Critical Race Theory B- what is it, and why NOT teach it?

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An eleven minute rant from John McWhorter (linguistics professor at Columbia University) about how dishonest the public debate is right now on this topic, and no surprise that a pretty good sized chunk of what he's describing in his rant is happening in these A and B threads.

(actually one correction - Glenn chimes in a fair amount as well, a bit more incendiary on the topic than John)

doesnt matter if you or I know what it is, if it is taught in Public school, it will be war between two dumbed down clueless sides. Which is exactly what is happening in the lower mainland right now, which is not even in the usa..

Probably less boring than most of the curriculum for the students, but not worth the bickering it will stir up

CRT's teaching of *system racism* is the idea that white people are oppressing POC.

CRT seems to ignore the obvious truth.

Many people are racist of black people because of the huge crime rates by blacks.

They fear them.

that crime rate is a social construct.

Crime rate is a result of numerous factors--the big ones being unemployment, undereducation, and poverty.
If people realized that, they wouldn't have an irrational racist fear of black people.

Exactly. I've known white people who were victims of black crime who understand these factors. I've known white people who were victims of black crime who became outright racists, the latter not being well-educated themselves on the factors that led to this situation.

That's sort of orthogonal to the conversation.

If we have to go down that line for a minute I'd second roronoa79's comment about economics and particularly forced economic situations and their effects has a lot to do with that. Having the less intelligent of a given race be poor is one thing, having most people of any intelligence range in a given race bottled into poverty - over arbitrary social dominance by another race - makes things significantly worse.

People still fear things that can harm them, regardless of whether they understand why the things want to harm them.

That seems like more of an argument in favour of teaching about how racism is woven into society than against it. Understanding why a trend exists (or at least why a perceived trend is believed to exist) helps people reconsider the attitudes they encounter.

not only that, white collar crime a la Judge Rottenburg Center, Dr phil camps, wall st. is far more socially acceptable than being say, a crackhead.

Less prison time too!

probably doesnt even count as crime on the stats used..

that made me think of a crazy conspiracy theory.

on the 'doc' movie an inside job, it mentions wall st is into coke.

perhaps they are trolling by mentioning that..

How is she crazy, how is she directly linked to CRT as a whole in being a representation, and how does doing a speech inform one on the nature of the subject? Hasn't there been pushed by the Right to allow people like race realist Jordan Peterson to do speeches at colleges, a man who connects IQ to race?

And what is disturbing in this case to a history of the subject eugenics and autism? For instance, when exactly were these subjects relevant. Otherwise couldn't you point to any places of education and say that they had a history of teaching that gay people should be institutionalised?

It doesn't teaches that at all. I think you are talking about "Systematic Racism", and it teaches that the the system oppressors POCs. It might lead to a conclusion that the people likely to be part of the system might be likely of a certain ethnicity, but it doesn't say specifically that white people are all oppressors, which is a big difference.

For another example, imagine that we said that Nazis did horrible things to Jewish people, and that Nazis were most likely German, what we are not saying is that it was a German person in particular that did horrible things to Jewish people. You wouldn't point to a random 12 year old the Nazi era and say that they were hurting Jewish people. We are talking about systems of power that created those horrible things, with perhaps some criticism of people who might have taken part in the system when they should have realised that injustice was being done.

As a real example in relation to CRT, certain places that had a high population of Christian black people put rules into voting where they put the restricted times they could vote to exclude Sundays, where the churches could mobilise the people to be able to vote together at that time. And the examples of restricting these areas from allowing the handing out of refreshments to people who would have long lines to be able to vote, because they were purposefully given a shortage of places to vote.




And that is kind of a self fulfilling prophecy where you have a large population that has been disadvantaged by economic inequality, and receive less opportunities due to that fear. You automatically treat people like thugs, there is a good chance you will turn them into thugs. And this has been something that has continuously been pushed by the likes of racial profiling where police officers have that fear of black people, treat them poorly out of that fear, and perpetuates things like the distrust of the police force and crime.

Finding excuses for those fear and rationalising them, does nothing to fix the situations. Explaining the fears themselves as an end result of systematic racism, so that people can at least be aware of the inequalities, can go a way to bringing change and understanding.

While the principle of all that is absolutely right, isn't the problem starting from things like children may be being taught racism from their parents and other places. Or really just this a whole criticism to things like religion, where faith based education teaches people to think based on blind doctrine rather than with a critical eye. Religion is still taught in schools, that is one particular religion over others, where the bible is being given to kids as their operating system.

Kind of seems like a lot of people just assume that the way they think is the real one just based on logic and critical thinking, while other people are de facto being forced to think a certain way. Perhaps it is just an unfair assumption, but would a lot of type of people that had a problem with something like evolution in schools being taught because it doesn't fit with what the bible says, now be going against CRT?

You can take it to a much more immediate level that a preschooler could understand as well - ie. Joe looks like me, Jeff looks like me, Stacy's a girl but she looks 'like me' in other ways, Donnie doesn't look like me. We're the 'blankest' slate in nature but we're not blank, we come with coding for tribe at least in part because we had it for so long. It can go south in the ways children play, sometimes in the way they form groups and include / exclude, and it shows up in adult behavior when people are deciding who they want to live near or give jobs to. It's a wicked problem because it's highly unlikely that any amount of introspect will solve it, rather it's more a thing where everyone's going to feel and experience that discomfort, and where I'd disagree profoundly with Robin DiAngelo - what matters is, from the moment you feel that discomfort (social anxiety, not fully feeling you know all the rules, or whatever else), what it is you do next. To judge yourself on having felt that discomfort is silly because what you do next has a lot to do with whether that discomfort gets reinforced or whether you dim it to complete irrelevance.


On one hand, immediately off the top, I think the ontological status and value of a claim and it's fundamental verity holds ultimate importance. What would we do, for example, if the neo-nazis of the world rallied against climate change and using the Hitler youth teachings about environmentalism figured that being as militantly nazi as they could required being as militantly environmentalist as they could? Would everyone figure that global warming is a neo-nazi thing and chuck the science in the circular bin? I don't buy the 'Well the right would love if that were true' or 'Fundamentalist Christians would love it if that were true' objection.

So another pillar of 'whiteness' (link here to News Week on the Smithsonian guidelines), one that I strongly endorse because we simply won't have anything better to go on: epistemic sufficiency. If it falls flat and doesn't work - it doesn't work. If someone builds a bridge and collapses - they did something wrong. If they try to build a plane and can't put it in the air - then it's a failed attempt at an airplane until they fix what's aerodynamically wrong with it or increase the horsepower. Is there gray area for preferences on psychology and symbol? Sure but.... our problem comes down to something like this - in a free society people have choices to make but they also have to be held accountable for those choices, and if someone decided to rob another person it's a choice with a consequence. If a person decides to start a Ponzi scheme, bank-rolls, and flees town with people's retirement savings - it's a choice with a consequence. It's the same thing that certain people can't leave other people alone and need to bend the world to their will, their beliefs, their ways of seeing things, and one of the best ways to identify those people is that they want to overshoot truth, logic, reason, etc. and do something 'special' with it. People are seeking power for its own sake all the time and a big part of that plays on people's decency and desire not to assume the worst of others.


I really think the best start to the future would be us canning the drug war, actually putting in the history books and teaching it as a war on both the poor and ethnic minorities, and that it was one of the last strong vestiges of old fashion racism that we held onto even into the 21st century. I'd also really love to see strategies in place both within the black community and from outside of it to improve opportunities and get more sharp minds where they belong.

The goal of understanding the history on this, if we have any desirable end goals, is to rectify the problems I'd assume. To the degree that there might be anyone who lives on complaint, gas-lighting, etc. who'll really miss those problems when they're gone or that if those problems are gone it would show their nakedness - people like that are a problem to anyone of any race who wants a better world for themselves, their neighbors, their children, etc.. and we have to get better at identifying them when we see them on the political stage. They might get more covert but that's fine because they're also that much more restrained and I have to hope that the blurry line of feigned incompetence, really on any side of political activity of any race, gender, political leaning, etc. stops being acceptable and that it gets harder to make power grabs through feigned incompetence. I also really hope we'll see a day where what's called the soft bigotry of low expectations can go a way as well, and part of that is actually fixing the historical problems.

This is exactly what the CRT is in a nutshell. And teaching it only causes more division and doesn't unite like it's proponents want to claim it does. America is not at least any more systemically racist than any other countries in the history of man. The real question should be why people are defending it as being legitimate.