosh and Robin DiAngelo, but I’m not really put off by the core claim that race is salient more of the time than white people tend to think. I think it’s pretty much true. I think ignoring race is a luxury that white people have (in the US, to be exact) that everyone else doesn’t. I think it’s ok to educate white people on the subject. It may be grating, unpleasant, unnerving, but that doesn’t make it wrong.
Of course, there’s the problem that it leaks out into the broader culture, which includes a lot of scoldy people (very much including white people) on social media and news outlets who use the jargon to bully everyone who reminds them of their mothers, so that doesn’t help.
That’s very suspicious in itself. You’re not supposed to walk. When we visit my oldest daughter in Tracy (California) we noticed that white people never walk anywhere except the immediate vicinity of their houses or in the parking areas of malls or supermarket, maybe in the park, if it’s not one frequented by non-whites. The only people you see walking outside the permitted areas tend to be black or Latin American. My wife is Latin American, but she doesn’t look like a stereotype Mexican, and no one ever imagines her to be other than European — not Finnish or Norwegian, perhaps, but easily Greek or Portuguese. The only thing that picks her out is her ability to detect the many faults in the signs that are supposed to be in Spanish.
I’ve been trying to remember if it’s the same in Denver, where my second daughter lives. On the whole I think it is.
Athel Cornish-Bowden #25
Back in 2000 I spent about ten days in Quincy, Illinois, and I too was struck by how empty the streets were. Indeed, by and large, the only people you could see out walking were other European visitors who, like ourselves, were there for the World Free Fall Convention 2000. To the locals everything was so centered around the car that walking anywhere was almost unheard of. In fact, someone I knew was once stopped by the Police and asked why she was out walking as if that was deeply suspicious in itself. After the convention we spent about a week in Chicago which couldn’t have been more different. There the streets were packed with people, and but for the looming skyscrapers we might as well have been in a big European city at that point. So the urban/rural divide was already very noticeable and has probably only increased since then.