Critical race theory (2 Viewers)

[DaveXA]

Frankly, I'm completely ignorant when it comes to the Critical Race Theory curriculum. What is it, where does it come from, and is it legitimate? Has anyone here read it and maybe give a quick summary?

If this has been covered in another thread, then I missed it.

 

[Paul]

I prefer that term to SJW, which, in my experience, is used in a derogatory manner. If it helps, substitute the latter for the former.

I agree, SJW has become pejorative.

 

[MT15]

So here are some tenets of CRT, which I found on this site:

A Lesson on Critical Race Theory

Coined by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, Critical Race Theory is the practice of interrogating race and racism in society that emerged in the legal academy and spread to other fields of scholarship.

www.americanbar.org

“While recognizing the evolving and malleable nature of CRT, scholar Khiara Bridges outlines a few key tenets of CRT, including:

• Recognition that race is not biologically real but is socially constructed and socially significant. It recognizes that science (as demonstrated in the Human Genome Project) refutes the idea of biological racial differences. According to scholars Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, race is the product of social thought and is not connected to biological reality.
• Acknowledgement that racism is a normal feature of society and is embedded within systems and institutions, like the legal system, that replicate racial inequality. This dismisses the idea that racist incidents are aberrations but instead are manifestations of structural and systemic racism.
• Rejection of popular understandings about racism, such as arguments that confine racism to a few “bad apples.” CRT recognizes that racism is codified in law, embedded in structures, and woven into public policy. CRT rejects claims of meritocracy or “colorblindness.” CRT recognizes that it is the systemic nature of racism that bears primary responsibility for reproducing racial inequality.
• Recognition of the relevance of people’s everyday lives to scholarship. This includes embracing the lived experiences of people of color, including those preserved through storytelling, and rejecting deficit-informed research that excludes the epistemologies of people of color.”

So, short version, in my own words. So any errors I own:

1. race isn’t biologically valid, but is a social construct.
2. our societal systems are set up to recognize race and treat the races differently.
3. racism isn’t confined to racist acts, like graffiti, but has been codified into law - most famous example is the differences in legal punishment for cocaine powder (a white person’s drug) and crack (POC drug) even though they are the same chemical compound.
4. we should try to include the experiences of POC when we tell the stories of a place and/or time.

As you can see, this really isn’t being “taught” in primary schools as much as it’s being used by teachers to make them more aware of how the way things are taught can be dismissive of the actual history of a place and time. As with any theory, it’s not a finished product, but will be debated by scholars in the field for a long time.

So. Farb and Paul, I would like to hear your objections to these tenets.

 

[samiam5211]

I prefer that term to SJW, which, in my experience, is used in a derogatory manner. If it helps, substitute the latter for the former.

Yea, or we can just say yea, i'm a SJW, you got a problem with it.

 

[CoolBrees]

The idea that being called a warrior for social justice is something bad says more about the person saying it imo.

 

[Optimus Prime]

The idea that being called a warrior for social justice is something bad says more about the person saying it imo.

I think taking a term away and turning it into a negative is something the right does very well. Social justice is one.

Woke is another - when I first became aware of the term people would proudly claim to be 'woke'

It's probably literally been years since I've heard the word used as anything other than a putdown

That said, I think the left also has a tendency to run amok and take things way too far giving the right plenty of fodder to mock

Political Correctness and PC have nothing but bad connotations now but I don't think that's always been the case

When I first heard the term (late 80s/early 90s) I took political correctness to mean:

Maybe we shouldn't call mentally and physically challenged people retards and cripples anymore (especially to their face)

If Asians don't like to be referred to as Oriental maybe we should respect their wishes and stop calling them that

Now PC is calling manholes peopleholes, master bedrooms the big bedroom and speed bumps become traffic calming islands

 

[MT15]

Lol, I’ve never heard any of those three examples, Optimus. They’re funny.

 

[SaintForLife]

I prefer that term to SJW, which, in my experience, is used in a derogatory manner. If it helps, substitute the latter for the former.

Do you always get easily offended by things people say?

Should you stop saying white privilege if some people consider it to be derogatory?

 

[SaintForLife]

If you can really explain what Critical Race Theory is, in your own words, and then explain how this theory would actually be taught in an elementary school setting, then we could have a conversation. The word as it’s being used today, by all sorts of people, is absolutely meaningless.

That is one of the silliest message board deflection tactics I have ever seen. The schools have documents acknowledging their teaching of CRT and future support of CRT, but you will ignore that until I follow your rules and define it myself?

 

[MT15]

No, I took the time to look it up and educate myself because I didn’t have a super great idea about what it was either. I feel pretty safe to say that CRT isn’t being taught in primary grades and not all that likely it’s being taught in high school either. Do some teachers study it? Yeah, I imagine they do. Is it all about what your type of people say it is about? No, I don’t think so.

 

[Farb]

• Recognition of the relevance of people’s everyday lives to scholarship. This includes embracing the lived experiences of people of color, including those preserved through storytelling, and rejecting deficit-informed research that excludes the epistemologies of people of color.”

I have no idea what that means. Can someone explain this one to me?

 

[MT15]

I have no idea what that means. Can someone explain this one to me?

I gave it my best try in the post: read a little further down.

 

[Farb]

I gave it my best try in the post: read a little further down.

Got it. Had to look up a few buzz words. It is basically saying your personal decisions are not your fault but something else. Disregard all forms of self accountability.

 

[Lapaz]

So here are some tenets of CRT, which I found on this site:

A Lesson on Critical Race Theory

Coined by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, Critical Race Theory is the practice of interrogating race and racism in society that emerged in the legal academy and spread to other fields of scholarship.

www.americanbar.org

“While recognizing the evolving and malleable nature of CRT, scholar Khiara Bridges outlines a few key tenets of CRT, including:

• Recognition that race is not biologically real but is socially constructed and socially significant. It recognizes that science (as demonstrated in the Human Genome Project) refutes the idea of biological racial differences. According to scholars Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, race is the product of social thought and is not connected to biological reality.
• Acknowledgement that racism is a normal feature of society and is embedded within systems and institutions, like the legal system, that replicate racial inequality. This dismisses the idea that racist incidents are aberrations but instead are manifestations of structural and systemic racism.
• Rejection of popular understandings about racism, such as arguments that confine racism to a few “bad apples.” CRT recognizes that racism is codified in law, embedded in structures, and woven into public policy. CRT rejects claims of meritocracy or “colorblindness.” CRT recognizes that it is the systemic nature of racism that bears primary responsibility for reproducing racial inequality.
• Recognition of the relevance of people’s everyday lives to scholarship. This includes embracing the lived experiences of people of color, including those preserved through storytelling, and rejecting deficit-informed research that excludes the epistemologies of people of color.”

So, short version, in my own words. So any errors I own:

1. race isn’t biologically valid, but is a social construct.
2. our societal systems are set up to recognize race and treat the races differently.
3. racism isn’t confined to racist acts, like graffiti, but has been codified into law - most famous example is the differences in legal punishment for cocaine powder (a white person’s drug) and crack (POC drug) even though they are the same chemical compound.
4. we should try to include the experiences of POC when we tell the stories of a place and/or time.

As you can see, this really isn’t being “taught” in primary schools as much as it’s being used by teachers to make them more aware of how the way things are taught can be dismissive of the actual history of a place and time. As with any theory, it’s not a finished product, but will be debated by scholars in the field for a long time.

So. Farb and Paul, I would like to hear your objections to these tenets.

This is a good summary of CRT, and I have objections to the first 3 tenets, but the last is a good tenet to which I have no objections.

1) "Recognition that race is not biologically real but is socially constructed and socially significant. It recognizes that science (as demonstrated in the Human Genome Project) refutes the idea of biological racial differences. According to scholars Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, race is the product of social thought and is not connected to biological reality."

I think race is biological, not just a social construct. Race refers to a subspecies, and a subspecies is a group within a species that has morphological differences, which can be nothing more than color. It is very apparent that Asians, Africans, Australian Aborigines, and Europeans have morphological differences, and the differences are not limited to color. There has obviously been a lot of mixing, so many people don't fit into any of the main race classifications, but that doesn't make the race classifications invalid.

2) "Acknowledgement that racism is a normal feature of society and is embedded within systems and institutions, like the legal system, that replicate racial inequality. This dismisses the idea that racist incidents are aberrations but instead are manifestations of structural and systemic racism."

Racism exists in every society, but I reject that it is embedded in a manner that replicates racial inequality. There are some laws that hurt some races more than others, but there are other laws that offset those laws. I think we always want to point to simple answers, and want to blame racism for racial inequality, but the reasons are much more complicated.

3) "Rejection of popular understandings about racism, such as arguments that confine racism to a few “bad apples.” CRT recognizes that racism is codified in law, embedded in structures, and woven into public policy. CRT rejects claims of meritocracy or “colorblindness.” CRT recognizes that it is the systemic nature of racism that bears primary responsibility for reproducing racial inequality."

Again, it is simplistic to point to racism as the cause for racial inequality. I think we've gotten away from meritocracy, and are certainly not colorblind, but the tendency is to help people of color more to try to help achieve racial equality, whereas CRT teaches that we do more to help white people. I think CRT is teaching what society was like in the past, but doesn't recognize the realities of today, which tends to help people of color more than white people.

 

[RobF]

Got it. Had to look up a few buzz words. It is basically saying your personal decisions are not your fault but something else. Disregard all forms of self accountability.

No, that's completely wrong.

@MT15's "we should try to include the experiences of POC when we tell the stories of a place and/or time." is essentially it, but I think there's a bit more. To break it down:

• Recognition of the relevance of people’s everyday lives to scholarship.

Pretty self-explanatory, it's essentially countering an 'ivory tower' approach, i.e. scholarship can't be performed through simply looking down on the masses, it has to take in the perspectives available from the masses.

• This includes embracing the lived experiences of people of color, including those preserved through storytelling

Also pretty self-explanatory, just filling in what the first part means in practice a bit.

• and rejecting deficit-informed research that excludes the epistemologies of people of color.”

And this part is a bit more abstract, but 'deficit-informed research', I believe, refers to research that's based on the notion that a group is inherently deficient in some way, e.g. lacking in mental capacity, or culturally lazy, so this section is saying that such research that also excludes the reality of those groups should be rejected.

Which it should, by the way, any research is inherently lacking if it simply ignores crucial relevant information. E.g. saying a group is 'culturally lazy' from a purely external point of view is inherently lacking.

So it's fundamentally as @MT15 said, just a bit more going on behind the "listen to people" aspect.

 

[MT15]

Got it. Had to look up a few buzz words. It is basically saying your personal decisions are not your fault but something else. Disregard all forms of self accountability.

Lol, that’s not what I got at all.

 

[cuddlemonkey]

Do you always get easily offended by things people say?

Should you stop saying white privilege if some people consider it to be derogatory?

I never said I was offended. Do you always jump to incorrect conclusions?

 

[Paul]

The idea that being called a warrior for social justice is something bad says more about the person saying it imo.

100% agree. That is true most of the time. The idea is to turn a noble word like warrior and to make it sound bad.

 

[MT15]

Lapaz, it’s been a long time since my biology undergrad, but i didn’t think that human races differ enough to be considered sub-species, so I looked it up:

Can humans be split into races? | Ask A Biologist

Do different "races" exist?In terms of biology, no. In biology, we’re actually finding that what we used to call “races” aren’t different enough to have as separate groups. In other animal species, we sometimes notice differences in appearance that allow us to group them… usually into...

askabiologist.asu.edu

“Are different races subspecies?
No! Races are not subspecies of the human species. There is only one “race”—the human race. So why can’t we sort humans into subspecies like we can with other animals? The answer is that the human species doesn’t have much genetic variation. We are too alike to split into groups.”

The article goes on to say the genetic differences between any two human beings are less than the genetic differences between two members of a lot of other species and way less than the differences between animal sub-species. Biologists used to use sub-species as a description but haven’t since the genetic material were found to be so similar.