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Slaw's avatar

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.

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Alex's avatar

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.

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