Critical Race Theory

The Sandbox Political Topics
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I think most of it isn’t. We can all be respected enough that the plumber listens to us. (I know a lot of women who get useless responses, from plumbers, etc., and then when their husbands use the exact same words, the plumber believes it.) We can all be trusted enough to not be shot by the police when opening a glove box to get the registration. We can all be seen as potential colleagues, and not assumed to be the help. We can all be heard in meetings. We can all be credited for our ideas.

I think the scholarships are a fringe case that gets a lot of press because it upsets people. And if you actually look at admissions, stuff like alumni parents and being good at an expensive sport or instrument dominate race-influenced stuff.

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270

I believe you that you are not afraid of losing white privilege.

But I think description you gave is completely consistent with privilege.

As a tongue-in-cheek example, consider Mary Antoinette, who i think exemplifies wealth privilege as much as anyone. You could imagine her making the same sort of protest after being told the peasants couldn’t eat cake instead of bread: that it’s not her privilege because she doesn’t worry about starving to death, and it’s their day-today experience that needs fixing, not hers, etc.

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Exactly. If Starbucks didn’t kick out a black patron while he waited for his friend that wouldn’t hurt me in the slightest.

If cops thought first and shot second, that would probably HELP me as I’d pay less taxes to fund wrongful death suits, and/or the taxes that I pay that fund police would be spent more productively.

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Well “let them eat cake” is an example of being clueless, I think. And yeah, the solution isn’t to starve Marie Antoinette… it’s to ensure that the peasants have enough to eat.

Now in that example perhaps giving the peasants more would mean that Marie Antoinette had less. But the overwhelming majority of this stuff is not a zero sum game.

And one could even argue that by having happier subjects, the cost of protecting her would decrease, which would benefit her as well.

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fwiw, “let them eat cake” appears to be apocryphal.

But it’s an extreme example of how privilege works – those who have privilege are blind to the trials others experience. to a large degree, cluelessness is the usual result of privilege.

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143 posts were merged into an existing topic: Religious offshoot of “critical race theory” thread

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Yeah, I know, I was just running with the hypothetical.

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We could all look at this:

While the Bible might be some kind of history book (would be nice to have dates attached, like a REAL history book), it’s also filled with a bullshitload of fiction. And not the “And some believe…” kind of stuff you read in, say a Hamilton biography. It’s more like, “You WILL believe or you’ll go to HELL, and no it doesn’t have to be proven!!” kind of bullshit.
And yes, so does the NT.

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I think the interesting point is that looking for systemic racism makes us ask some very interesting questions. Normatively, it makes us wonder about whether adam and eve should be portrayed as white.

positively, it makes us want to study whether the creationism and white supremacy movements have strengthened each other.

i think this is a good thing.

But there is a temptation towards reductionism, where everything becomes about systemic racism. That article seems to at least partially succumb to that temptation, although i wonder if the author wasn’t trying to be provocative. Creationism becomes really about systemic racism rather than religion.

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FWIW, I don’t think creationism and racism are too tightly linked. However if you go back to the early arguments against evolution a lot of then do seem to revolve around some racist anti-black tropes including the “We’ll I’ll be monkey’s Uncle” and the imagery surrounding it. There were a lot of white who wanted no part f blacks in their family tree no matter how long ago that might have been.

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Here is another article:

It claims that:

“It’s time that we see the development of discriminatory technological products as an intentional act done by the largely white, male executives of Silicon Valley to uphold the systems of racism, misogyny, ability, class and other axis of oppression that privilege their interests and create extraordinary profits for their companies. And though these technologies are made to appear benevolent and harmless, they are instead emblematic of what Ruha Benjamin, professor of African American Studies at Princeton University and the author of Race After Technology , terms “The New Jim Code“: new technologies that reproduce existing inequities while appearing more progressive than the discriminatory systems of a previous era.”

I have a lot of sympathy for the claim that:

“ It’s time for us to reject the narrative that Big Tech sells—that incidents of algorithmic bias are a result of using unintentionally biased training data or unconscious bias. Instead, we should view these companies in the same way that we view education and the criminal justice system: as institutions that uphold and reinforce structural inequities regardless of good intentions or behaviors of the individuals within those organizations.”

But to me that is different from the earlier quote that this behavior is intentional.

I’ve heard that systemic racism is not about intent. But this seems a difficult prescription to follow in practice.

Either people reject the intent, and the guilt that seems to come with it, and thus reject systemic racism.

Or they embrace the intent along with systemic racism, at least partially.

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If that’s typical CRT, I’m not on board.

I don’t think that biased systems are necessarily the result of intentional racism.

The article is written by a PhD candidate, hoping to finish in 2022. Maybe I should discount it because the author isn’t a recognized leader in this field. Or, maybe I should take it seriously because this is the standard required for PhD level work.

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For me, it’s more a matter of taking what i like from it.

Systems can have a kind of inertia built into them in which they reproduce existing inequities.

I think it gets more subtle when we ask ourselves whether we, ourselves, are systems that naturally support the status quo. And if we support unjust status quo then are we complicit? Are we guilty? Probably to some degree.

But this article seems to devolve into a kind of fanaticism when it. confidently declares that these companies are intentionally supporting white supremacy.

I don’t think it’s helpful to ask whether this represents crt or not. Because ultimately there is no institution of crt, instead there are individual writers with individual ideas that must be evaluated separately.

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Text of Article
A Missouri legislative committee on Monday held a hearing on how educators teach K-12 students about race and racism without hearing from any Black Missourians.

No Black parents, teachers or scholars testified to the Joint Committee on Education during the invite-only hearing on critical race theory.

Aside from an official from Missouri’s education department, the only people who testified Monday were critics of critical race theory, which is a way of thinking about America’s history through the lens of racism.

Missouri NAACP President Rod Chapel called it “ridiculous” to have a conversation about inequity while “excluding the very people who are saying we’ve been treated inequitably.”

“That talks more to the kind of hearing that they wanted to have than the information that they wanted to gather,” Chapel told reporters after the hearing. “They wanted to hear from their friends who were going to support their political talking points.”

Republican Sen. Cindy O’Laughlin, who leads the committee, said she wanted to use the hearing to highlight voices of parents upset about critical race theory who have said local school officials ignored their complaints.

“I felt today it was important to hear from people who have tried to go through the official cycle of authority within their districts and have basically been turned away,” she told committee members.

O’Laughlin said she also invited an associate professor of teaching who specializes in Black history, but he declined to testify.

She said there will be more committee hearings on critical race theory and more opportunities for the public to weigh in.

“I’m certain this won’t be the last conversation,” she said.

Heather Fleming, a former Missouri teacher who now offers diversity and inclusion training, said she wanted to testify Monday but was not allowed. She said without any African Americans involved in the discussion, “you’re talking about us, without us.”

“What not having any African Americans in the room really showed was that this wasn’t really about understanding,” Fleming said.

Scholars developed critical race theory during the 1970s and 1980s in response to what they viewed as a lack of racial progress following the civil rights legislation of the 1960s.

It’s recently become a political lightning rod.

Many Republicans view the concepts underlying critical race theory as an effort to rewrite American history and persuade white people that they are inherently racist and should feel guilty because of their advantages.

“Some students are having serious emotional problems dealing with the CRT, or social justice, concepts being taught in our schools,” Katie Rash, a leader in the Missouri chapter of the group No Left Turn in Education, told the committee Monday.
Article End.

The bolding was mine to highlight the sweet, sick irony. By the way Republicans it is not rewriting history. It is about including historical events which have been whitewashed out of history. Yes Republicans it is a proven fact that America is racist from before it’s founding to today.

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How much of the US economy when slavery ended was being produced by slave labor? I think this is a question that has merit. I do know the North where there was no slavery was already doing far better economically which is the main reason they won the war. They had many more resources than the Confederacy did. The are where slaves were mainly held is still the poorest most economically depressed areas in the country.

While slavery was the most vile and evil example of systemic racism I believe the main barriers of African American economic success today are really from the systemic racism in policies that have been implemented long after slavery was over.

I do not want to downplay slavery, but the focus on it gives white people an out. Slavery is not responsible for the majority of economic hardship faced by many African Americans today.

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My personal anecdotal example of racism is the G.I. Bill. My father went into the navy at the beginning of the war dirt poor. He used the GI Bill after the war to work his way through school and receive an accounting degree. My and my siblings and my kids and my nieces and nephews can all track our success back to that welfare program. If my father was black all that success is lost.

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20th century stuff: between the GI bill benefits being restricted and racial covenants in real estate, I wonder if there are other large scale engineered ways to keep a group of people less wealthy.

college degree touted for a long time as improving family wealth. home ownership and the resultant appreciation is a HUGE generation to generation wealth transfer opportunity. What other huge ones am I missing?

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I think you mean that you’re personal anecdotal example of racism is the college your dad attended refuse to admit black students?

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Criminal justice system pretty consistently sentences African Americans at higher levels and for longer sentences.

Harder to get credit for a long time so higher interest loans for cars and credit cards means sucking more money from each paycheck form interest.

Gerrymandering today sucks their political power.

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Yep. Even the US Government recognizes that its actions are racist. The Anti-Drug Abuse Act signed into law by Ronald Reagan in 1986 specifically targeted crack vs. powder cocaine which "In 1995, the U.S. Sentencing Commission concluded that the disparity created a “racial imbalance in federal prisons and led to more severe sentences for low-level crack dealers than for wholesale suppliers of powder cocaine. … As a result, thousands of people – mostly African Americans – have received disproportionately harsh prison sentences.” (quote from wiki article on fair sentencing act)

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