If I'm reading this correctly, CRT is -- at least for some -- calling for a fairly complete dismantling of classic liberalism and rationalism, not to mention many of the founding principles of the Enlightenment. Which is fine! Argue that! I'm pro-free-speech! But, well, this isn't that different from what a lot of conservatives are *saying* CRT is (amid some hysteria and often overt racism). And, yeah, it does feel awfully Marxist in its vibe. But beyond that, I kinda agree with the conservatives on at least the parameters of the debate: if we're going to radically alter civilization -- and I'm having a hard time coming up with a more radical perspective than the one that's being argued here -- shouldn't this be debated? If we're going to use these ideas to inform school curriculums -- and it seems to me like we already definitely are -- shouldn't every aspect of this world-view be open to at good faith dialogue? But I feel like I've read 50,000 articles, even this one, sort of, where I'm told that the debate over CRT is, mostly, just white backlash and grievance, or about not wanting slavery taught in schools. This feels like gaslighting. And any criticism is invariably defined as some form of racism. There is DEFINITELY a lot of bad faith criticism of CRT, but I sure don't feel like I read very many "good faith" defenses. I keep arguing: Hey, I agree with some of what you say, but some of your conclusions are really out that, what you're saying is really, really radical. But the answer always seems to be some form of: No, it's not, and it's racist to say that. That feels like a terrible way to change anyone's mind or ever win this debate.
I think part of the problem is that CRT theory isn't self-correcting, because of contemporary politics. Liberals are EXTREMELY wary of criticizing anything race-related, for fear of being labeled racist and/or lumped in with conservatives, and "cancelled." Sure, conservatives criticize aspects of CRT, but no one listens to them, in part because even the reasonable ones are lumped into with the racist Trump assholes. So a lot of bonkers and/or ridiculous ideas are offered up with little or no pushback (always a problem in academia, but even more so as ultra-progressives/radicals take over the place). Here I go subscribing to an "objective" liberal world-view (which, however flawed, I think is greatly superior to seeing things only in terms of tribalism and power dynamics). But the current discussion of CRT seems to me to be a completely mess.
CRT is largely a diversion to avoid studying Western economic dysfunction for which Classical Liberalism is partly responsible. ("Free" competition among self-interested individuals, without a countervailing mechanism to ensure common prosperity, has resulted in Bezos being many times wealthier than the entire poverty-ravaged nation of Haiti, not to mention poverty in US inner-city black ghettos).
NAIRU neoliberal economic orthodoxy obviously most negatively affects the most disadvantaged, whether by race, ethnicity, gender, cultural inheritance or intelligence. Solution: the Job Guarantee, see MMT.
Hopefully China will prove it, now that Xi is promoting "common prosperity" among different ethnic groups, which should reduce wealth/income inequality in China which is currently almost as high as in the US.
True that the academic theory laid out here isn't much different from what conservatives are critiquing. The bad-faith portion of the conservative arguments is that this "objectivity isn't real" academic version of CRT isn't being taught in schools. At most, the watered down "maybe we should question whether our textbooks are racist and rewrite them to not be" conclusion of CRT is what is proliferating via the 1619 project, as it should imo.
I found the article helpful for what academic CRT is, but it can make the debate more confusing, as it shows that the strawman conservatives are pointing to when they critique teaching about slavery is real. That strawman just doesn't have much to do with teaching about slavery in schools. Is there a fallacy name for pointing at something is real but unrelated?
I might have misunderstood the author's point, but I think that this piece, and most of the discussion about "objectivity," misses a very important point. Evaluating the truth of positive statements is very different from evaluating the truth of normative ones.
An example of a positive statement is "this building will stand only if it is constructed using concrete." It's possible to evaluate the truth of this statement objectively. An easy way to do it would be to attempt to construct the building using some material other than concrete. The truth of the statement does not depend on whether the inventor of concrete was an anti-racist paragon or a genocidal maniac.
An example of a normative statement is "constructing this building is good for society." There is no obvious way to evaluate this statement in an objective way. We need to agree on an entire moral philosophy before doing so, and there's no way to empirically test which moral philosophy is "correct." We therefore might doubt a normative claim made by a genocidal maniac merely on the basis of that person's character.
The issue in this article is that the author makes the implicit assumption that ALL of social science is about making normative statements. He then cites negative aspects of Western culture (like colonialism and oppression of natives) in order to cast doubt on the entire process of producing social science.
Notwithstanding the fact that you'd be hard-pressed to find any culture that doesn't have war and destruction in its past, social science often asks questions with objective answers. For example, one might be interested in the employment effects of increasing the minimum wage (independently of whether such laws are normatively good). These types of claims made by social science can't be dismissed on the basis of Western culture's depravity. So, we might not be able to decide whether white supremacy or anti-racism is objectively right, but the conclusion that we should discard objectivity entirely is unwarranted and potentially destructive.
My understanding of the author's point, and of academic CRT, is that because it's humanly impossible to interpret or rely facts without a subjective lens, then there can be no objectivity, even about positive statements. Kind of extrapolating the fact that most of our understanding of science/history historically has been biased/politicized to prove that it will always be. It feels reactionary to me, but a diluted version is still valuable:
Situation: history is written by the victors and science has historically been done by ideologues trying to prove their own incorrect social theories. All countries' institutions are historically and currently racist. Much of what people consider to be objective truth is actually subjective or simply false.
Bailey: therefore, nothing can be truly objective and the motives of the author must be questioned with every piece of evidence.
Motte: therefore, we should subject our institutions, from legal systems to history textbooks, to thorough questioning and potentially revision. However, even if starting from a Cartesian blank slate, it is possible to find positive truths and rebuild institutions based on them.
However, I can sympathize the understanding of the fight specifically about teaching grade school history as a fight between two non-objective normative statements. You can have two history textbooks that have no incorrect statements in them that will give students completely different understandings of slavery, the civil war, the civil rights movement, etc, based on what's included and how it's phrased.
Is it more useful to frame knowledge as something that can be abstracted out of context (what you call a positive statement) or to place it in the context of existing cultural constructions (which, almost inevitably creates a normative question).
I think it's important to recognize that both are valuable. There is value in being able to build up knowledge that is abstract and highly portable, but that has its limits -- it's also worth recognizing that most discussion (and most attempts to plan or organize anything) are contextualized.
Right, I think I completely agree with this comment. Whenever any type of decision is made, normative considerations are important, and those considerations typically have some relation to the decision's cultural context. But wouldn't it be fair to say that regardless of the context, we should be able to agree on what the effects of that decision will be?
I get frustrated with arguments like the one in this article because I find that they often conflate the notion that decisions necessarily require subjective judgment with the far more radical idea that understanding the EFFECTS of a particular decision is a subjective endeavor. For instance, in the example I gave, someone who opposed the building and someone who was in favor of it could, in principle, reach an agreement of whether it would stand if constructed with concrete.
I think I agree with your comment, but there's more of a grey area than you might think.
Is a statement like, "X is safe for human consumption." an objective statement? Yes, but the question about what threshold should be used to establish safety is a normative one. If something is safe in general, but some people have a bad reaction to it, how do you decide whether it's safe or not (and this isn't an abstract question. The government had to set a threshold for acceptable lead contamination and now it looks like that was set too high, or new research is suggesting that air pollution has a much larger effect than previously thought).
But I agree that none of that should be taken to argue that objective knowledge is impossible or of no value.
I also found this post hard to parse. Here's my attempt to pull out the key ideas from the post.
1) "Critical Race Theory’s founders sought to understand how a society that had officially disowned racism managed to continue being racist"
2) Nationalism and racism are similar ideas. And therefore people are racist sometimes and that's sort of similar to nationalism.
3) Social science is hopelessly biased because its practitioners are and have historically been biased.
4) The idea of Objectivity is often used as cover to establish norms that favor certain people over others. This is partially because our modern understanding of the world intellectually descends from thinkers who were wrong (about race). But it's also partially because sometimes it's harder to be objective than we want it to be.
5) "Equality before the law" is bad if the law is bad, and the law can be bad in subtle ways.
6) Intellectual thought in the social sciences is always a tricky ploy to manipulate society and the law into doing what the intellectuals want.
7) Critics of CRT are all white supremacists. (This feels like a straw man, but it's how I interpret the concluding argument of the post. The author seems to feel like they are in a war with white nationalists to control the narrative.)
My commentary on (4) is that in a negotiation, it is often important to establish norms that help your case. In a small negotiation that might be something like "you should pay for this because it was your idea", but in the grand negotiation of history, that might be something like "the rich have an obligation to help the savages live a morally upstanding life". In ordinary disagreements, it is often unclear what norms should be followed, so it makes sense that it would be unclear in the bigger scheme as well. I don't think I would rephrase that as "objectivity is impossible"; it would maybe be better to say "our society makes assumptions that benefit some people and not others".
On (5), I think the law usually tries to enforce good outcomes, but it doesn't always work. Clearly racist laws like crack/cocaine sentencing disparity are outnumbered by basically good laws like no stealing.
(6) Seems incredibly cynical, and I would prefer that people with this outlook be treated as trolls.
This post is absolutely littered with disorganized criticism of American conservatives and various historical movements. I think perhaps CRT should be thought of as a framework for criticizing historical movements and conservatism. But that's not a strong thesis.
Thanks for this breakdown. It still leaves me a little confused... here are the things that confuse me.
1. Its a way of analyzing law, structure, etc and how it perpetuates bad stuff (white western way mainly). For example... the crack vs cocaine disparity. Redlining. Etc... But I get the feeling that CRT proponents have issues with even more ideas/laws... I don't want to give examples... but twitter is awash with examples.
2. Is CRT criticisms based entirely on outcomes? To be CRT approved, do outcomes need to be exactly equitable. Would a law that gave different punishments to white vs black be acceptable as long as outcomes were equitable?
No wonder there is so much controversy in corporate and education training. It's so unclear as to what it is or isn't that is easy for some of the more ridiculous examples we have seen to call themselves CRT. Or maybe they aren't ridiculous.
Here is where I am at...
Makes sense to criticize western colonial history... it is what it is.
Makes sense to analyze the purpose and outcome of laws, that have disparate outcomes for no real justifiable reason (perhaps Marijuana laws might fall in this category)
I have issues with some of the nationalism = racism by default comparison.
General criticisms of western civilization culture also seem silly to me. At least until you can give me an example of something better.
The whole thing hurts my brain.
Feels like it would be better to start with something small... a concrete example, and analyze it with CRT. Let me follow along with the logic.
Then move on to something else.
Im in Argentina working right now... only American on the job site. Speak little Spanish (close to none). My brain hurts enough. This whole thing just adds to it. I wanted to sincerely engage though, since the guy took his time to write it.
In essence, the theory part of CRT can be summarized as racism being a type of ether permeating society, ubiquitous and unchanging. But what I see in its practice is in essence a wholesale attack on the competence and distinction (think especially of CRT's recommendation regarding abolishment of advanced placement courses, SAT, etc etc.)
It is a way to analyze history and hopefully learn from history to create better laws and structures. To do that though you have to zoom out one level and think about Sociology and not just Law and Econ. If this sounds very academic and university nerdy, well it started with university professors thinking about methods and philosophy to better understand how the world works.
TNS, the guest writer is pretty much describing the big wigs of the field of sociology that started it as a social science. The social science of sociology in turn influenced CRT. The only one he did not included are the founding sociologists who viewed things from an economic prism, such as Karl Marx. If you were to limit Sociology to 3 founders many experts would then relay the names Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Karl Marx and TNS talked about 2 of them here.
Now those 3 founders are studying how ideas emerge in history and move through history, and the ideas in the process are shaping history for ideas are attractive to human agents and people act on ideas, but also the ideas in the process are creating "structures" that in turn shape history. This in turn is the study of sociology. **A)** How much is human agency (which Liberalism focuses on) versus the other diode how much is structure is one of the big debates in sociology and the answer is of course "both" and thus there is a tension on how to describe both at the same time.
Now the 3 founders of sociology are very different in how they think ideas are created, and thus how structures are created, and TNS elaborates on two of them. How they disagreed is more than you can condensed in a single reply post, I am sorry, but TNS is trying to show how they disagreed and in the process the reader unzooms and sees more of the picture.
**B)** For example what is subjectivity and objectivity when it comes to knowledge is another one of the big debates in sociology, and how we create symbols and structures. Let get “concrete” for a second, for example me saying building more housing is GOOD is a subjective value, and lots of important things in life is subjective. Any time you are saying something is good or bad you are being subjective and making a value statement. There can be winners and losers and so on with any change, and the Hume Guillotine still exists saying how the world "ought to be" is a question of subjectivity while the world "is currently now" is a realm of facts and figures and is more objective, facts and figures are more empirical but still gathering up those facts and figures are full of subjectivity in the search process. This Hume Guillotine is often known as a Fact / Value distinction or the Is / Ought problem. To study Sociology is to deal with both subjectivity and objectivity at the same time, and to grapple with the tension between these two extremes which we only think as extreme in a language sense.
**C**) Third Sociology has a study of language and other structures component, if you are looking at the evolution of words through time you are doing "diachronic" research, while if you freeze frame language to a specific time like the present, or the founding, or reconstruction you are doing "synchrony" research. Thus static being vs dynamic being in other words. This too has a tension. You can more easily see this tension in our current society for we as a culture have done big conversations over stuff like originalism and so on with the study of law, but it is not the only tension that is important in the study of law.
These 3 debates are the big debates in Sociology and through them you get even more debates that emerge from the tensions of A, B, and C. For example studying things at a small scale (micro), large scale (macro), or intermediate scale (meso) is really a mixture of those 3 tensions I mentioned above.
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CRT is talking about thinking about perception and how perception influences our search for facts, while at the same time influences how we try to create better options in law and anything else we do with human agency or human structure we built. After all structures are man made at the start and end of the day.
Think of the goal of CRT as being more meta-aware of things. But once you are meta-aware you still have not solved a problem and thus individual CRT people, individual agents may have different political visions of society and they will disagree on this much like the 3 Sociologists I mentioned at this start of the long reply also disagreed about methods on how to study society.
If this sounds very academic well CRT started in academia.
Agreed, hard to pull out the main points of a long text with page-long paragraphs ... examples and a summary would've helped, I think - still not clear what the main points are.
It is a typical example of the poorly thought-through attempt to defend left-wing conclusions using post-modernism and I am surprised you would host it on the blog. The structure of (1) pointless intellectual history and (2) quarter-baked post-modernist philosophy of science thrown in at the end is standard practice in this type of work. If none of what he says is true, why should I believe any of it? According to him all of what he is a power play and makes no claim to truth (or being more probably true than what a liberal or conservative believes?). Is the claim that 'the Pfizer vaccine reduces the risk of being hospitalised by covid' also not objective? If not, is it false, or neither true nor false? Should I take the Pfizer vaccine? At the end he suggests that the conflicting normative beliefs of liberals and conservatives are both objective. So there are true contradictions then?
I don't get the attack on objectivity (and presumably scientific method) either. I have literally never heard ANYONE argue that any one is, or any human can be, completely objective. It's an ideal, a goal -- something that is limited and flawed but still superior to all the alternatives. Post-modernism has always seemed like a complete dead end to me and, of course, a total conversation stopped.
This article disorganized and bad, but I feel the need to defend postmodernism. The central thesis of postmodernism is that "there are multiple frameworks for understanding the world and sometimes it's useful to switch between them". That's taken to a nihilistic extreme in this post by an author claiming that all intellectual frameworks are dishonest. But it is genuinely useful to recognize that any given theoretical framework is limited.
Why is "the ideal" the normative value we see as (+) positive and deviation from the ideal is (+/-) neutral or (-) negative?
When we can also set the normative value as the world it is now or some other benchmark? Robin James has a good article I will link to below on this, talking about John Rawls and Charles W Mills and a sitcom tv show that aired a few years ago. The problem of setting the ideal to some horizon place, "a good place" is that you are simultaneously setting in "no place", at the same time you are turning your attention away from the present world (or the sins of the past world affecting the present.)
Subjective Values (what is good or bad, or correct vs incorrect) are always present even if we build the creation of facts on top of them and call them Objective. Saying something is normative value is merely putting a standard to measure something against.
Saying in the past the laws were crafted by the people who had power does not mean the laws can be good or bad, or some form of mixture, it is merely acknowledging the truth that laws are crafted by the people who have power vs the people who did not have power to craft the law. What you do with this information once you think it through is up to you, but it is better than passing over and leaving it unexamined in the first place.
1) In the 2000s there were conservative legal scholars arguing there was no discrimination with heterosexual marriage laws for any person can marry another person of the opposite sex. So in theory a gay man can marry a straight women or a lesbian women, even though the gay man wants to marry their romantic partner and the law says no.
Having a little critical analysis in your cognition and you can see the contradiction.
2) This is more to Critical Race Theory, In the past a company had hiring decisions and what level of promotion you could achieve that was limiting based off race. This was legal at the time. Likewise they had the same thing with sex where certain jobs were off limits to women but not to men. Then the corporation changed their rules internally to contort with law changes done by the Federal Government. Decades later people who worked at the company want to retire with the pensions. What would the legal situation be for a black women who was not allowed to advance in this company due to the previous law? Likewise in a similar situation with a different company when there is a recession the company fired the last hired person, is this a firing due to race if whites were the only people with seniority previous due to the previous internal rule change of the company, while more recent hires were of a mixture of races?
Well it "depends" on how you look at it wouldn't it? This is what Ludwig Wittgenstein called "seeing that" versus "seeing as" whenever you encounter a picture of a duck-rabbit (illusion), and you only have the memory words of duck or rabbit. You have to articulate that nothing quite fits and you acknowledge that the world is complicated.
This post is disorganized and hard to read. It sets up straw-men and then argues against them rather than clearly stating its main ideas and its policy goals. I think maybe there's a large inferential distance between this author and your regular audience. If you host this author again, my request is that you edit the post to help bridge that intellectual gap.
It’s one thing to say that CRT misreads history and social science in a way that would make the average old-school Marxist blush (and it does). What’s even worse is how depressing and inherently divisive these bad ideas are. Plenty of people are wrong; only a select few can be this miserable.
I’m also not sure if CRT adherents recognize themselves as the world’s strongest practitioners of tribalism and racial obsession, but what’s truly ironic is that in doing so they more strongly mimic 19th and 20th century racist pseudoscience than anyone else today.
"Western history has global significance only because Europeans and European colonists once seized power across most of the earth. "
Actually, its significance is not the seizing of global power.....attempts to seize global power, and regional power, are the historical coin of the realm. Western history is significant for the elevation of the individual, rights, and especially, the scientific revolution.
(What studies of ancient DNA reveal is that the earth was people and re-peopled through genocide, war, settler colonialism, slavery, extinctions, brutal replacements, rape, and famine. And also, from time to time, a tad of kindness.)
It was in the 18th century and 19th century that the most cogent and sustained efforts to rid the world of slavery came about.....that within the world of "whiteness". And it was also in the 18th and 19th century, in Europe under Enlightenment auspices, that saw the feminism and the beginnings of what would be gay rights come into being.
That 19th effort to rid the world of ‘Arab Slavery’ provided cover for King Leopold’s rubber terror in the Congo. There are a lot of disappointments in the continental abolitionist movement, but that it even occurred at all if impressive.
I've read a lot of critical race theory, and it is really not that hard to understand what people mean by that who criticize it. It is the difference between saying all people are equal, the same, and saying one race is the oppressor race and the other the oppressed. That's it. Not really tough. The rest is propaganda designed to obfuscate the issue.
Starting from either point you end up in very different places about policy, education, etc. Both views are in fact against racism. It is a difference in how you approach ending it that matters.
That’s a good summary. Thank you. You point to maybe the main challenge for liberalism, applying Hume’s guillotine to the core claim of liberalism- whether humans are or only should be equal. I.e if there is no factual basis to that claim, given that humans are not equal in history, what could be the normative basis to the claim without factual evidence to support it? The writer appears to go along with Weber, and Hume, distinguishing ends as values and means as facts, I.e there are historical facts but the facts and their representation are always entwined with the normative ends their representation by social actors serve in history. Bourdieu makes the best job of theorising how best to use critical self reflection as part of designing social science quantitative and qualitative research methods to preserve the progressive power of objectivity claims, and means to test that objectivity, without falling prey to the distortions all the forms of power produce in making those claims - ‘race’ being one amongst many. The best example is Bourdieu’s opus ‘Distinction’ about class in France.
Various forms of the equality claim also underpin Marxism (say as ‘species being’), feminism, CRT, neuro diversity etc, not just liberalism - often without clearly articulating whether this is a purely normative claim or is also grounded in fact.
So to rephrase what you say - one person could both believe that all people should be equal (the value), and that there is objective evidence (facts) of inequality, oppression and tyranny between observable human groups that define and distinguish themselves by skin colour, class and sex markers, age, nation and so on. The two beliefs are not incompatible. I would argue that the way observation and representation is structured by those power relations, is also amenable to observation through critical self reflection. How that critical self reflection is done requires clearly articulating to be credible for social science. It is less necessary say for developing mathematical axioms or observing and theorising the physical properties say of concrete. Human power relations have no influence on the properties of concrete, even if we can observe how they do in determining who does the observation and how they write.
From someone who’s well-read in the social sciences, this is a fantastic post. It’s refreshing to see a discussion of CRT that’s actually rooted in the study of social science and uses history to bring it all into context.
Noah, Noah. You're doing it again. Who exactly is it who believes that CRT is "any discussion of racism whatsoever”? Preemptively setting up a straw man on the right.
I love reading you, man, and I'm really enjoying your sci-fi picks, but like a lot of people on the left (and the right, of course), you often let things slip that reveal your Stephen-Colbert-like stereotyping of the other side. When you feel the urge to set up an ideological dichotomy, restrain yourself.
Except people like Rufo have *literally said that this is their goal*. You can argue that clowns like Rufo aren't representative, but I have seen very few on mainstream right disavow him.
Rufo is sharp. Unlike other conservatives, he understands to the nth degree the game CRT and post-modernist people play to gain power in praxis, not necessarily theory, is the re-definition of words. So, he applies the same medicine to them.
Well, if you pay attention to most liberals or leftists who defend what they assume “critical race theory” is, you will find that most of them think it refers to “teaching about slavery and the civil rights movement.” So these people certainly do exist.
On the one hand this is laughable but on the other it's quite disturbing. I cannot believe people think that what this author is saying is profound or useful.
I do wonder if this isn't the heart of the matter. What are the best tools to promote racial and other kinds of equality? A more egalitarian society in general? And I'd also agree that, for all their flaws, the classic liberal tools and values of equality before the law, respect for diversity as a goal, free speech, objectivity as a goal, appeals to reason and liberal ethics, democracy and debate as a way to resolve disputes, peaceful transfer of power, rejection of superstition and divine right -- these are mostly "advances" over what came before, and all superior to a current theory that argues these are all tools of subjugation used by the powerful to reinforce a rigid status quo. Social change is hard, but I much prefer a system where the change is the result of liberal values, not a raw power struggle, to the spoils go the victor.
I believe the argument CRT makes is that "the classic liberal tools and values" you cite are still a work in progress for minorities in our society because laws can be written to disproportionately affect one group over another. A perfect example was the treatment of crack cocaine vs. powder cocaine. A crack user caught with 5 grams got 5 years; a snorter (powder user) had to be caught with 500 grams (over a pound!) to get the same sentence. Intentional or not, the law had a much greater negative effect on blacks than on whites. https://www.criminaldefenselawyer.com/resources/crack-vrs-powder-cocaine-one-drug-two-penalties.htm
"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread." --Anatole France
Sure, but you (and they) are assuming a motive that isn't necessarily correct. The crack/cocaine laws have been outrageous in their effect, but I don't think we can assume, as CRT does, that the effect was motivated by a desire to punish black people -- that they are the work of "white supremacy." A significant portion of the Congressional Black Caucus supported harsher laws for crack because it was seen at the time (accurately) as a scourge of Black communities. Was our perception of crack, and crack-being-a-scourge-of-the-black-community related to greater racism, and a racist media lens? Almost certainly! But this issue is waaaaaay more complicated than, "white America conspired, consciously or unconsciously, to use their power to oppress black people." Most things in life are complicated and messy, with lots of variables and moving pieces. Racism is one of those pieces! But it's not the only one. I'm 100% on board with CRT as one lens through which we can view different issues. They lose me when they apply this lens as they *only* lens, and make assumptions about motivations that are too extreme or flat-out factually wrong. (Big picture? I'm not denying the existence of an entrenched powerful sometimes-racist (but also sometimes just clueless) status quo. I'm arguing that classic liberal values, updated with new perspectives, are the best tools we have to fight and change that status quo.)
The crack "epidemic" was media hype along the same lines as reefer madness; that was obvious to almost anybody familiar with the history of drug policy in the U.S.
As regards CRT and motives, I'm not familiar-enough to say one way or another. But almost every drug law in the U.S. is enforced primarily against minorities. More whites than blacks are caught with drugs, yet more blacks are in prison for drug offenses. Why?
I also thought of that quote when I was reading this piece.
I think clearly racist laws like crack/cocaine sentencing disparity are outnumbered by basically good laws like "no stealing". (Although maybe not.)
As Mr. France notes, the rich are unlikely to be prosecuted for stealing bread, but it's still a law that's pushing society toward a better equilibrium where less bread is stolen.
Is it, though? I mean, if you're talking about equilibria, then we're out of the realm of direct moralism ("stealing is bad!") and into utilitarianism ("how to minimize stolen bread").
And in this new realm, it's not entirely clear that France is missing the point, although he's definitely being cheeky and poetic rather than direct. To wit, he's saying that the "classical liberal tools and values" clearly don't solve the equilibrium problem, and are therefore of limited actual value. We must need new values! - to patch over the gap, that is.
I've been working on an update of the classical liberal view: It's not about limiting the power of government, but limiting the accumulation of power. Or, through a Madisonian lens, it's about perfecting the Madisonian mission of diffusing power.
Take our system. It may have a lot of *distribution* of power, but because of our electoral dynamics inherited from the British, we don't actually diffuse power much; the spoiler effect instead encourages parties to suppress dissension in their ranks and cooperate across the branches that are supposed to keep powers separated from each other.
This is quite obviously a perversion of Madison's vision. But precisely because Madison's vision didn't really take zero-sum electoral systems into account, it failed. FPTP, Winner-Take-All, Single-Member Districts, these are all zero-sum, and in order to make the separation of powers work, you need to replace them with positive-sum dynamics.
Basically, multiparty democracy allows you to properly diffuse accumulations of power within a representative republic with separation of powers. IMO, this gets us closer to the objectives of classical liberalism than classical liberalism itself ever could, because classical liberalism lacks the ability to countenance the role of parties in a democracy past anything but a naively simplistic "FACTIONALISM BAD!" take. Sure, factionalism is bad, but it's human nature, and FPTP/SMD/WTA exacerbate it, rather than diffusing it as Madison expected.
If I'm reading this correctly, CRT is -- at least for some -- calling for a fairly complete dismantling of classic liberalism and rationalism, not to mention many of the founding principles of the Enlightenment. Which is fine! Argue that! I'm pro-free-speech! But, well, this isn't that different from what a lot of conservatives are *saying* CRT is (amid some hysteria and often overt racism). And, yeah, it does feel awfully Marxist in its vibe. But beyond that, I kinda agree with the conservatives on at least the parameters of the debate: if we're going to radically alter civilization -- and I'm having a hard time coming up with a more radical perspective than the one that's being argued here -- shouldn't this be debated? If we're going to use these ideas to inform school curriculums -- and it seems to me like we already definitely are -- shouldn't every aspect of this world-view be open to at good faith dialogue? But I feel like I've read 50,000 articles, even this one, sort of, where I'm told that the debate over CRT is, mostly, just white backlash and grievance, or about not wanting slavery taught in schools. This feels like gaslighting. And any criticism is invariably defined as some form of racism. There is DEFINITELY a lot of bad faith criticism of CRT, but I sure don't feel like I read very many "good faith" defenses. I keep arguing: Hey, I agree with some of what you say, but some of your conclusions are really out that, what you're saying is really, really radical. But the answer always seems to be some form of: No, it's not, and it's racist to say that. That feels like a terrible way to change anyone's mind or ever win this debate.
I think part of the problem is that CRT theory isn't self-correcting, because of contemporary politics. Liberals are EXTREMELY wary of criticizing anything race-related, for fear of being labeled racist and/or lumped in with conservatives, and "cancelled." Sure, conservatives criticize aspects of CRT, but no one listens to them, in part because even the reasonable ones are lumped into with the racist Trump assholes. So a lot of bonkers and/or ridiculous ideas are offered up with little or no pushback (always a problem in academia, but even more so as ultra-progressives/radicals take over the place). Here I go subscribing to an "objective" liberal world-view (which, however flawed, I think is greatly superior to seeing things only in terms of tribalism and power dynamics). But the current discussion of CRT seems to me to be a completely mess.
CRT is largely a diversion to avoid studying Western economic dysfunction for which Classical Liberalism is partly responsible. ("Free" competition among self-interested individuals, without a countervailing mechanism to ensure common prosperity, has resulted in Bezos being many times wealthier than the entire poverty-ravaged nation of Haiti, not to mention poverty in US inner-city black ghettos).
NAIRU neoliberal economic orthodoxy obviously most negatively affects the most disadvantaged, whether by race, ethnicity, gender, cultural inheritance or intelligence. Solution: the Job Guarantee, see MMT.
Hopefully China will prove it, now that Xi is promoting "common prosperity" among different ethnic groups, which should reduce wealth/income inequality in China which is currently almost as high as in the US.
True that the academic theory laid out here isn't much different from what conservatives are critiquing. The bad-faith portion of the conservative arguments is that this "objectivity isn't real" academic version of CRT isn't being taught in schools. At most, the watered down "maybe we should question whether our textbooks are racist and rewrite them to not be" conclusion of CRT is what is proliferating via the 1619 project, as it should imo.
I found the article helpful for what academic CRT is, but it can make the debate more confusing, as it shows that the strawman conservatives are pointing to when they critique teaching about slavery is real. That strawman just doesn't have much to do with teaching about slavery in schools. Is there a fallacy name for pointing at something is real but unrelated?
The 1619 Project has a pretty ahistorical take on both 1. The American Revolutionary War and 2. Disparaging Lincoln’s character. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/03/06/1619-project-new-york-times-mistake-122248
I might have misunderstood the author's point, but I think that this piece, and most of the discussion about "objectivity," misses a very important point. Evaluating the truth of positive statements is very different from evaluating the truth of normative ones.
An example of a positive statement is "this building will stand only if it is constructed using concrete." It's possible to evaluate the truth of this statement objectively. An easy way to do it would be to attempt to construct the building using some material other than concrete. The truth of the statement does not depend on whether the inventor of concrete was an anti-racist paragon or a genocidal maniac.
An example of a normative statement is "constructing this building is good for society." There is no obvious way to evaluate this statement in an objective way. We need to agree on an entire moral philosophy before doing so, and there's no way to empirically test which moral philosophy is "correct." We therefore might doubt a normative claim made by a genocidal maniac merely on the basis of that person's character.
The issue in this article is that the author makes the implicit assumption that ALL of social science is about making normative statements. He then cites negative aspects of Western culture (like colonialism and oppression of natives) in order to cast doubt on the entire process of producing social science.
Notwithstanding the fact that you'd be hard-pressed to find any culture that doesn't have war and destruction in its past, social science often asks questions with objective answers. For example, one might be interested in the employment effects of increasing the minimum wage (independently of whether such laws are normatively good). These types of claims made by social science can't be dismissed on the basis of Western culture's depravity. So, we might not be able to decide whether white supremacy or anti-racism is objectively right, but the conclusion that we should discard objectivity entirely is unwarranted and potentially destructive.
My understanding of the author's point, and of academic CRT, is that because it's humanly impossible to interpret or rely facts without a subjective lens, then there can be no objectivity, even about positive statements. Kind of extrapolating the fact that most of our understanding of science/history historically has been biased/politicized to prove that it will always be. It feels reactionary to me, but a diluted version is still valuable:
Situation: history is written by the victors and science has historically been done by ideologues trying to prove their own incorrect social theories. All countries' institutions are historically and currently racist. Much of what people consider to be objective truth is actually subjective or simply false.
Bailey: therefore, nothing can be truly objective and the motives of the author must be questioned with every piece of evidence.
Motte: therefore, we should subject our institutions, from legal systems to history textbooks, to thorough questioning and potentially revision. However, even if starting from a Cartesian blank slate, it is possible to find positive truths and rebuild institutions based on them.
However, I can sympathize the understanding of the fight specifically about teaching grade school history as a fight between two non-objective normative statements. You can have two history textbooks that have no incorrect statements in them that will give students completely different understandings of slavery, the civil war, the civil rights movement, etc, based on what's included and how it's phrased.
This reminds of the discussion I've seen about "decoupling" as an intellectual strategy (I'm sure various people have written about this, but I've seen it here: https://everythingstudies.com/2018/05/25/decoupling-revisited/ )
Is it more useful to frame knowledge as something that can be abstracted out of context (what you call a positive statement) or to place it in the context of existing cultural constructions (which, almost inevitably creates a normative question).
I think it's important to recognize that both are valuable. There is value in being able to build up knowledge that is abstract and highly portable, but that has its limits -- it's also worth recognizing that most discussion (and most attempts to plan or organize anything) are contextualized.
Right, I think I completely agree with this comment. Whenever any type of decision is made, normative considerations are important, and those considerations typically have some relation to the decision's cultural context. But wouldn't it be fair to say that regardless of the context, we should be able to agree on what the effects of that decision will be?
I get frustrated with arguments like the one in this article because I find that they often conflate the notion that decisions necessarily require subjective judgment with the far more radical idea that understanding the EFFECTS of a particular decision is a subjective endeavor. For instance, in the example I gave, someone who opposed the building and someone who was in favor of it could, in principle, reach an agreement of whether it would stand if constructed with concrete.
I think I agree with your comment, but there's more of a grey area than you might think.
Is a statement like, "X is safe for human consumption." an objective statement? Yes, but the question about what threshold should be used to establish safety is a normative one. If something is safe in general, but some people have a bad reaction to it, how do you decide whether it's safe or not (and this isn't an abstract question. The government had to set a threshold for acceptable lead contamination and now it looks like that was set too high, or new research is suggesting that air pollution has a much larger effect than previously thought).
But I agree that none of that should be taken to argue that objective knowledge is impossible or of no value.
As Noah’s less intelligent blue collar reader, I have to confess that 90% of this post was over my head.
At the end of it all, I am no closer to knowing what is the concrete goal.
I believe CRT is originally aimed at the law. So perhaps a concrete example. There is this law… which should be that law.
Is CRT a way of analyzing history? Is it a movement?
Help me envision what the author wants to see in society.
I also found this post hard to parse. Here's my attempt to pull out the key ideas from the post.
1) "Critical Race Theory’s founders sought to understand how a society that had officially disowned racism managed to continue being racist"
2) Nationalism and racism are similar ideas. And therefore people are racist sometimes and that's sort of similar to nationalism.
3) Social science is hopelessly biased because its practitioners are and have historically been biased.
4) The idea of Objectivity is often used as cover to establish norms that favor certain people over others. This is partially because our modern understanding of the world intellectually descends from thinkers who were wrong (about race). But it's also partially because sometimes it's harder to be objective than we want it to be.
5) "Equality before the law" is bad if the law is bad, and the law can be bad in subtle ways.
6) Intellectual thought in the social sciences is always a tricky ploy to manipulate society and the law into doing what the intellectuals want.
7) Critics of CRT are all white supremacists. (This feels like a straw man, but it's how I interpret the concluding argument of the post. The author seems to feel like they are in a war with white nationalists to control the narrative.)
My commentary on (4) is that in a negotiation, it is often important to establish norms that help your case. In a small negotiation that might be something like "you should pay for this because it was your idea", but in the grand negotiation of history, that might be something like "the rich have an obligation to help the savages live a morally upstanding life". In ordinary disagreements, it is often unclear what norms should be followed, so it makes sense that it would be unclear in the bigger scheme as well. I don't think I would rephrase that as "objectivity is impossible"; it would maybe be better to say "our society makes assumptions that benefit some people and not others".
On (5), I think the law usually tries to enforce good outcomes, but it doesn't always work. Clearly racist laws like crack/cocaine sentencing disparity are outnumbered by basically good laws like no stealing.
(6) Seems incredibly cynical, and I would prefer that people with this outlook be treated as trolls.
This post is absolutely littered with disorganized criticism of American conservatives and various historical movements. I think perhaps CRT should be thought of as a framework for criticizing historical movements and conservatism. But that's not a strong thesis.
Thanks for this breakdown. It still leaves me a little confused... here are the things that confuse me.
1. Its a way of analyzing law, structure, etc and how it perpetuates bad stuff (white western way mainly). For example... the crack vs cocaine disparity. Redlining. Etc... But I get the feeling that CRT proponents have issues with even more ideas/laws... I don't want to give examples... but twitter is awash with examples.
2. Is CRT criticisms based entirely on outcomes? To be CRT approved, do outcomes need to be exactly equitable. Would a law that gave different punishments to white vs black be acceptable as long as outcomes were equitable?
No wonder there is so much controversy in corporate and education training. It's so unclear as to what it is or isn't that is easy for some of the more ridiculous examples we have seen to call themselves CRT. Or maybe they aren't ridiculous.
Here is where I am at...
Makes sense to criticize western colonial history... it is what it is.
Makes sense to analyze the purpose and outcome of laws, that have disparate outcomes for no real justifiable reason (perhaps Marijuana laws might fall in this category)
I have issues with some of the nationalism = racism by default comparison.
General criticisms of western civilization culture also seem silly to me. At least until you can give me an example of something better.
The whole thing hurts my brain.
Feels like it would be better to start with something small... a concrete example, and analyze it with CRT. Let me follow along with the logic.
Then move on to something else.
Im in Argentina working right now... only American on the job site. Speak little Spanish (close to none). My brain hurts enough. This whole thing just adds to it. I wanted to sincerely engage though, since the guy took his time to write it.
In essence, the theory part of CRT can be summarized as racism being a type of ether permeating society, ubiquitous and unchanging. But what I see in its practice is in essence a wholesale attack on the competence and distinction (think especially of CRT's recommendation regarding abolishment of advanced placement courses, SAT, etc etc.)
It is a way to analyze history and hopefully learn from history to create better laws and structures. To do that though you have to zoom out one level and think about Sociology and not just Law and Econ. If this sounds very academic and university nerdy, well it started with university professors thinking about methods and philosophy to better understand how the world works.
TNS, the guest writer is pretty much describing the big wigs of the field of sociology that started it as a social science. The social science of sociology in turn influenced CRT. The only one he did not included are the founding sociologists who viewed things from an economic prism, such as Karl Marx. If you were to limit Sociology to 3 founders many experts would then relay the names Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Karl Marx and TNS talked about 2 of them here.
Now those 3 founders are studying how ideas emerge in history and move through history, and the ideas in the process are shaping history for ideas are attractive to human agents and people act on ideas, but also the ideas in the process are creating "structures" that in turn shape history. This in turn is the study of sociology. **A)** How much is human agency (which Liberalism focuses on) versus the other diode how much is structure is one of the big debates in sociology and the answer is of course "both" and thus there is a tension on how to describe both at the same time.
Now the 3 founders of sociology are very different in how they think ideas are created, and thus how structures are created, and TNS elaborates on two of them. How they disagreed is more than you can condensed in a single reply post, I am sorry, but TNS is trying to show how they disagreed and in the process the reader unzooms and sees more of the picture.
**B)** For example what is subjectivity and objectivity when it comes to knowledge is another one of the big debates in sociology, and how we create symbols and structures. Let get “concrete” for a second, for example me saying building more housing is GOOD is a subjective value, and lots of important things in life is subjective. Any time you are saying something is good or bad you are being subjective and making a value statement. There can be winners and losers and so on with any change, and the Hume Guillotine still exists saying how the world "ought to be" is a question of subjectivity while the world "is currently now" is a realm of facts and figures and is more objective, facts and figures are more empirical but still gathering up those facts and figures are full of subjectivity in the search process. This Hume Guillotine is often known as a Fact / Value distinction or the Is / Ought problem. To study Sociology is to deal with both subjectivity and objectivity at the same time, and to grapple with the tension between these two extremes which we only think as extreme in a language sense.
**C**) Third Sociology has a study of language and other structures component, if you are looking at the evolution of words through time you are doing "diachronic" research, while if you freeze frame language to a specific time like the present, or the founding, or reconstruction you are doing "synchrony" research. Thus static being vs dynamic being in other words. This too has a tension. You can more easily see this tension in our current society for we as a culture have done big conversations over stuff like originalism and so on with the study of law, but it is not the only tension that is important in the study of law.
These 3 debates are the big debates in Sociology and through them you get even more debates that emerge from the tensions of A, B, and C. For example studying things at a small scale (micro), large scale (macro), or intermediate scale (meso) is really a mixture of those 3 tensions I mentioned above.
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CRT is talking about thinking about perception and how perception influences our search for facts, while at the same time influences how we try to create better options in law and anything else we do with human agency or human structure we built. After all structures are man made at the start and end of the day.
Think of the goal of CRT as being more meta-aware of things. But once you are meta-aware you still have not solved a problem and thus individual CRT people, individual agents may have different political visions of society and they will disagree on this much like the 3 Sociologists I mentioned at this start of the long reply also disagreed about methods on how to study society.
If this sounds very academic well CRT started in academia.
Agreed, hard to pull out the main points of a long text with page-long paragraphs ... examples and a summary would've helped, I think - still not clear what the main points are.
This is drivel. Quick question - are there any claims to objectivity made in the piece? If not, why should it change my mind?
I think he's arguing against the idea of objectivity. And "drivel" is a pretty unwarranted thing to say...
It is a typical example of the poorly thought-through attempt to defend left-wing conclusions using post-modernism and I am surprised you would host it on the blog. The structure of (1) pointless intellectual history and (2) quarter-baked post-modernist philosophy of science thrown in at the end is standard practice in this type of work. If none of what he says is true, why should I believe any of it? According to him all of what he is a power play and makes no claim to truth (or being more probably true than what a liberal or conservative believes?). Is the claim that 'the Pfizer vaccine reduces the risk of being hospitalised by covid' also not objective? If not, is it false, or neither true nor false? Should I take the Pfizer vaccine? At the end he suggests that the conflicting normative beliefs of liberals and conservatives are both objective. So there are true contradictions then?
I don't get the attack on objectivity (and presumably scientific method) either. I have literally never heard ANYONE argue that any one is, or any human can be, completely objective. It's an ideal, a goal -- something that is limited and flawed but still superior to all the alternatives. Post-modernism has always seemed like a complete dead end to me and, of course, a total conversation stopped.
This article disorganized and bad, but I feel the need to defend postmodernism. The central thesis of postmodernism is that "there are multiple frameworks for understanding the world and sometimes it's useful to switch between them". That's taken to a nihilistic extreme in this post by an author claiming that all intellectual frameworks are dishonest. But it is genuinely useful to recognize that any given theoretical framework is limited.
I see. Thanks, that makes more sense.
Why is "the ideal" the normative value we see as (+) positive and deviation from the ideal is (+/-) neutral or (-) negative?
When we can also set the normative value as the world it is now or some other benchmark? Robin James has a good article I will link to below on this, talking about John Rawls and Charles W Mills and a sitcom tv show that aired a few years ago. The problem of setting the ideal to some horizon place, "a good place" is that you are simultaneously setting in "no place", at the same time you are turning your attention away from the present world (or the sins of the past world affecting the present.)
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/secret-twist-political-philosophy-good-place/
Subjective Values (what is good or bad, or correct vs incorrect) are always present even if we build the creation of facts on top of them and call them Objective. Saying something is normative value is merely putting a standard to measure something against.
Saying in the past the laws were crafted by the people who had power does not mean the laws can be good or bad, or some form of mixture, it is merely acknowledging the truth that laws are crafted by the people who have power vs the people who did not have power to craft the law. What you do with this information once you think it through is up to you, but it is better than passing over and leaving it unexamined in the first place.
Two examples to illustrate "hidden values"
1) In the 2000s there were conservative legal scholars arguing there was no discrimination with heterosexual marriage laws for any person can marry another person of the opposite sex. So in theory a gay man can marry a straight women or a lesbian women, even though the gay man wants to marry their romantic partner and the law says no.
Having a little critical analysis in your cognition and you can see the contradiction.
2) This is more to Critical Race Theory, In the past a company had hiring decisions and what level of promotion you could achieve that was limiting based off race. This was legal at the time. Likewise they had the same thing with sex where certain jobs were off limits to women but not to men. Then the corporation changed their rules internally to contort with law changes done by the Federal Government. Decades later people who worked at the company want to retire with the pensions. What would the legal situation be for a black women who was not allowed to advance in this company due to the previous law? Likewise in a similar situation with a different company when there is a recession the company fired the last hired person, is this a firing due to race if whites were the only people with seniority previous due to the previous internal rule change of the company, while more recent hires were of a mixture of races?
Well it "depends" on how you look at it wouldn't it? This is what Ludwig Wittgenstein called "seeing that" versus "seeing as" whenever you encounter a picture of a duck-rabbit (illusion), and you only have the memory words of duck or rabbit. You have to articulate that nothing quite fits and you acknowledge that the world is complicated.
This post is disorganized and hard to read. It sets up straw-men and then argues against them rather than clearly stating its main ideas and its policy goals. I think maybe there's a large inferential distance between this author and your regular audience. If you host this author again, my request is that you edit the post to help bridge that intellectual gap.
What a dismal world view.
It’s one thing to say that CRT misreads history and social science in a way that would make the average old-school Marxist blush (and it does). What’s even worse is how depressing and inherently divisive these bad ideas are. Plenty of people are wrong; only a select few can be this miserable.
I’m also not sure if CRT adherents recognize themselves as the world’s strongest practitioners of tribalism and racial obsession, but what’s truly ironic is that in doing so they more strongly mimic 19th and 20th century racist pseudoscience than anyone else today.
"Western history has global significance only because Europeans and European colonists once seized power across most of the earth. "
Actually, its significance is not the seizing of global power.....attempts to seize global power, and regional power, are the historical coin of the realm. Western history is significant for the elevation of the individual, rights, and especially, the scientific revolution.
(What studies of ancient DNA reveal is that the earth was people and re-peopled through genocide, war, settler colonialism, slavery, extinctions, brutal replacements, rape, and famine. And also, from time to time, a tad of kindness.)
It was in the 18th century and 19th century that the most cogent and sustained efforts to rid the world of slavery came about.....that within the world of "whiteness". And it was also in the 18th and 19th century, in Europe under Enlightenment auspices, that saw the feminism and the beginnings of what would be gay rights come into being.
That 19th effort to rid the world of ‘Arab Slavery’ provided cover for King Leopold’s rubber terror in the Congo. There are a lot of disappointments in the continental abolitionist movement, but that it even occurred at all if impressive.
I've read a lot of critical race theory, and it is really not that hard to understand what people mean by that who criticize it. It is the difference between saying all people are equal, the same, and saying one race is the oppressor race and the other the oppressed. That's it. Not really tough. The rest is propaganda designed to obfuscate the issue.
Starting from either point you end up in very different places about policy, education, etc. Both views are in fact against racism. It is a difference in how you approach ending it that matters.
That’s a good summary. Thank you. You point to maybe the main challenge for liberalism, applying Hume’s guillotine to the core claim of liberalism- whether humans are or only should be equal. I.e if there is no factual basis to that claim, given that humans are not equal in history, what could be the normative basis to the claim without factual evidence to support it? The writer appears to go along with Weber, and Hume, distinguishing ends as values and means as facts, I.e there are historical facts but the facts and their representation are always entwined with the normative ends their representation by social actors serve in history. Bourdieu makes the best job of theorising how best to use critical self reflection as part of designing social science quantitative and qualitative research methods to preserve the progressive power of objectivity claims, and means to test that objectivity, without falling prey to the distortions all the forms of power produce in making those claims - ‘race’ being one amongst many. The best example is Bourdieu’s opus ‘Distinction’ about class in France.
Various forms of the equality claim also underpin Marxism (say as ‘species being’), feminism, CRT, neuro diversity etc, not just liberalism - often without clearly articulating whether this is a purely normative claim or is also grounded in fact.
So to rephrase what you say - one person could both believe that all people should be equal (the value), and that there is objective evidence (facts) of inequality, oppression and tyranny between observable human groups that define and distinguish themselves by skin colour, class and sex markers, age, nation and so on. The two beliefs are not incompatible. I would argue that the way observation and representation is structured by those power relations, is also amenable to observation through critical self reflection. How that critical self reflection is done requires clearly articulating to be credible for social science. It is less necessary say for developing mathematical axioms or observing and theorising the physical properties say of concrete. Human power relations have no influence on the properties of concrete, even if we can observe how they do in determining who does the observation and how they write.
From someone who’s well-read in the social sciences, this is a fantastic post. It’s refreshing to see a discussion of CRT that’s actually rooted in the study of social science and uses history to bring it all into context.
Noah, Noah. You're doing it again. Who exactly is it who believes that CRT is "any discussion of racism whatsoever”? Preemptively setting up a straw man on the right.
I love reading you, man, and I'm really enjoying your sci-fi picks, but like a lot of people on the left (and the right, of course), you often let things slip that reveal your Stephen-Colbert-like stereotyping of the other side. When you feel the urge to set up an ideological dichotomy, restrain yourself.
Except people like Rufo have *literally said that this is their goal*. You can argue that clowns like Rufo aren't representative, but I have seen very few on mainstream right disavow him.
Rufo is sharp. Unlike other conservatives, he understands to the nth degree the game CRT and post-modernist people play to gain power in praxis, not necessarily theory, is the re-definition of words. So, he applies the same medicine to them.
Well, if you pay attention to most liberals or leftists who defend what they assume “critical race theory” is, you will find that most of them think it refers to “teaching about slavery and the civil rights movement.” So these people certainly do exist.
On the one hand this is laughable but on the other it's quite disturbing. I cannot believe people think that what this author is saying is profound or useful.
I do wonder if this isn't the heart of the matter. What are the best tools to promote racial and other kinds of equality? A more egalitarian society in general? And I'd also agree that, for all their flaws, the classic liberal tools and values of equality before the law, respect for diversity as a goal, free speech, objectivity as a goal, appeals to reason and liberal ethics, democracy and debate as a way to resolve disputes, peaceful transfer of power, rejection of superstition and divine right -- these are mostly "advances" over what came before, and all superior to a current theory that argues these are all tools of subjugation used by the powerful to reinforce a rigid status quo. Social change is hard, but I much prefer a system where the change is the result of liberal values, not a raw power struggle, to the spoils go the victor.
I believe the argument CRT makes is that "the classic liberal tools and values" you cite are still a work in progress for minorities in our society because laws can be written to disproportionately affect one group over another. A perfect example was the treatment of crack cocaine vs. powder cocaine. A crack user caught with 5 grams got 5 years; a snorter (powder user) had to be caught with 500 grams (over a pound!) to get the same sentence. Intentional or not, the law had a much greater negative effect on blacks than on whites. https://www.criminaldefenselawyer.com/resources/crack-vrs-powder-cocaine-one-drug-two-penalties.htm
"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread." --Anatole France
Sure, but you (and they) are assuming a motive that isn't necessarily correct. The crack/cocaine laws have been outrageous in their effect, but I don't think we can assume, as CRT does, that the effect was motivated by a desire to punish black people -- that they are the work of "white supremacy." A significant portion of the Congressional Black Caucus supported harsher laws for crack because it was seen at the time (accurately) as a scourge of Black communities. Was our perception of crack, and crack-being-a-scourge-of-the-black-community related to greater racism, and a racist media lens? Almost certainly! But this issue is waaaaaay more complicated than, "white America conspired, consciously or unconsciously, to use their power to oppress black people." Most things in life are complicated and messy, with lots of variables and moving pieces. Racism is one of those pieces! But it's not the only one. I'm 100% on board with CRT as one lens through which we can view different issues. They lose me when they apply this lens as they *only* lens, and make assumptions about motivations that are too extreme or flat-out factually wrong. (Big picture? I'm not denying the existence of an entrenched powerful sometimes-racist (but also sometimes just clueless) status quo. I'm arguing that classic liberal values, updated with new perspectives, are the best tools we have to fight and change that status quo.)
The crack "epidemic" was media hype along the same lines as reefer madness; that was obvious to almost anybody familiar with the history of drug policy in the U.S.
As regards CRT and motives, I'm not familiar-enough to say one way or another. But almost every drug law in the U.S. is enforced primarily against minorities. More whites than blacks are caught with drugs, yet more blacks are in prison for drug offenses. Why?
I also thought of that quote when I was reading this piece.
I think clearly racist laws like crack/cocaine sentencing disparity are outnumbered by basically good laws like "no stealing". (Although maybe not.)
As Mr. France notes, the rich are unlikely to be prosecuted for stealing bread, but it's still a law that's pushing society toward a better equilibrium where less bread is stolen.
Is it, though? I mean, if you're talking about equilibria, then we're out of the realm of direct moralism ("stealing is bad!") and into utilitarianism ("how to minimize stolen bread").
And in this new realm, it's not entirely clear that France is missing the point, although he's definitely being cheeky and poetic rather than direct. To wit, he's saying that the "classical liberal tools and values" clearly don't solve the equilibrium problem, and are therefore of limited actual value. We must need new values! - to patch over the gap, that is.
I've been working on an update of the classical liberal view: It's not about limiting the power of government, but limiting the accumulation of power. Or, through a Madisonian lens, it's about perfecting the Madisonian mission of diffusing power.
Take our system. It may have a lot of *distribution* of power, but because of our electoral dynamics inherited from the British, we don't actually diffuse power much; the spoiler effect instead encourages parties to suppress dissension in their ranks and cooperate across the branches that are supposed to keep powers separated from each other.
This is quite obviously a perversion of Madison's vision. But precisely because Madison's vision didn't really take zero-sum electoral systems into account, it failed. FPTP, Winner-Take-All, Single-Member Districts, these are all zero-sum, and in order to make the separation of powers work, you need to replace them with positive-sum dynamics.
Basically, multiparty democracy allows you to properly diffuse accumulations of power within a representative republic with separation of powers. IMO, this gets us closer to the objectives of classical liberalism than classical liberalism itself ever could, because classical liberalism lacks the ability to countenance the role of parties in a democracy past anything but a naively simplistic "FACTIONALISM BAD!" take. Sure, factionalism is bad, but it's human nature, and FPTP/SMD/WTA exacerbate it, rather than diffusing it as Madison expected.