I think we have a big problem with the discourse around CRT. The r/criticalracetheory subreddit recently opened, and it's a shithole of tribalism and virtue signaling by stupidpol types, far right conspirators, bored liberals who just walked in to wave their red or blue MAGAs like it's jury duty, and a noticeable complete absence of leadership or actual CRT philosophers. When I checked, the mod who probably redditrequest'd it did not seem to be showing any power level or political affiliation. I could not determine if the agenda of the sub will be "epic WWF style CRT debates" or actual CRT academic discussion .
other hexbear threads:
I've got:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIZ_3-i5FY4 <- thoughtslime
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZWaJ5Nqz3M <- the serfs
and basically nothing else for resources. Any true CRT fans/enjoyers sharing information would be great. Also, IDK if hexbear is pro CRT or divided on CRT lol.
Search Terms: CRT, critical race theory, criticalracetheory
The gist I got from Shaun and the recent shitty Chapo ep is that it's definitely correct in explaining how racism was a founding principles of he US, but that it focuses on it to the point of ignoring capitalism (that might just be the 1619 project tho)
Basically another one of those things that's imperfect, but if you hear criticism of it there's a 99% chance it's in bad faith from someone who thinks racism isn't even real
but that it focuses on it to the point of ignoring capitalism (that might just be the 1619 project tho)
I can see that with liberal education, they'll point out how racism is bad but ignore the relation of it to capitalism.
Yeah that's the gist, but idk if 1619 is just the mainstream lib-y version of the actual academic discipline (it is from the NYT after all)
It's a mixed bag because it's such an academic topic that you get a lot of the liberal academia biases. I've read some really amazing CRT articles though that trace the history of race as it exists as a modern concept as a superstructural element generated by the capitalist mode of production. Essentially arguing that there is a hard split between our modern conceptualization of race and pre-capitalist ones which were much more ethnicity/region focused than our color coded system because the economic models required different inputs from the social system.
And then you also get afro-pessimist articles about how everything is racialized and has been forever and will be forever and there can never be change around that subject. Win some lose some :shrug-outta-hecks:
sucks that /r/CT's quality is gonna get fucked because of that. All communties are better when under the radar
From the very little I've read on the subject it sounds good and like something that should be taught in schools. The objective history of the USA is that it's horribly bad on race issues and still has a long way to go.
I'll be real with you. I do not give a single shit about critical race theory. It's like arguing about merry Christmas on Starbucks cups as far as I can tell
I can see the similarities, but one big difference is that anti-CRT hysteria is being used to fuck with school curricula. Shutting discussions of structural racism out of schools is how you get the whole "it's not racist unless they're wearing a white hood and yelling the n-word" mentality on a mass scale. I don't think the War on Christmas bullshit ever had the potential to make that big of impact.
Right thats what we have now though. So what's the other side. How big of a change do you think crt is actually going to have? I'm skeptical it's going to result in some huge change it's just spinning your wheels for minimal upside
Think of how many people understand concepts like structural racism and unconscious bias today compared to thirty years ago (or fifty years ago). Although tons of people still don't understand those concepts (or feel comfortable openly rejecting them), there's been significant progress. That can be rolled back.
it’s just spinning your wheels for minimal upside
Another way this is different from War on Christmas bullshit is that if you get into some big discussion about it there are substantive things to talk about. Pointing out the many ways racism permeates American society forces libs to confront a lot of contradictions they usually ignore, and there are still plenty of people out there who aren't ignoring this stuff so much as they're ignorant of it. You might be able to move some people on a topic that has a material effect on people's lives.
I mean people came up with all sorts of justifications to be mad one way or the other over merry Christmas and happy holidays. Could talk about white supremacy, being a Christian or secular nation, the power of corporations. I don't remember everything but people had reasons, a tree falls in the woods and people come up with takes.
The similarity I see is just the most useless people in media and politics ecstatic to be arguing about this which makes me think it's a massive waste of time. Especially on the right, there is clearly an organized effort to turn this into something that it's not underway.
But if you've got the bandwidth more power to you. I'm staying out of it and I don't think I'll miss much
I think it's particularly powerful because of past gains regarding more overt racism. If you're going to do racism in any sort of mainstream environment today, you have to at least dress it up with some plausible deniability. You don't hate people because they're black or brown, you're concerned about "crime" or "culture." And an increasing number of people are able to see through those dogwhistles, too.
For your conscious, unrepentant racists, these are surmountable rhetorical obstacles. But for those who aren't consciously racist, maybe who just grew up in conservative households/areas, or who aren't too political to begin with? They're in an environment where racism is widely considered bad, they think of themselves as good, so they believe they should oppose racism. So when you show them how racism is baked into all sorts of American institutions, they have to square their comfort with those institutions with "I'm a good person and should oppose this." Not all of them are going to change their beliefs to resolve that contradiction, but some will.
A lot of CRT spaces are utterly infested with shitlibs unfortunately
Simple answer about CRT in the USA.
Most of our taught in school mandatory history has almost all negative race related interactions yeeted out of existence while having no problems with framing "white" people with lots of positive racial characteristics and "non white" people with negative racial characteristics. CRT is just correcting the historical record/education by reducing/eliminating the positive/negative racism that
mightis in most primary school education and discussing the racial components of the history taught in schools that is typically ignored.There is a book in the MegaArchive of Theory that has an somewhat older edition of "Lies My Teacher Taught Me" that doesn't use the phrase CRT but what it is doing is exactly what CRT is supposed to be doing. Author does surveys of public school history books, points out where they are wrong/incomplete/misleading and tries to give some explanation as to what causes this.
The hexbear hive mind should be pro CRT, I don't think I've come across a compelling argument for why we should not embrace a more full and correct telling of history.
CRT is good, it's a subset of critical theory which is based on a dialectical materialist approach to history. The problem only arises when people start cherry picking CRT or other critical theories to divert attention from a systemic problem they themselves benefit from. The theories themselves are good and necessary and need to be integrated into any historical understanding of class that we have, but trying to reduce them to isolated issues that esist outside the influence of capitalism and class conflict is liberalism and self defeating.
I like to call this the "Killer Mike" effect. A great understanding of the issues of racial relations and how they effect class, but a sharp denial that capitalism is at fault and preaching the importance of black landlords and black capitalists.
The CriticalTheory sub has some discourse on it. It hasn’t been invaded by chuds yet.
Damn, I guess I really haven’t been on :reddit-logo: much lately.
I hate the fact that people pretend to be for or against CRT. CRT is almost completely irrelevant to the discussions of what seems to mostly be corporate liberal DiAngelo racism. It's only there as a buzzword, a boogeyman. I want everyone to just reject that bullshit because CRT isn't that. DiAngelo bullshit is stupid and not representative of CRT, nor is it representative of antiracism. So leftists and libs defend the shit conservatives attack as CRT (DiAngelo bullshit) because they believe CRT is antiracism in general. Reject conservative boogeymen. Anyone that says "CRT" in a discussion should be dismissed and CBT'd.
CRT itself is fairly varied. There are some things I like about it and things I don't.
For an example of something I've found is useful when thinking about this: The concept of "whiteness" is useful when you ask yourself, "if there are all these various European ethnic groups and most (but not all) have been white, and the criteria for being white changes, so what the FUCK does being white actually mean?" Or more topically, before r/WhitePeopleTwitter became shitlib central, it was just random tweets from white people with no clear connecting culture, so you ask "given that black twitter has a clear culture, what does it actually mean to be white twitter and why does it just look like 'normal twitter'?" After asking these things, you realize that "white" in a culture of white cultural supremacy just means "American", and that it exists solely as a negative category. I don't mean negative as "bad", I mean negative as "it's only possible to view whiteness as a relevant category insofar as who is not in it vs who is". So it's not important to white people that their category includes people from Sweden, people from Italy (now), European Jews, etc. It is only important to white people that their category excludes people such as black, latino, Italian (before), arab, non-European Jews, etc. Understanding this makes it much easier to reason about white people and whiteness.
As far as things I don't like? I think that CRT (like other academic treatments like Racecraft, etc.) understands that race is a socially contrived category. Unlike alternatives, I think that it attempts to ameliorate the damage from race based prejudices by reifying racial categories, leading to absolute racial essentialism. In other words, it often claims that while race is not real, racism is real, and that as a consequence, the only way to understand oppression dynamics and address them is by restructuring society along the axes of racial oppression. In practice, this often fails to really account for "intersectionality" in its original sense, and instead leads to narratives (see: Settlers, etc.) that are fatalistic about the ability of white people to ever behave in a non-supremacist way. This is, IMO, a dead end to any kind of organizing in the US aside from the kind of ethnoracial separatism advocated by the aforementioned Settlers.
I don't like its epistemological underpinnings, in which anecdotes and stories supplant any kind of materialist, falsifiable, or observable accounts of oppression. I don't believe this kind of epistemology is a universal one, and it often seems to be seeking to convinced the already converted rather than change the minds of non-adherents. It also means that, since nothing needs to be backed up by provable claims, the door is wide open for bad faith actors to appropriate the language, stories, and rhetoric of the oppressed. Zionists have taken this to its obvious conclusion recently, with all of the posting of stories of trauma. It has also cropped up with bad faith BLM grifters who hijack the narrative to funnel money into their own pockets because the general hostility towards asking for proof of anything means that they can scoot by with next to no accountability.
Ultimately, I don't think CRT is relevant in any way except as something for Dems and Republicans to bicker over without understanding at all. Similarly to how neither of those groups understands "socialism" or "communism", yet argues for or against it constantly, I don't think Republicans know what it is other than "white man bad", and I don't think Dem libs would actually like it either if they knew what it was. Many of their favorite lib things like incremental change and the primacy liberal constitutional freedomz are torn apart in a lot of CRT writing.
The way I see it, CRT is the new SJW/feminism/cultural Marxism boogeyman. Every online dipshit has their own definition and opinion on the extent of its influence. I figure like with the SJW/gamergate psychosis of the 10s, I’ll only passively develop a basic understanding 3-5 years after it stops being relevant, so I think I’ll just ignore anything that has to do with it beyond reactionary revisionism.
It’s just not worth engaging if it doesn’t have to do with harmful policy. I say let idiots tire themselves out on ignorant circlejerks. Debates and arguments are pointless.
I prefer CRT because it has lower latency and looks cooler when tuned to dead channels
Too much imperialism on my mind to know or care about this. Why is discussion of this being given oxygen?
