This post is pretty close to getting it. The instrumental value of CRT for corporations and schools is regimentation and policing. Of course it fulfills other needs such as moral pedagogy and religiosity. It serves an entrenched special interest: diversity administrators. Finally, it serves an institutional purpose as a kind of ‘insurance’ - CRT is a shakedown operation.
All of this is bad enough, but what is worse is that we don’t really know what the downstream effects will be. CRT is explicitly identitarian. It is also authoritarian in that it normalizes institutional involvement in what were previously private spaces. Finally, it is epistemically deranging. Critical theory in general is good at motivating action to get power (‘do your praxis’) but is bad at everything else. It leads to bad art, bad institutional governance, bad health policy, and the general dissolution of rigorous standards required in liberal discourse. What I think someone like Freddie, who is outside the institutions, misses is how cancerous the ascent of critical theory really is.
In the 1950s it was white people wanting to be hipsters and jazz--Norman Mailer, 1957-
"it is no accident that the source of Hip is the Negro for he has been living on the margin between totalitarianism and democracy for two centuries. But the presence of Hip as a working philosophy in the sub-worlds of American life is probably due to jazz, and its knife-like entrance into culture, its subtle but so penetrating influence on an avant-garde generation—that post-war generation of adventurers who (some consciously, some by osmosis) had absorbed the lessons of disillusionment and disgust of the Twenties, the Depression, and the War." (reprinted in Dissent in 2007--https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/the-white-negro-fall-1957 )
Bravo. And in addition I would point out that eventually the worm will turn and this brand of politics will outlive its usefulness as public opinion shifts against it. And at that point the convenient scapegoats will not only be people like Sista Souljah but also Ricky Ray Rector.
It's a kind of tragedy of the commons. If racism is structural, and all whites are complicit everyone is responsible for it and when everyone's responsible for something effectively no one is.
I feel like it's easier to imagine critical theory ameliorating material differences than it is to imagine incrementalism making blacks and whites statistically indistinguishable or near indistinguishable. Like if you could snap your fingers and convince the average voter to hold Kimberle Crenshaw's (to pick one random CRT scholar) views you could move mountains on materialist policy.
If you snapped your fingers and made CRT crazed white people gone away nothing much would come of that. They'd go be weird about something else and the culture war would shift to some adjacent topic.
If your foundation for measuring the pace of racial equality is metrics like income, college education, etc. then the complicating factor is that it is not whites at the top of the heap in the United States but Asians. The entire CRT debate is really stuck in a world view where race relations in the US means the state of black-white relations rather than the reality of a multicultural society with a staggeringly diverse set of interests.
I share skepticism (as a white Latina, on the... sidelines, margins... of all this discourse) that CRT discourse by whites/for whites has had any meaningful impact on material outcomes... But then again... I work in health research and recently had a baby so it's on my mind.
One place racial and ethnic disparities - with material consequences - are immediately obvious is in obstetric care. Black moms in particular have worse outcomes (by "worse" I mean...death) than might be predicted otherwise by their health, their access to care, etc. Some of this is impacted by giving women Black doctors. https://www.pnas.org/content/117/35/21194. At a certain point, asking OBs to address *personal* and not *structural* racism might make some sense.
https://www.statnews.com/2021/06/03/vbac-calculator-birth-cesarean/ VBAC is meaningful for health of the mom and lowers risk for future pregnancies (Cesarean gets more dangerous with each baby... google "placenta accreta" sometime). The calculator OBs might use to determine candidacy... used race and ethnicity. Meaning, if I identified myself as Latina (important to do so because diabetes has a genetic link and it's common in my family) I would have been less likely to be a "candidate" for VBAC than if I identified myself as white. This is a socially constructed category, obviously. But it has potentially BIG impact on the quality of care I receive; the size of my family going forward; my risk of dying on the operating table (low in absolute terms, but it goes up quite a bit with each cesarean). This is a material outcome, right? Death of mother.
If more white OBs feel guilty, and think obsessively about race, and ponder their own decision-making ad nauseum, and revisit all their clinical decision-making, and try endlessly to be the wokest OB in the room... isn't it possible that more structurally racist tools like this VBAC calculator might be overhauled? I mean, this isn't changing on its own. It requires individually motivated people in positions of power to take a look; to revisit; to question received wisdom. What might motivate them to do that? If it's CRT, if it's the zeitgeist, if it's trendy right now to interrogate everything in light of racial disparities? That is a good thing.
"Anti-racism", CRT, and rap music (or is it "wap" music now?) have all jumped the shark a while back. As Eric Hoffer said; "Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket". But what's after racket?
When you say "educated white liberals" it almost feels like you're leaving out "on Twitter." Even among educated white liberals there is only a small minority who cares about this issue. It's the same small minority that likes to protest things. The small minority that wishes it was forever 1969 and they were protesting the Vietnam War.
1. While the results are often ham-handed, I suppose there's a lot worse things that (white) people could be competing over than being the most "anti-racist" person in the room. It seems like channeling that energy in a more productive direction is a better problem to have than turning people's motivations completely around.
2. I think the ham-handed efforts like the example listed stem from insecurity. People are afraid of being called racist, or harbor doubts that they are racists deep inside (a notion cultivated by the Robin DiAngelo types), and so have to engage in exaggerated gestures of demonstrating anti-racisms.
I suppose I'm more optimistic. These seem like fixable problems to me. But there is a lot of damage that can be done in the meantime. I thought people would learn to handle the flood of information coming into them in the rectangles in their pockets, but they elected Trump president once, and almost did so again. So, it is worth observing these problems, and taking steps to limit the damage done.
There is no reason to demand 'equity' at the level of television and the Oscars any more than there is to demand 'equity' at the position of NFL cornerback. 'Equity' is a marker only applied when it comes to dispossessing White people.
Let's center the Black voice of Professor Ibram X Kendi. What does he think the path forward should be?
"To fix the original sin of racism, Americans should pass an anti-racist amendment to the U.S. Constitution that enshrines two guiding anti-racist principals: Racial inequity is evidence of racist policy and the different racial groups are equals. The amendment would make unconstitutional racial inequity over a certain threshold, as well as racist ideas by public officials (with “racist ideas” and “public official” clearly defined). It would establish and permanently fund the Department of Anti-racism (DOA) comprised of formally trained experts on racism and no political appointees. The DOA would be responsible for preclearing all local, state and federal public policies to ensure they won’t yield racial inequity, monitor those policies, investigate private racist policies when racial inequity surfaces, and monitor public officials for expressions of racist ideas. The DOA would be empowered with disciplinary tools to wield over and against policymakers and public officials who do not voluntarily change their racist policy and ideas."
Along these lines (matarialist antiracism), I hope you'll review Musa al-Gharbi's book, We Have Never Been Woke, when it comes out. He has some challenging ideas for how affluent whites should stop virtue signaling and put some skin in the game and yet some of them to me still seem to rely too much on personal decisions rather than radical structural change so I'd love your assessment. Here's a preview: https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/wd54z/
Seems to me like CRT has/is going to become a perpetual grift machine. For CRT’s goals to work, it would have about 25 years to fix systematic racism. So, if you don’t get systematic racism fixed in 25 years, now you have to finish fixing the systematic racism you missed in the first generation plus fix it in the next generation that has come along, and the next generation, and the next, etc. Sounds like a self licking ice cream cone that can easily find plenty of people (and their wallets) who feel guilty about their whiteness.
"DEI training isn’t designed to make the world less hostile to people of color but to make white people into more spiritually clean people." Could you say more about this? I've only attended one "dismantling white supremacy" workshop, offered outside the workplace by the group SURJ, and I wouldn't characterize it as spiritual cleansing for white people. Can you report on the specifics of some of the DEI trainings you've attended or read about?
>"as uncomfortable as this fact may be, the persistence of racism means that to fight racial inequality we will often have to downplay the racial elements of what we fight for".
Bingo!
It means a few other things as well. To take your example of student loan forgiveness, that likely requires an Act of Congress, passed by a majority in the House, and by a 60-40 supermajority in the Senate, and then signed in to law by the President (or, with a 2/3 supermajority vote in the Senate and in the House).
In the recent New York City Democratic primary, with a majority of voters BIPOC, and with ranked-choice voting consolidating their votes into a single final candidate, progressives still could not manage to make the top-two vote getters.
So, ya want student loan forgiveness??? It means, uncomfortable as this fact may be, that you're gonna have to fight hard, really REALLY HARD, to elect a whole bunch of Hillary Clintons and Joe Bidens.
This post is pretty close to getting it. The instrumental value of CRT for corporations and schools is regimentation and policing. Of course it fulfills other needs such as moral pedagogy and religiosity. It serves an entrenched special interest: diversity administrators. Finally, it serves an institutional purpose as a kind of ‘insurance’ - CRT is a shakedown operation.
All of this is bad enough, but what is worse is that we don’t really know what the downstream effects will be. CRT is explicitly identitarian. It is also authoritarian in that it normalizes institutional involvement in what were previously private spaces. Finally, it is epistemically deranging. Critical theory in general is good at motivating action to get power (‘do your praxis’) but is bad at everything else. It leads to bad art, bad institutional governance, bad health policy, and the general dissolution of rigorous standards required in liberal discourse. What I think someone like Freddie, who is outside the institutions, misses is how cancerous the ascent of critical theory really is.
The White Negro.
In the 1950s it was white people wanting to be hipsters and jazz--Norman Mailer, 1957-
"it is no accident that the source of Hip is the Negro for he has been living on the margin between totalitarianism and democracy for two centuries. But the presence of Hip as a working philosophy in the sub-worlds of American life is probably due to jazz, and its knife-like entrance into culture, its subtle but so penetrating influence on an avant-garde generation—that post-war generation of adventurers who (some consciously, some by osmosis) had absorbed the lessons of disillusionment and disgust of the Twenties, the Depression, and the War." (reprinted in Dissent in 2007--https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/the-white-negro-fall-1957 )
Bravo. And in addition I would point out that eventually the worm will turn and this brand of politics will outlive its usefulness as public opinion shifts against it. And at that point the convenient scapegoats will not only be people like Sista Souljah but also Ricky Ray Rector.
It's a kind of tragedy of the commons. If racism is structural, and all whites are complicit everyone is responsible for it and when everyone's responsible for something effectively no one is.
I feel like it's easier to imagine critical theory ameliorating material differences than it is to imagine incrementalism making blacks and whites statistically indistinguishable or near indistinguishable. Like if you could snap your fingers and convince the average voter to hold Kimberle Crenshaw's (to pick one random CRT scholar) views you could move mountains on materialist policy.
If you snapped your fingers and made CRT crazed white people gone away nothing much would come of that. They'd go be weird about something else and the culture war would shift to some adjacent topic.
If your foundation for measuring the pace of racial equality is metrics like income, college education, etc. then the complicating factor is that it is not whites at the top of the heap in the United States but Asians. The entire CRT debate is really stuck in a world view where race relations in the US means the state of black-white relations rather than the reality of a multicultural society with a staggeringly diverse set of interests.
I share skepticism (as a white Latina, on the... sidelines, margins... of all this discourse) that CRT discourse by whites/for whites has had any meaningful impact on material outcomes... But then again... I work in health research and recently had a baby so it's on my mind.
One place racial and ethnic disparities - with material consequences - are immediately obvious is in obstetric care. Black moms in particular have worse outcomes (by "worse" I mean...death) than might be predicted otherwise by their health, their access to care, etc. Some of this is impacted by giving women Black doctors. https://www.pnas.org/content/117/35/21194. At a certain point, asking OBs to address *personal* and not *structural* racism might make some sense.
https://www.statnews.com/2021/06/03/vbac-calculator-birth-cesarean/ VBAC is meaningful for health of the mom and lowers risk for future pregnancies (Cesarean gets more dangerous with each baby... google "placenta accreta" sometime). The calculator OBs might use to determine candidacy... used race and ethnicity. Meaning, if I identified myself as Latina (important to do so because diabetes has a genetic link and it's common in my family) I would have been less likely to be a "candidate" for VBAC than if I identified myself as white. This is a socially constructed category, obviously. But it has potentially BIG impact on the quality of care I receive; the size of my family going forward; my risk of dying on the operating table (low in absolute terms, but it goes up quite a bit with each cesarean). This is a material outcome, right? Death of mother.
If more white OBs feel guilty, and think obsessively about race, and ponder their own decision-making ad nauseum, and revisit all their clinical decision-making, and try endlessly to be the wokest OB in the room... isn't it possible that more structurally racist tools like this VBAC calculator might be overhauled? I mean, this isn't changing on its own. It requires individually motivated people in positions of power to take a look; to revisit; to question received wisdom. What might motivate them to do that? If it's CRT, if it's the zeitgeist, if it's trendy right now to interrogate everything in light of racial disparities? That is a good thing.
"Anti-racism", CRT, and rap music (or is it "wap" music now?) have all jumped the shark a while back. As Eric Hoffer said; "Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket". But what's after racket?
When you say "educated white liberals" it almost feels like you're leaving out "on Twitter." Even among educated white liberals there is only a small minority who cares about this issue. It's the same small minority that likes to protest things. The small minority that wishes it was forever 1969 and they were protesting the Vietnam War.
A couple thoughts from this.
1. While the results are often ham-handed, I suppose there's a lot worse things that (white) people could be competing over than being the most "anti-racist" person in the room. It seems like channeling that energy in a more productive direction is a better problem to have than turning people's motivations completely around.
2. I think the ham-handed efforts like the example listed stem from insecurity. People are afraid of being called racist, or harbor doubts that they are racists deep inside (a notion cultivated by the Robin DiAngelo types), and so have to engage in exaggerated gestures of demonstrating anti-racisms.
I suppose I'm more optimistic. These seem like fixable problems to me. But there is a lot of damage that can be done in the meantime. I thought people would learn to handle the flood of information coming into them in the rectangles in their pockets, but they elected Trump president once, and almost did so again. So, it is worth observing these problems, and taking steps to limit the damage done.
There is no reason to demand 'equity' at the level of television and the Oscars any more than there is to demand 'equity' at the position of NFL cornerback. 'Equity' is a marker only applied when it comes to dispossessing White people.
Nonetheless, very interesting and timely article.
Brilliant. Will be sharing widely.
Let's center the Black voice of Professor Ibram X Kendi. What does he think the path forward should be?
"To fix the original sin of racism, Americans should pass an anti-racist amendment to the U.S. Constitution that enshrines two guiding anti-racist principals: Racial inequity is evidence of racist policy and the different racial groups are equals. The amendment would make unconstitutional racial inequity over a certain threshold, as well as racist ideas by public officials (with “racist ideas” and “public official” clearly defined). It would establish and permanently fund the Department of Anti-racism (DOA) comprised of formally trained experts on racism and no political appointees. The DOA would be responsible for preclearing all local, state and federal public policies to ensure they won’t yield racial inequity, monitor those policies, investigate private racist policies when racial inequity surfaces, and monitor public officials for expressions of racist ideas. The DOA would be empowered with disciplinary tools to wield over and against policymakers and public officials who do not voluntarily change their racist policy and ideas."
https://www.politico.com/interactives/2019/how-to-fix-politics-in-america/inequality/pass-an-anti-racist-constitutional-amendment
Along these lines (matarialist antiracism), I hope you'll review Musa al-Gharbi's book, We Have Never Been Woke, when it comes out. He has some challenging ideas for how affluent whites should stop virtue signaling and put some skin in the game and yet some of them to me still seem to rely too much on personal decisions rather than radical structural change so I'd love your assessment. Here's a preview: https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/wd54z/
Seems to me like CRT has/is going to become a perpetual grift machine. For CRT’s goals to work, it would have about 25 years to fix systematic racism. So, if you don’t get systematic racism fixed in 25 years, now you have to finish fixing the systematic racism you missed in the first generation plus fix it in the next generation that has come along, and the next generation, and the next, etc. Sounds like a self licking ice cream cone that can easily find plenty of people (and their wallets) who feel guilty about their whiteness.
"DEI training isn’t designed to make the world less hostile to people of color but to make white people into more spiritually clean people." Could you say more about this? I've only attended one "dismantling white supremacy" workshop, offered outside the workplace by the group SURJ, and I wouldn't characterize it as spiritual cleansing for white people. Can you report on the specifics of some of the DEI trainings you've attended or read about?
>"as uncomfortable as this fact may be, the persistence of racism means that to fight racial inequality we will often have to downplay the racial elements of what we fight for".
Bingo!
It means a few other things as well. To take your example of student loan forgiveness, that likely requires an Act of Congress, passed by a majority in the House, and by a 60-40 supermajority in the Senate, and then signed in to law by the President (or, with a 2/3 supermajority vote in the Senate and in the House).
In the recent New York City Democratic primary, with a majority of voters BIPOC, and with ranked-choice voting consolidating their votes into a single final candidate, progressives still could not manage to make the top-two vote getters.
So, ya want student loan forgiveness??? It means, uncomfortable as this fact may be, that you're gonna have to fight hard, really REALLY HARD, to elect a whole bunch of Hillary Clintons and Joe Bidens.