Will and money
Historian Heather Cox Richardson writes:
The idea that will and money could create success was at the heart of the Reagan Revolution. Its adherents championed the idea that any individual could prosper in America, so long as the government stayed out of his (it was almost always his) business.
Critical Race Theory challenges this individualist ideology. CRT emerged in the late 1970s in legal scholarship written by people who recognized that legal protections for individuals did not, in fact, level the playing field in America. They noted that racial biases are embedded in our legal system. From that, other scholars noted that racial, ethnic, gender, class, and other biases are embedded in the other systems that make up our society.
Historians began to cover this ground long ago. Oklahoma historian Angie Debo established such biases in the construction of American law in her book, And Still the Waters Run: The Betrayal of the Five Civilized Tribes back in 1940. Since then, historians have explored the biases in our housing policies, policing, medical care, and so on, and there are very few who would suggest that our systems are truly neutral.
Very few historians, I guess she means. Certainly there are very many people in general who would suggest exactly that, and others who would suggest that no actually our systems are biased in favor of Those People.
So why is Critical Race Theory such a flashpoint in today’s political world? Perhaps in part because it rejects the Republican insistence that an individual can create a prosperous life by will alone. It says that, no matter how talented someone might be, or how eager and dedicated, they cannot always contend against the societal forces stacked against them. It argues for the important weight of systems, established through time, rather than the idea that anyone can create a new reality.
It acknowledges the importance of history.
H/t guest
I’ve argued with people who claim there’s no such thing as systemic racism or no evidence of it in such-and-such a system. I can’t quite understand what they mean by it and I’ve never managed to pin anyone down to a coherent explanation. I think they generally mean either that there’s no detectable bias in one particular variable (regardless of whether it is relevant or has been reliably measured) or that if there’s any racism, then it’s not intentional. In the latter case, I ask them what they think ‘systemic’ means and generally don’t get an answer to that, either.
It’s strange because there’s a sense in which all racism is systemic. Perhaps something like xenophobia exists in all or most humans. Perhaps a tendency for xenophobia is innate, who knows. But racism is something that’s expressed through systems. Societies, at the lowest resolution, but also in the systems that make them up. You don’t have to explicitly build racism into a system for it to be racist; pretty much any form of ‘rich-get-richer’ semantics in the building of a network will do it, for example. We’ve talked about this sort of thing before. Remember the machine learning tools the police use to predict where crimes will happen? They’re trained on data which is itself systemically racist; previous generations of police knew where the ‘trouble spots’ were, even if they were not explicitly racist themselves. They are where most of the crimes seemed to happen exactly because that’s where they went looking for it. Thereby strengthening the idea that they were trouble spots. Rich-get-richer. Semantics like these are easy to spot in a huge variety of systems if you go looking for them and bias of all sorts gets baked in regardless of or sometimes despite intent.
Of course, the fact that a lot of people involved in building, developing and evolving systems are explicitly racist doesn’t help.
This way of thinking doesn’t really add anything, except the question of why any particular system should be exempt. I’d expect to see systemic racism in systems of people that have self-organised and especially in ones which have goals (such as arrest targets) which are artificial to the system or do not accurately measure a desired outcome.
I’m aware that I’m not explaining this very well, I’m rushing. I’ll come back if I ever think of a better way to explain myself.
latsot, I was reading a book not long ago that argued that misogyny isn’t ‘hatred of women’; it’s the support of systems that prevent women from achieving equal opportunities. A lot of the same ideas accrue to racism; people think it’s the idea of ‘hating black people’ or ‘hating the other’. That is, of course, racism, but that isn’t the racism that we talk about when we talk about changing police, or other systems, to make them more equitable. That is the systemic racism, and it doesn’t have to be intentional, any more than misogyny has to be an intentional hatred of women.
The book argued that misogyny isn’t ‘hatred of women’? But that’s literally what the word means – miso & gyny: hate & women. It should have argued that sexism isn’t [or is more than] hatred of women.
Yeah, I thought it was a little odd. She uses sexism in the way most of us use misogyny. Her arguments about institutionalized sexism and misogyny were sound, but her terms were…sort of backwards of how I would use them.
I can’t figure out if the problem is with CRT itself, or just the theorists who “practice” it. But there’s definitely a problem. I think part of it is that CRT doesn’t appear to have a language or a framework for discussing racism in terms of proportionality — everything might be to some degree racist and therefore harmful, but surely some things are less racist and therefore less harmful than others. And surely in some contexts the balance of power tilts in the other direction; sometimes white people don’t necessarily have the upper hand. Maybe it is possible to discuss this stuff within CRT, and the leading academics within CRT are simply ignoring it. But the assumption seems to be that white is always maximally oppressive and everybody else is always maximally oppressed, without exception. Overall in the US it’s certainly true that there are systemic advantages for white people. But at, say, an elite liberal arts college, where wokeness is the currency of the day, that may not be the case: like the incident with the Smith College student (cost to attend: $80K a year) who tried to have a janitor fired over supposed racism, when the janitor was just doing their job asking the student to leave a dorm room that was closed.
Another example is the notorious purity spiral that broke out in the online knitting community a couple years ago, covered by the BBC here. A sweet young gay male knitter tried to highlight diversity and unite the knitting community around the hashtag #diversknitty or something punny like that, and he ended up driven to near suicide by an anti-racist mob. Kehinde Andrews, a prominent Critical Race Theorist, couldn’t see what the problem was: he just kept saying, well, all white people are racist, and racists are bad and anti-racists are good and that’s all we need to know. It was like he couldn’t even process the possibility that not everyone who purports to be an Anti-Racist is on the side of the angels, and not everyone who is accused of Being A Racist deserves whatever punishment she gets from the Anti-Racist mob, or that she might not even be guilty of Being A Racist at all. It seems that to even ask a Critical Race Theorist if he sees any problems with a mob driving a young gay man to attempt suicide for trying to elevate the voices of knitters of colour is pointless, because CRT can only allow him to frame the situation in a way that the accused racist is automatically guilty, and maximally guilty at that, and therefore he deserves whatever he gets.
Is it possible to separate out this kind of toxic attitude from the entire field of CRT? Is the problem with the “theory” itself or the people within it?
Yes, I’d agree with Ophelia: speculatively, sexism is misogyny expressed through systems. But terminology aside, I think we’re in agreement, ikn.
Careful, though. There are a lot of books about emergent properties of systems and most of the ones I’ve read either make extravagant claims they can’t support or try to make the obvious sound revolutionary.
Arty,
I know very little about CRT. But one of the driving forces behind purity spirals is that the basis of the feedback in the loop doesn’t match the desired outcome, which is why they never stop until some external event intervenes. In the knitting example, the desired outcome was (presumably) better recognition of racism and thereby better treatment of people belonging to minority races. But the feedback element (more and more extravagant displays of purity and shunning) could never meet this criteria, hence the spiral.
This is broadly similar to what I was saying earlier; a disjoint between the desired outcome and the way the system tries to self-correct to meet it, causing it to go way off course. These systems can still look from the inside as though they’re working properly and from the outside, too, if you use the same skewed criteria to judge them. So in this example, if your criteria for success is that the (perceived) racists get punished, then the system is great. If you take a wider perspective or enquire too closely into how the racism was identified and the increasingly skewed proportionality of the punishment, it looks like a clusterfuck.
(Not that that answers your question.)
There’s nothing explicitly racist in investors buying single family homes for rental property, but the effect of it disparately impacts home ownership and the ability of black people to build wealth. I just read this piece this morning about what’s happenng in St. Paul and Minneapolis.
https://enewspaper.twincities.com?selDate=20210615&goTo=A01&artid=2 (I hope this link works!, it’s to the e-newspaper edition.)
At the same time that rents are going up, homeowners in traditionally black neighborhoods are finding that the housing stock is being taken up by investors with better access to funding and market data than they do. Of course this prices many out of the market, so they are stuck again with renting. In the Midway new apartments are going up, but of course, they are “luxury” apartments, and the city is trying to figure out how they can legally make sure that there is affordable stock. Rent control is not really a good option, but there needs to be a recognition that market forces affect racial minorities in different ways than they do white people, and that is a result of overtly racist policies in the past if not the present.
If Critical Race Theory is not the best way for the legal education system to address the continuing economic barriers to rising out of poverty, then those who are disparaging it need to present a better alternative. Those in the corporate world know that bosses don’t want to hear about problems unless their people bring also solutions, right? Then, rather than pass laws against teaching Critical Race Theory, find a way to present the concepts in a way that tells the truth about why black people face more poverty than white people.
It’s not because of the “work ethics,” there’s a legacy of systemic racism, and while racism de jure is supposedly erased by the Civil RIghts and Voting RIghts Acts in the 1960’s, racism de facto surely remains.