Epiphanies 2021: Critical Race Theory
I'm surprised there is no thread on this. I did do a search before starting this with no result. It is a complex issue, with quite a distance between what we might call academic CRT (Derrick Bell, Richard Delgado et al) and what is taken by many to represent it, typically expressions from Black Lives Matter activists, and second hand opinions. It also has many aspects specific to the USA, which a lot of concentration on actual US legislation, and the US Constitution.
So let me state what I take to be the basic themes, as taken from D. A. Horton who is a fully paid up evo Southern Baptist Minister and Theologian who takes CRT seriously as part of his work.
1. Race is man made and it created privilege for "whites", which may include US imigrants who are not obviously ghostly white (Italians e.g.). Horton is a latino.
2. Racism is permanent.
3. Counter-stories of the marginalised are needed.
4. Being colourblind is not being truthful.
5. Racial progress is (only) made when white people benefit.
I make no comment to keep this short in case I get told that this belongs on another thread. However, whilst I think some opposition to CRT is uninformed (sometimes deliberately misleading) I am not convinced by it. So unless there is someone on the Ship, preferably more than one, who is prepared to go into bat for CRT, this thread perhaps should be strangled at birth.
So let me state what I take to be the basic themes, as taken from D. A. Horton who is a fully paid up evo Southern Baptist Minister and Theologian who takes CRT seriously as part of his work.
1. Race is man made and it created privilege for "whites", which may include US imigrants who are not obviously ghostly white (Italians e.g.). Horton is a latino.
2. Racism is permanent.
3. Counter-stories of the marginalised are needed.
4. Being colourblind is not being truthful.
5. Racial progress is (only) made when white people benefit.
I make no comment to keep this short in case I get told that this belongs on another thread. However, whilst I think some opposition to CRT is uninformed (sometimes deliberately misleading) I am not convinced by it. So unless there is someone on the Ship, preferably more than one, who is prepared to go into bat for CRT, this thread perhaps should be strangled at birth.
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For philosophy a common go to place is the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy which, unfortunately does not yet have an article on Critical Race Theory though some bits of other articles do discuss it. Probably Critical Philosophy of Race has the most https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/critical-phil-race/
There is also The New Yorker article "The Man Behind Critical Race Theory" by Jelani Cobb 13 September 2021
Why not?
I don't know that I'm well enough informed* to "go to bat" for CRT, but the summary in the Wikipedia article is pretty convincing to me. It probably helps that I had some exposure to critical theory in grad school years ago.
Let's take one statement from Wikipedia: "CRT scholars view race and white supremacy as an intersectional social construct that advances the interests of white people at the expense of persons of other races."
It's the "intersectional social construct" part that serious** critics object to -- reality isn't socially constructed, they say (again, Wikipedia -- I don't mean to imply I've read extensively on this; I do remember the arguments raised against critical theory when I was in school, and they fit with this objection to CRT). While I could barely wrap my mind around this idea when I was young, the longer I live the more sure I am that while the stone Samuel Johnson kicked was not socially constructed, it's the story about him kicking the stone that's the important thing at this point. There are obviously real consequences to racism -- it warps all our lives, it kills the people who suffer the most from it -- but it lasts beyond the immediate horrible consequences of one day's racism because it isn't just the product of some finite number of white people alive today who are propagating it; it's built into the structures of our society.
First you have to get the idea that social constructs exist and are important -- so look at the legal system, as it was legal scholars who first developed CRT. Any legal system is a social construct, and liberals (in the classic sense of that word) would like to think ours is neutral, but as soon as you look at how race intersects with how things play out in the legal system, it's very clear that the system is far from neutral.
*At the top of my to-read list, when I find the strength to pry myself away from fiction, are works by Kimberlé Crenshaw.
**As opposed to the kneejerk critics on the right attempting to paint CRT as unAmerican because they'd have to admit their own racism if they took CRT seriously.
And the laws being currently drafted in parts of the US are very much in this vein of using CRT as a bogeyman to push through legislation that would make it harder to discuss racism both as a present and a historical reality.
Most of us reading CRT in depth begin with the work of Frantz Fanon who wrote out of the Caribbean history of slavery and his early life on French Martinique. He would later align himself with the Algerian war of liberation and study colonialism in Africa. The key work on identity was his Black Skin, White Masks and Fanon's insight that white supremacist thinking creates Black subjects with a split self, internalised social and racial inferiority, forced to live as non-beings because they cannot reach equality or full selfhood in a world of whiteness (so you have the term 'non-white' still used, a negative marker for an identity based on lack, as when the term 'men' was used to include women as if women were just non-men).
In the UK, much of the pioneering work on CRT was done by Stuart Hall, born in the Caribbean, who would focus on the Windrush generation and the Black diaspora in Britain. By the late '70s Hall had written Policing the Crisis, looking at how crime statistics were misused to justify police violence against Black communities, and helped produce It Ain't Half-Racist Mum, a media study of racial stereotypes and white British attitudes to immigration. The current writing and academic work developing CRT and anti-racism activism remains indebted to Hall.
CRT in the US is a very different story. There's a long and powerful history of Black people writing and protesting against slavery (Frederick Johnsson, Phyllis Wheatley), racial segregation in the South, recording suppressed histories of the Underground Railroad, the Great Migration and the Harlem Renaissance. Central tenets of CRT emerged from the work of Black thinkers and artists like WEB DuBois, James Baldwin, Martin Luther King, Toni Morrison and Claudia Rankine. I find it crucial to keep this long history in mind because one tactic used by white rightwing critics of CRT is to treat it as a new deracinated theory, something that has just come up out of nowhere. As @Ruth pointed out above, intersectionality is core to give a fuller and more accurate account of overlapping or colliding forms of privilege or oppression.
The big question for someone like myself is not how we can grasp and name the concrete, specific and appalling history of racism in the past by looking at systemic apartheid in South Africa or the Atlantic slave trade, but how and why racism is still perpetuated today in so many tropes and misrepresentations, in the absence of Black voices or Black presence in public forums or workplaces, and how it is best countered. One disturbing aspect of the critiques emerging of CRT is that once again Black people are being asked to explain or justify CRT to white men who have no interest in interrogating their own racial privilege.
Critique of liberalism: Critical race theory scholars question foundational liberal concepts such as Enlightenment rationalism, legal equality and constitutional neutrality ... - I think this is simply saying that not everything can be fixed by legislation. If so, I agree with this - for lots of bad things (not just identity-based ones) I don't think 'there ought to be a law against it!' is the solution (or at least, not the entire solution).
Storytelling, counter-storytelling, and "naming one's own reality": The use of narrative (storytelling) to illuminate and explore lived experiences of racial oppression. -- This seems neither controversial nor new. Storytelling has always been used to highlight injustice - it's why we have Charles Dickens and Emile Zola. However, this does seem to be in direct contradiction with the point a bit further down:
Empathetic fallacy: Believing that one can change a narrative by offering an alternative narrative in hopes that the listener's empathy will quickly and reliably take over. -- The power of storytelling is that it encourages empathy. If empathy isn't available or is ineffective then I'm not sure why storytelling was promoted as a solution in the earlier bullet point.
Revisionist interpretations of American civil rights law and progress - I don't have the historical knowledge to make any comment about this.
Intersectional theory -- I guess most people would agree that reducing any individual to a single aspect of their identity is a bad thing and leads to simplistic solutions. (Actually, a lot of moderate right-wing critique of CRT seems to be just describing intersectionality under another name - which makes me wonder how far people are agreeing with each other at the top of their voices.)
Standpoint epistemology: The view that a member of a minority has an authority and ability to speak about racism that members of other racial groups do not have -- This seems reasonable until you have different members of that minority saying different things; at that point ISTM you are back where you started. Do I have a right, as a white person, to say whether Tony Sewell or Kemi Badenoch's views on CRT are more or less authoritative than those of Stuart Hall?
Essentialism vs. anti-essentialism: [...] It is a question of how groups can be essentialized or are unable to be essentialized. -- This seems the sort of unanswerable question where the answer you get out is determined by the axioms you feed in.
Structural determinism: Exploration of how "the structure of legal thought or culture influences its content", whereby a particular mode of thought or widely shared practice determines significant social outcomes, usually occurring without conscious knowledge. -- I think I agree with whichever contributor added an [example needed] tag. I can see (for example) that the use of 'adversarial' over 'inquisitorial' trials favours some personality types over others - but on the other hand ISTM that's why we employ lawyers rather than relying on our own personalities to fight legal cases.
Non-white cultural nationalism/separatism: The exploration of more radical views that argue for separation and reparations as a form of foreign aid (including black nationalism) -- 'Exploration' is an almost meaningless word. It reminds me of undergraduate essays where I couldn't decide what my conclusion was.
https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/publications/human_rights_magazine_home/civil-rights-reimagining-policing/a-lesson-on-critical-race-theory/
Much of the moderate critique I've seen tends to focus on ends - and what weight should be put on weight vs class, the right wing critique of Lindsay, Rufo and others seems mostly disingenuous (and openly so https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FBgqpbxVcAcsNQm?format=jpg&name=large )
The coded bits in the RSE* advice (link to Government site are:
* Relationships and sex education (RSE) and health education
It's a catch all that can then be selectively enforced.
However, it has struck me before, repeatedly over a number of years, that whenever one probes the arguments of anyone who makes a great thing about arguing that things like 'Enlightenment rationalism, legal equality and constitutional neutrality' are somehow oppressive, what they turn out to be saying is that they should be entitled to bias everything in their own favour. They just hope you wi somehow not notice. So one tool to help them do this is then to maintain that the cautious critique any hearer should apply to any new argument somehow predisposes the hearer to reject it - but not to worry because we've produced rhetoric phrased in the form of intellectual argument as to why you should feel obliged to abandon your critical faculties in our favour.
But then, I suspect that a Critical Race Theorist will take my caution as proving his or her case.
It is rather like a situation I encountered some years ago where a business seeking a loan argued that the organisation they wanted to borrow from was being unfair in expecting their books to balance. The lender just did not understand that the business structure they were operating under meant conventional addition and subtraction didn't apply to them!
The background at the time was the appointment of Munira Mirza as the Government Race Inequality adviser (link to Guardian profile) and the lauding of Katharine Birbalsingh at various Conservative events. She is now the social mobility chief (link to Guardian coverage) who was quoted as saying:
As someone who has always worked with those excluded from schools, the no excuses behaviour policies as promoted and lauded by Birbalsingh have excluded more of those kids who cannot fit in and making it harder for those with difficulties to get support. It may work for some youngsters, but it really isn't universally applicable.
1. The fetishisation of free-speech to the extent where even the most openly hostile verbal and acted-out aggressions against a minority group are protected should be overturned. I believe Richard Delgado is focussed in on this. To me the argument that the solution to hate speech is more speech ignores the much greater difficulty that any minority group faces in getting it's message across.
2. Racial progress is only made when white people benefit. OK broadly I think this makes sense. It is just a fact that there is a dominant grouping, and establishment. When attempting change where you are not in the dominant position you're virtually always going to have to go for a win-win situation and that's just tough.
My main problems.
First I don't want to believe that you cannot get to an acceptable, even if imperfect, settlement though the use of peaceful legal channels, and given the progress made to date, I think it regrettable that Bell is saying that this is a road to nowhere. I don't think I'm mis-characterising him here. He spent much of his life as a civil rights lawyer and became very disillusioned with how far black Americans can get using this strategy. But then what is the alternative?
Second, though they admit, even emphasize, that race is a social construct, based on no decently argued objective reality, they seem wedded to it, and even to an obsession with colour. I just don't get why they do not critique the concept of race and seek for some understanding of inter-group hostility that makes sense. It's as if latinos, Jews, Moslems have no place in there thinking. Are some of these white?? You can end up in the stupidity of apartheid S. Africa trying to decide who is white and who is black.
Last for now I have misgivings about basing far-reaching political programmes largely on narratives. In the case of Derrick Bell, these famously are made up stories, with his two best known books being effectively books of imaginative fables. Now it is important to hear people's lived experience, and I so not in anyway underestimate this. In social studies, qualitative studies are valid, although most people are happier with quantitative studies. But it is concerning to me that the person most often cited as the originator of CRT "argues" his case through fiction.
That's enough for now. This cannot easily be discussed in short posts.
The origins of CRT in the legal sphere (and the context for what you quoted) was the observation that racial disparities in legal outcomes persisted even after formal equality legislation was on the statute books. So it’s primarily the examination of why negative bias persists.
Thanks, that's definitely better than Wikipedia.
My suspicion is that CRT is a double-edged sword, at least in terms of practical application. Looking at the American Bar Association's bullet-points:
Recognition that race is not biologically real but is socially constructed and socially significant. - Agreed.
Acknowledgement that racism is a normal feature of society -- I'm a bit nervous of the word 'normal' -- ISTM that the more racism is presented as something inevitable, the closer we are to the British National Party view that racism is a natural response to People Who Are Not Like Us and therefore racial integration is impossible. ISTM that if the message is that racism is all-pervasive, it also needs to be that racism is a parasite that can be eradicated.
Rejection of popular understandings about racism, such as arguments that confine racism to a few “bad apples.” [...] CRT recognizes that it is the systemic nature of racism that bears primary responsibility for reproducing racial inequality. -- Yes and no, and this is where I see CRT as a double-edged sword -- racism is systemic, but systems are set up by individuals. Some specific school administrators are making rules about pupils' hairstyles, some specific members of education boards are deciding how to allocate funding.
I think the language of 'systemic' diverts attention from the responsibility of individual moral actors, by shoving it all onto an amorphous and unaccountable 'the system'.
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. -- First a snark: anyone who uses a phrase like 'deficit-informed research that excludes the epistemologies' does not sound like they are interested in the relevance of scholarship to people's everyday lives.
Translated into plain English, I think this means: 'Researchers should acknowledge that people of colour decide what is true or false according to different criteria from white people', which itself sounds pretty racist, but I don't know how else to interpret it.
So in ordinary English saying 'the law is racist' means that the body of written legislation contains clauses that explicitly discriminate against people with particular characteristics or ancestry.
In the jargon what I think it means is that the legal organisations taken as a whole, including legislature, courts, and police, by acting as if the society is racially neutral when the society already shows the effects of racial discrimination or by acting as if each instance of racial discrimination is sui generis and does not interact with other instances, impact(*) that racial discrimination.
That writers in the social sciences talk about general phenomena rather than specific instances also tends when communicating with non-academic settings to result in prose full of abstractions with relatively few concrete illustrations.
(*) Press into, fix firmly into, crush together, pack in.
Pedantry aside, the feminist arguments for using inclusive language are well-enough known that I shouldn't have to go over them again.
Well "intersectional" is an overused word, but apart from that, even blood-and-fire critics like Strachan accept that race is a social construct, as do I, which is why I wish CRTers would stop making race and colour front and centre in their thinking. Clearly there are groupings of people, often complex and overlapping, and often the source of rivalry and dominance. I do not see any value in attaching the problem of oppression to race, whatever than means. Agreed and I know of no serious disagreement with that. And I also think it is common ground that criticism of the constructs of any society is needed. I have been looking a lot at the UK legal system and many aspects of it are appalling.
So up to now there is nothing you have said that I would not agree with.
Thanks for the ABA link @chrisstiles, it gets to the heart of what at at stake and the pressing need to challenge discriminatory systems and structures: "For civil rights lawyers, this necessitates an examination of the legal system and the ways it reproduces racial injustice."
The social construct of race has been fucking over millions of people for hundreds of years - you can not either analyse or address that, by refusing to look at it.
If you want to work out where past and present oppression has had effects that need to be remedied you need to identify the basis on which the oppressors worked and thought even if you think the oppressors' decisions were based on nonsense.
Generally your post is extremely well expressed and contains very little, if anything, that I could take issue with. And maybe now I should be on the Intersectionality thread but I really do not understand why you think: It's not that I think intersectionality is wrong in any way but I don't think it is a particularly useful tools. So take the intersection of ethnicity and religion in the case of the Uyghurs. I don't deny it but can't quite get why some think it important. Yes it works in the classic case of the black women refused employment where the firm defended itself by pointing to numbers of black and women employees, so obviously if discrimination has to be proved by law and being on the basis of race or sex, so that a case brought on the basis of the joint aspect would be ruled out, then that has to be changed. And maybe that's all you mean but you seem to be making it into a more universal issue somehow. True and part of the situation where the power resides in one interest group. Which is pretty universal.
And it is easy to see how this is very frustrating, and maybe Derrick Bell gave up on the "work within the system to change the system" because he found it demeaning as well as frustrating. But what's the alternative? Arm and fight?
Plus I can't really agree that this is the only role. How about persuading those who are not in power. Within a democracy that can be powerful. Why did Trump get so much of the black vote? Why any? Isn't there work to be done? Take Brexit. I totally disapprove but I can recognise an effective campaign when I see one even if I wish it didn't exist.
I know how much some dislike anyone saying that the oppressed have to do more. It's hard and maybe they have to be heroes. Which is unfair, like life, but sometimes the only way to get change.
Have you reflected on what it might mean that you get to talk about "them" and what "they" should do ?
I guess it depends on whether we are preventing future injustices or fixing present injustices. E.g. once the president has been shot, the medical treatment is the same regardless of the attacker's motives.
So, taking the example of Black schools crawling with vermin because of inequitable funding systems - if the issue is presented as 'This school is full of rats, and that is a bad thing', then that's very hard for the school board to argue with, and it also invites an immediate fix to the problem, i.e., reforming the funding system so that there aren't any schools in the district that are full of rats. If the issue is presented as 'The school board is full of racists, conscious or otherwise', then this is harder to prove and invites challenges like 'Hey, yes, it sucks, but it's not racist!' which may be philosophically interesting but which don't actually get the problem of the rats sorted.
Sure, but the school board probably can't do anything about segregation in US neighbourhoods, whereas they can fix the rats and the funding. And I agree that we shouldn't focus on reactive solutions but if the injustice has already happened, then some part of our response is necessarily reactive.
To clarify / backtrack - I'm not suggesting CRT is wrong or inapplicable, just that it can be a double-edged sword depending on what we are seeking to achieve.
I believe the sense in which it is meant is that racism isn't an exceptional feature in terms of the experience of the average African American, 'is' in this case not being 'ought'
I think what this acknowledges is that racism isn't simply a question of a few people saying 'the word' or doing something particularly racist, but that often the embodiment of racism within institutions is accompanied by diffusion of responsibility. Take the continued plight of the Windrush generation. This is - at best - going to be the subject of an inquiry after all the current participants are retired, and it'll come to the conclusion that no one was at fault, everyone had plausible deniability and that nevertheless the outcome demonstrated institutional racism at the Home Office.
Anybody gets to use the pronouns "they" and "them". If I used "them" of the old, in a way that implied I was not included, that would be misleading. Saying "they have to be heroes" because they have had the odds stacked against them seems to be a reasonable comment. Should I have said "we"? But the system isn't stacked against me.
I don't get your analogy, as it also uses a rather vague term. Maybe you like vague terms. Talking about crimes against elected public officials would at least be specific, and it may be worthwhile making that a separate crime, in the way murder of police officers was in the UK. I'd have to think about that. Vagueness is not the same as nonsense. No doubt, in those days, race was the main idea, since the major target groups were different in terms of appearance and custom (Native Americans, African Slaves). But we have moved on and it would help to make terminology more precise. In fact, Identity Politics, probably even more derided that CRT, gets closer ISTM, since any group with a distinct Identity can be the object of aggression and oppression.
So maybe you could hazard the definition: Race is an identity group clearly distinguished by appearance, and thereby easily marginalised. Not brilliant though. Would you instantly recognise Stephen Fry as Jewish? Or Keith Jarrett as Black (in which case you would be wrong).
Most social constructs are designed to oppress and exploit the group on the end of them. As well as reinforcing the status quo.
I can't comment from lived experience of racism, so I'll offer a lived example of my own. Many women have been denied treatment for pregnancy-related injuries and these aren't included in most private health policies. Even something like incontinence, which isn't always related to birth, is excluded. But in men's health, an issue like this is covered in oncology.
The problem with many of these discussions is that the loudest voices aren't usually ones from groups directly impacted by the social construct.
The only way we - and it is we, not they - are going to get change is to accept the issues identified within CRT exist. Then think about how to bring about change. Which means educating ourselves, asking about and listening to people's lived experience and acknowledging our own shortcomings / blind-spots etc. And doing something .... The oppressed, frankly, have done their bit. It's time for the oppressors * to do theirs.
* Given the make-up of this board is predominately white, middle-class and western, that means us lot.
You're obviously not familiar with some of the controversies around the way school district boundaries are often drawn in the U.S.
Of course it is possible to be Polish and Black and Romanian and Black - which is a facet of intersectionality.
The common fundamental unconscious assumption that British and European people are white, is part of why people of various different heritages - who have lived in any given European country all their lives - are also subject to xenophobia.
I think historically you'd find that a hard position to sustain, @Doublethink alludes to the fact that 'whiteness' is often taken to be the default, but how at the same time the boundaries of whiteness is a moving signifier over time.
After all, it's not too long ago that there were signs saying "No blacks, no Irish" in the UK (which itself goes some way to explain the very different relationship the Black and Irish communities had on each side of the Atlantic), and the position of Jewish people, and when they were seen as part of the mainstream differed on either side of the Atlantic.
WRT CRT itself, as a legal theory in the US; many of it's primary proponents are African-American, and so obviously they would obviously feel most qualified to speak about the experiences of their own community, though some of the references @MaryLouise mentions speak to the same topic earlier and coming from a slightly different standpoint ('political blackness' was stronger in the UK than the US for instance).
There's a longer form examination of Chris Rufo over at New Yorker. They credit him with more or less single handedly inventing the controversy over critical race theory by using it as disingenuous boogeyman for white racial anxiety.
In other words, take an academic phrase with a very specific meaning about how concepts of race influence the American legal system and turn it into a catch-all for any discussion of race that makes white folks uncomfortable.
In other news Pro Publica did one of their long-form investigations about concepts of race influencing the American legal system in their story Black Children Were Jailed for a Crime That Doesn’t Exist. The tl;dr version is an out of control juvenile legal system in Rutherford County, Tennessee that seems to be arresting black children, in some cases dragging them out of elementary schools in handcuffs, and then trying to figure out a crime on which they could be held.
Why am I mentioning this and what does it have to do with "critical race theory"? Because under Tennessee's new critical race theory law it would be illegal to discuss this article or anything it describes in any public school in Tennessee. That's the way a scary (to white people) sounding method of legal analysis usually discussed by second year law students is used to shut down any discussions that touch even remotely on race. I'd point out the irony of the people backing these laws banning critical race theory also being the most likely to complain about "cancel culture", except dishonesty isn't the same thing as irony.
Every time I think I have an handle on just how fucked up the "justice" system is in parts of the US along comes an article like this to prove that no, really, this hole has no bottom.
That's depressingly likely to be true, but ISTM an example of 'systemic' being allowed to cloak individual responsibility. Identifiable senior officials must have known what was going on, or at least turned a blind eye, long before the scandal hit the public consciousness; it's iniquitous that they should get off scotfree because the 'system' was to blame.
(I don't have any inside information on the Home Office but it's not credible that no-one accountable knew.)
'Something' should be something effective, in which case it's reasonable to ask if CRT is the most effective tool for the job. For most of us, the only 'something' we can really do is speak out about it. In which case, if there's a clear inequity, will an accusation of racism shock people into doing something about it, or will it just bring down the defensive shutters and hairsplitting 'Yes but technically it's not racism, because ...'?
That's a fair comment - I'm not.
True but I'm not sure what you are saying - do you mean 'ethnicity' and 'race' are indeed separate categories but some Polish people in the UK are subject to CRT by virtue of being Black, or are you just reminding me as an aside that Polish and Black are not mutually exclusive?
I'm not sure ignoring racism will produce any better results from those who implement racist policies. Take, for example, North Carolina's racial gerrymandering and vote suppression system. Despite targeting the state's black residents for disenfranchisement "with almost surgical precision" (to quote a federal judge who ruled on the matter), the North Carolina legislature argued that they were trying to disenfranchise the state's Democratic voters, who just happened to be predominantly black so that "technically it's not racism, because ... " Quite honestly I don't think there's anything really to be gained by not calling out people who enact racist policies. Sure, they're going to claim to have some bullshit reason for whatever self-interested thing they're doing but they'll have some disingenuous excuse no matter how gently you broach the subject.
There are, of course, places in the US where busing has been used to achieve similar racial distributions in all a city's schools. Busing has disadvantages, of course - more travel time for kids, and it's harder to hang out with your school friends socially if they don't live near you, but it also has some advantages.
In my own boring suburb, there are huge fights about which areas get allocated to which schools, and that's mostly socioeconomic, although race might contribute as well: it's mostly the McMansion dwellers not wanting to share a school with the apartment complexes.
I suspect a large part of the problem is people enforcing rules uniformly in an environment in which the previous actions of the same organisation destroyed the records that those rules depend on. So what do you do ? Changing that could be seen as "saying .. that (those affected) should be entitled to bias everything in their own favour".
Another example, what's an equitable solution for second order effects of past racist policies like this one:
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/racist-housing-policies-created-some-oppressively-hot-neighborhoods
How do you get to it electorally? And who is to blame if you can't? I don't think solutions can merely consist of punishing particular individuals (though it might include that in some cases). I think in many cases punishing individuals is seen as preferable because it precludes systemic change (and then who's the guilty party?)
GHDC is the
Greensboro Health Disparities Collaborative (GHDC), made up of "community, clergy, health care and public health members, and academic leaders." ACCURE is
Accountability for Cancer Care through Undoing Racism and Equity, the name of the first study conducted to address systemic obstacles to care by this group.
The disparities in cancer survival rates were eliminated, not by calling individual people racists, but by identifying the systemic problems in one part of a local healthcare system, which disproportionately affect Black patients.
Article here, behind the WaPo paywall:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/racism-cancer-health-care-disparity/2021/10/22/a2da80f0-3039-11ec-93e2-dba2c2c11851_story.html
The US healthcare system is but one example of something that treats people as if we're all the same, i.e., all white and middle class, and thus inevitably mistreats people who aren't. Individual healthcare providers don't have to be racists - they can provide the same care to everyone who comes through the door - for the whole system to yield disparate outcomes for different groups of people.
@Anteater I'm not sure how to respond to what you ask about intersectionality because the literature on this is sophisticated and extensive. Have you read the work of Black feminist Kimberlé Crenshaw (@Ruth mentioned her above)? She coined the term 'intersectionality' to speak to the multiple social forces, social identities, and ideological instruments through which power and disadvantage are expressed and legitimized.
You see, if you haven't ever been on the receiving end of racism, you are going to struggle to grasp why anti-racism work is so urgent and important for those of us who deal with racist denigration and exclusions every single day of their lives, along with sexism and/or transphobia and/or ableism. There's no doubt your own sense of social identity could be defined as intersectional, but if those factors (for example being able-bodied or cis-het or white or middle-class or living in a post-industrial social welfare state or employed by a progressive university) operate to your advantage, they don't need to be examined or questioned, they can stay invisible. On the other hand, if you were born into a war-torn country in the Middle East, if you were designated female at birth, if you didn't speak English growing up, if you have a only a few years of formal schooling, if you find yourself homeless as a refugee, all those determining vectors that shape your life and your sense of who you are operate simultaneously and in combination as intersectional oppressions to be named and resisted.
So when you say you don't think intersectionality is a particularly useful tool, it simply indicates to me that you either haven't thought hard enough about the impact of racism or sexism or homophobia etc on others, or that you believe that the advantages you may possess by virtue of birth or gender or class are somehow there for everyone or that intersectionality is irrelevant because it doesn't work for the privileged in society. When it comes to disadvantages, a person privileged with regard to financial security or being white might struggle with mental health issues or disability, but not experience racism or sexual violence or homelessness. Intersectional markers point to power relations that might be obvious as weaponised (the racial profiling of Muslim travellers at airports) or subtle and often invisible because they show absence but not excluding practices. If there are two similarly qualified candidates sending in CVs for a work position, and one is named Newton-Thompson and the other Onyilogwu, what are the odds that the employer thinks, "Yikes, I'll never pronounce that!" and quietly shelves the CV?
In Epiphanies, it is especially important to consider sources and to have done the homework. I personally think that the reason we don't have a number of threads on Critical Race Theory on the Ship is that we're not ready yet to talk about systemic ongoing racism in our workplaces, academic institutions, policing, incarceration practices, on the street, etc perhaps because it hasn't affected many posters as a lived reality.
The local history library near Lunar House in Croydon had - and may well have as it's been a long time since I worked there - an extensive collection of literature / artefacts related to Windrush. They would have been delighted to receive the Windrush related records that were keep in the Home Office's basement instead of them being destroyed.
The landing records were the equivalent of parish or census records. It's almost a no-brainer to believe that if these records related to white people, they wouldn't have been tossed. They would have been passed to a museum or similar.
It's even worse when you know that the decision makers were told by front line home staff that destroying these records would make confirming people's accounts of when they arrived impossible as they were the only information source.
But the attitudes to history are really strange. Many people want history to be full of heroes and national greatness. Rather than flawed human beings and national mess-ups. Historians focusing on the UK's Empire or slavery are frequently told no one wants to know about that stuff, it's just too depressing or too long ago etc. Historians focusing on WW1 don't get that.
And back to CRT ... It's not really for white people to decide if it's the right tool to tackle racism is it?!
Well plenty of White people seem to have decided it's the right tool, despite the existence of dissenting Black voices such as Tony Sewell, Kemi Badenoch or John McWhorter.
I think White people have the choice of either not getting involved at all because we don't have the standing to make a comment (and thus effectively refusing to advocate either for or against CRT approaches), or else evaluating that one set of Black voices provides more convincing evidence than the other - which isn't IMV a problem as long as we are actually listening to those voices rather than just amplifying whichever group confirms our preconceptions, but does ultimately mean that White people end up sitting in judgement over Black people's accounts of racism.
Apartheid in South Africa was based on definitions of race that were ultimately incoherent leading to absurdities such as seeing if pencils would fall out of people's hair. But those absurdities had real effects on people's lives. And if you want to undo those effects you have to work out who was affected.
Why? What do you mean by "in kind"?
Which term do you think is 'vague'? Why does it matter? For that matter, can you define 'vague'? Where is the precise dividing line between 'vagueness' and 'nonsense'? Is there a precise dividing line between 'vagueness' and 'nonsense'? Is there a precise dividing line between 'vague' and 'specific'?
Anyway:
The FBI learn that an assassin is targeting the President. So would it be sensible for them to react by sending a task force out to protect the Mayor of New York, because the Mayor of New York is an elected public official, and 'elected public official' is at least specific? No.
It does not matter whether the assassin's reasoning is specific or vague or makes any sense at all. What matters is that the President is the assassin's target.
What matters with racism is not whether the concept of race is specific or vague or makes any sense at all. What matters is who has or has in the past been the racists' targets.
What has that got to do with the price of eggs?
Why in the name of all that is specifically holy or vaguely holy would I want to?
Communities will always disagree within themselves about the best way forward. A person stating an opinion is just that. They're not representing their community, just themselves.
Listening to those voices without speaking for them seems the way to go. The last thing we need is white people deciding what is and isn't racist.