I saw my relative liked an anti-crt tweet so I think its time I finally figure out what this is all about. I'd like to think I have a basic understanding of critical theory from reading this and excerpts from Foucault in college, but I genuinely don't get what the difference between critical theory and crt is. Is crt not just applying critical theory to race? Why is it designated differently? Should I just email Chomsky?
Thanks
This a great answer, thanks.
"It is at its best quite marxist in its analysis ..." are you referring to CRT or Crenshaw's writing?
I gathered that whatever the chuds were screaming about wasnt actually CRT considering how hard Critical Theory is to grasp (kids are never gonna read or be taught anything remotely along the lines of foucault or marcuse).
It comes from the Frankfurt School which is draws its roots from Marx, but in a pretty distinctly anti-communist/communist critical way. So CRT is by no means communist, but it approaches race through the same systemic lense Marx used to reveal the contradictions of capitalism.
That being said, it's not incompatible with communism at all, as it just looks at what exists and what systemic/social foces create those conditions.
in american culture you can add "race" to stuff to make conservatives mad. example: "war" gets conservatives excited. Make it "race war" and suddenly they're punching each other in the shoulder and yelling cereal names and shit
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02691728.2013.782585
In a 2014 paper by the black feminist epistemology heavyweight Kristie Dotson, she explains that our entire epistemic landscape is itself profoundly unequal. Indeed, she argues that it is intrinsically and “irreducibly” so, meaning that it is not possible from within the prevailing system of knowledge and understanding to understand or know that the system itself is unfairly biased toward certain ways of knowing (white, Western, Eurocentric, male, etc.) and thus exclusionary of other ways of knowing (be those what they may). That is, Dotson explains that when we look across identity groups, not only do we find a profound lack of “shared epistemic resources” by which people can come to understand things in the same way as one another, but also that the lack extends to the ability to know that that dismal state of affairs is the case at all. This, she refers to as “irreducible” epistemic oppression, which she assigns to the third and most severe order of forms of epistemic oppression, and says that it requires a “third-order change” to the “organizational schemata” of society (i.e., a complete epistemic revolution that removes the old epistemologies and replaces them with new ones) in order to find repair.
The usual tools by which we identify provisional truths and settle scholarly disagreements are part of the hegemonically dominant system that, by definition, cannot be sufficiently radical to create real revolutionary change (a “third-order” change, as Dotson has it). That is, they can’t reorder society in the radical way that is necessary. The belief is that to play by the existing rules (like conversation and debate as a means to better understand society and advance truth) is to automatically be co-opted by those rules and to support their legitimacy, beside one deeper problem that’s even more significant.
The deeper, more significant aspect of this problem is that by participating in something like conversation or debate about scholarly, ethical, or other disagreements, not only do the radical Critical Social Justice scholars have to tacitly endorse the existing system, they also have to be willing to agree to participate in a system in which they truly believe they cannot win. This isn’t the same as saying they know they’d lose the debate because they know their methods are weak. It’s saying that they believe their tools are extremely good but not welcome in the currently dominant system, which is a different belief based on different assumptions.
