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

  • Tyreup [none/use name]
    ·
    3 years ago

    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.