A Different Look At How We Are Discussing CRT
Photo by LearningLark, CC BY 2.0
Over at The Narratives Project, a different way of looking at the CRT debate by focusing on how different media outlet define CRT and the assumptions those definitions bring.
From The Narratives Project:
We found that the mere action of defining and discussing CRT is inherently subjective. The human mind is very skilled at fitting new information into our pre-existing bank of knowledge, which will, inevitably, frame how we perceive something. We struggle to find agreement between the left and right on the definition and interpretation of CRT because there is no neutral position to congregate around.
We can try to get a fuller picture of the debate by seeking out viewpoints that contradict our own, but claiming to approach some topics from a neutral point of view is, as far as we can tell, impossible given our distinct experiences and worldviews. Therefore, our best option appears to be attempting to understand the root causes of our disagreement instead of pursuing consensus.
If the concept we are defining is morally laden and tied to our values, as in the case with CRT, we are no longer speaking solely about a “neutral” definition, but about deep-seated values. This is what makes it so difficult to reach an agreement about what CRT is — when people question our definition they are, by extension, attacking our values. In those circumstances, reading a different definition will not be enough to convince us to change our minds because in doing so, we would also have to alter our values.
Many of the newspaper articles discuss how their contra partisans are mistaken in their definition of CRT and are arguing for or against a concept they do not fully understand. But because each side’s definition is based on prior assumptions and beliefs, the definition of CRT presented by the left and right is largely consistent with each side’s point of view and in line with their values. Differences in definitions are not indicative of faulty understanding or reasoning, but rather stipulate differences in what we use to render interpretations: our priors and values.
By acknowledging how our values impact our views on different topics, we have a better chance of understanding the people with whom we disagree. To understand them does not, however, mean that we must agree with them. It is perfectly fine, perhaps even preferable, that we do not change our opinions on a whim, just because someone disagrees with us. But being able to understand how someone reached a certain conclusion can help us view them with more humanity and respect. When we understand why we disagree, there is a greater chance that we can have constructive conversations.
The entire report is available at The Narratives Project for free in PDF for like this.
CRT
Hanley had an essay about CRT that described how high level academic theories escape the ivory halls and get watered down for wider distribution. It harmonizes nicely with this.Report
Watered down AND bastardized. The latter is especially important.Report
Yes but the issue is bastardized by who? In this case, I think the right-wing thinks (and maybe has) found the perfect term to scare white people without having to resort to old racial epihets. It is another in a long line of Lee Atwater’s observation on how you can no longer jump up and down stating the n-word.Report
Sure right wingers bastardize and exaggerate it but in reality they’re arriving late to the game. The initial watering down and bastardizing is occurring on the left when it’s imported from the academy into general left wing discourse. Everything from appropriation to micro-aggressions to privilege gets dumbed down, universalized and twisted into stupid shapes by non-academics posturing in left wing arenas. By the time genuinely malevolent right wing actors arrive on the scene they don’t actually have to do much beyond simply nutpick and point the cameras and microphones of their media megaphone at what some people on the left are saying.Report
Article here. Chip and Saul, you really need to read this.Report
As much as I appreciate what Hanley is trying to do here I think this is mostly wrong. Maybe it explains the Twitter/pundit war but not the larger issue. What no CRT apologist has ever been able to explain to me is why so many big school systems suddenly have references to the works of and some level of engagement with Kendi, Diangelo, and/or their lesser known fellow travelers in the world of DEI contracting.
IMO what’s really happening is the overproduction of administrative bureaucrats in education, but other places too. A handful of them are true believers, but most are just following the training in their required undergrad courses on useless, low rigor race and gender studies disciplines (if you can even call it that). They then go out and get hired by some compliance department and justify their existence with outsourced racism audits and training for the faculty and copy and paste the required reading lists everywhere they can. Eventually it gets on the radar of unsuspecting parents when some exercise or activity shows up that appears to be based on a bunch of 19th century level racialist assumptions. They then rightly wonder where it is their tax money is going.Report
Your whole second paragraph is (IIRC) a lot of what Hanley was talking about, but via different vector (admin instead of educators).Report
Freddie has touched on this too. One of the reasons CRT and identarianism is flourishing so much is because it’s so fishing easy and it’s easy by design.
A lot of CRT’s early manifestations were in academic arenas where the overall pie of tenure tracks and jobs were shrinking and all the actors were desperately looking for ways to differentiate themselves without putting in too much effort and CRT is well tailored for that purpose. Because of that it migrates extremely easily to the C-suite and to the Dept. of Education’s endless layers of middle management.
After all- changing education policy, making the whole apparatus of a school district adhere to the new change, getting positive results, measuring them and then publicizing/taking credit for them is astronomically difficult- especially in the time frame of a middle management education bureaucrat trying to advance in their field. But peppering internal documentation with fashionable CRT buzzwords, updating websites, instituting training classes and basically festooning your administrative apparatus with CRT crepe paper? That’s easy as heck to do and it’s fashionable to do. It’s a good way to look like you’re accomplishing something and advance in your field. Your bosses love quantifiables and inserting CRT into stuff is quantifiable so it’s great for you come evaluation time. Sure it’s probably not doing a damn thing to help educational goals or improve things for students but most non-crt policy changes don’t move the needle on those measurements either. Changing educational outcomes is hard as fish. CRT is easy. So that’s why it’s absolutely all over the place in those management environments. It’s easy to implement and implementing it is rewarded.Report
Agreed. I’m starting to see the whole thing as another symptom of the ongoing crisis around the purpose of higher ed bleeding over into white collar work. Like we’ve created these people with expectations of a middle class lifestyle who need something to do, there’s a vaguely legal/compliance justification for having them around or a box to check or whatever, and no one is really paying that much attention to it until after the fact.Report
It’s the iron law of institutions. They’re doing what is good for them individually but not what’s good for their institutions. It’s not good for the Dept. of Education to be viewed as a woke vanguard. Not good at all. But it’s very good for each individual employee of the Dept. of Education to import this easy to install Woke signaling (praise, plaudits and promotions for stuff that is so so easy to implement) so they do it anyhow. It’s not good for the Democratic Party or for Liberalism for this woke stuff to be signaled so prominently and ham handedly but it’s beneficial for individual actors so it happens any how.Report
“ What no CRT apologist has ever been able to explain to me is why so many big school systems suddenly have references to the works of and some level of engagement with Kendi, Diangelo, and/or their lesser known fellow travelers in the world of DEI contracting.”
I wouldn’t consider myself a CRT apologist but I can say it quickly became cool and hip and then necessary to cite those folks, especially after George Floyd.
I can name many people who name dropped those folks. I can name far fewer who actually read them, and fewer still who read them cover to cover. And even fewer who made real changes to their curriculum as a result.
And most of those changes would elicit either a weak eye roll or a “Yea, I guess that makes sense.”Report
The only part that doesn’t make sense to me is where you say it became necessary. According to who?Report
Well, “necessary” was a bit of hyperbole but those voices kinda became “required reading” in certain circles to maintain certain liberal/woke/progressive/whatever bona fides. That’s no longer the case.Report
There is also a phenomenon where the definition is deliberately obfuscatory. It’s an obscure legal theory from the 70’s. It’s not appropriate to teach to children. PhDs have trouble with the concepts.
The attempt to pull a “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain” strikes me as unlikely to work but that’s just because of all of the times I remember it failing… rather than of all the times I saw it work. Because why in the hell would I remember the latter?
But when you notice someone pulling the former, it’s hard to walk into the conversation thinking “they probably won’t try a trick like that a second time”.Report
Can someone point me to a paper supporting the claim that CRT actually involves sophisticated ideas that are difficult to grasp?
I read Delgado and Stefancic. That was the book CRT apologists told me to read to understand what it’s really about. And one of my takeaways from it was that, contrary to claims that CRT is narrow and deep, it is in fact broad and shallow, a discipline that simply ignores the hard problem of causal inference in social science and instead rests on a simple post-hoc fallacy.
But it was an introductory book. Maybe it goes deeper in places. I looked for an advanced CRT class to find out what textbook they use, but wasn’t able to find one. Maybe it’s called something else.Report
I don’t have a paper, just a few commenters.
As far as I can tell, the nut of Critical Race Theory is okay. Steelman the whole “Structural Racism” thing and you’re pretty much there. “The law in its majestic equality” and whatnot.
The problem with that is that it can also be used among affluent white liberals to crab bucket with each other and then that game of telephone turns into bad DEI training among the whole “some of my best friends are POCs!” set. “White Fragility” becomes a surprisingly robust way to maintain structural racism.
And so bad DEI gets smooshed into the part of CRT that isn’t merely affluent white liberals crab bucketing. Very few people who would benefit from this *NOT* happening are part of that particular corner of the conversation. It’s just the people making money and the people bucketing for clout who are having it.
And so here we are.Report
I don’t have a paper, just a few commenters.
Scroll down a bit. You’ll see them.Report
Any critical theory is going to be primarily that, a critique of something. It’s not an alternate theory of “what” or “how-to”. Its goal is going to be deconstructing a current approach, not constructing a better one. I think of a lot of libertarianism in this way. Its value lies in giving a warning, not in proposing an alternative.Report
It also reminds me of the panic over Saul Alinsky in 2009-2010, or the “Cloward-Piven Strategy” which was chanted repeatedly on Fox News during the same period, or the 1619 Project.
In both cases, the moral panic was whipped up as part of an effort to make ordinary and unremarkable political opinions seem frighteningly exotic and sinister.
With CRT, the ordinary facts of American history like redlining, highway planning and racial gerrymandering are forced into something weird and exotic called “CRT” and presented to those eager to ignore them as a sinister plot.Report
Honestly, though, isn’t there the implication that there are such things still active? Not merely ripples of past actions that need to be quelled, but a continued churning? I’m not writing this in any confrontational way. It seems to me that we can either deny / suppress knowledge of older racist acts, acknowledge them without making any restitution, acknowledge them and make restitution, or discuss as an introduction to the claims of current structural racism.Report
Those would be the options writ large. The issue the Left has is the very vocal parts of the right want everything regarding racism in America to be your first option and are using the label CRT to whip a frenzy to achieve that objective. They aren’t engaged in reasoned debate about whether any of the others are acceptable, nor where CRT – the academic version – Actually fits into the discussion.Report
I know that’s the go-to accusation, but not a word of it is true.Report
Which of your four options do you see as most true and why?Report
I see proof that there has been legal racism in the US, but no proof that there currently is. The two middle positions are rational. I opt for position two because (a) quantifiable claims for compensation are difficult, and (b) I don’t believe that it’s in the spirit of the American ideal, and it’s probably not legal, to combat past racial preferences with modern racial preferences.Report
Many of those fighting CRT at school boards don’t even see this, and they don’t appear to want their kids taught even this.
There are no longer laws that designate racism the way Jim Crow did. That doesn’t mean there is no racism, nor does it mean there is no tolerance for racism in current law.
why the heck not? What’s wrong with doing things now that acknowledge the past hurts and seek to remedy them through government action? People who have been discriminated against can’t as individuals overcome these injustices without help.Report
1- Show me an example of someone denying the statement “there has been legal racism in the United States”.
2 – We agree that there are no longer laws that designate racism. We agree that there is racial bias in this country. I get the feeling that your last clause is carrying a lot of weight. What do you mean by “tolerance for racism in current law”? Do you mean that we don’t prosecute racism (or don’t do so enough), or that racist people influence the judicial system?
3 – I have a much lower opinion of the ability of government to cure problems, but beyond that, I think we’re talking about cases of decades-old legal discrimination, possibly generations-old.Report
Both actually.
Yes and? Emancipation corrected a generations old wrong, as did the Civil Rights Act (and for that matter the voting Rights Act). Why do we have no obligation to correct things which were done in our name simply because of how long ago they were done?
You won’t see that exact statement. And that wasn’t and isn’t my point.Report
1 – “‘I see proof that there has been legal racism in the US,’
“Many of those fighting CRT at school boards don’t even see this, and they don’t appear to want their kids taught even this.”
This may not be your central point, but it’s something you did say. It seems important to your thinking, and definitely to Chip’s. I’ve just never heard it in real life.
2 – Racism itself isn’t illegal, and as such can’t be prosecuted. Judicial outcomes that differ by race aren’t proof of racists’ influence on the judicial system, and you’ve conceded that we don’t have any racial laws in the US.Report
3 – I’m fine with compensation where compensation can be reasonably assigned. Racial preferences or general racial laws are different from emancipation or the Civil Rights Act in that they institutionalize a relationship based on race.Report
Of course it is subjective in the public sphere. As countless articles and tweets have discussed, CRT is generally taught in upper-level law school electives. Maybe some of the more elite law schools through it in with their crim law classes because elite law seems to be sociology grad school in many ways. I had one session in my third year Jurisprudence course devoted to CRT.
But the right-wing launched unto it because it is so academic and therefore unknown to many but easy to turn into “ooga ooga blah people will be next to your children in school and one day, one of them might ask your girl to the prom. Or your son will ask why you are so proud of your ancestors who committed treason in defense of slavery.”Report
From the OP:
One talking about this from the lib cable nets says that there is no CRT in the public schools, adn tbh I’m not sure what they mean by that. I mean Chris Rufo and his ideological friends pretty clearly have the receipts: consultant contracts, diversity conferences, curriculum committee documents, school board minutes, etc.
So what exactly do the libs mean? I guess they’re saying that there aren’t 11th graders going to CRT class in the same way they’re going to trigonometry. But that’s obviously weak sauce if that really is the point. There has to be something more than that?Report
Chaits got a pretty excellent analysis that is very pertinent to this discussion.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/11/joe-biden-agenda.htmlReport