Critical Race Theory

The Sandbox Political Topics
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Eh, it’s both.

The fact that 3 of my great-grandfathers and both of my grandmothers went to college and that both of my grandfathers and both of my parents have graduate degrees gave me advantages that my husband doesn’t have.

My husband’s American grandfather was a sharecropper and his African grandfather was a subsistence farmer. My husband was the first in his family to go to college, which he paid for partly with a scholarship and partly with student loans.

In my family money flows from the older generation to the younger generation. My parents paid for college, they pay for everything when we get together (occasionally I grab the bill at a restaurant, but you have to be fast with my mother… and forget about it when my stepfather was alive. He’d have given the restaurant his credit card when he made the reservation. No way could you possibly pay when he was around.)

In my husband’s family random aunts and cousins periodically hit him up for money because they know he’s successful.

So… cops tailing my husband when he drives the BMW but not me when I drive the same exact car is a present-day thing.

But the advantages I had by having my college fully paid for and growing up in an environment where it was expected from when I was a preschooler that I would be getting a bachelors degree at a minimum and the fact that my siblings and cousins all grew up with the same expectations… that’s generational.

I ended up not taking advantage of the fact that I was a legacy at two different Ivy League schools and a 3-generation legacy at another top STEM school that’s every bit as good as the Ivies. But it was an option available to me that was certainly not available to my husband. I could go to whichever school I wanted.

My husband went to the college that gave him the best sports scholarship and had to deal with the stresses of being a student athlete. When he was injured, bye bye scholarship.

And even, to a large extent, the fact that cops feel the need to tail my husband but not me is the result of the inherited racism of the cop and the people who trained him and the people he works with.

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242

Or in the words of Oscar Hammerstein:

It isn’t born in you; it happens after you’re born.

You have to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made
And people whose skin is a different shade
You have to be carefully taught.

You have to be taught before it’s too late
Before you are six or seven or eight
To hate all the people your relatives hate
You have to be carefully taught.

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The actual US, and the opportunities it offers it’s citizens, depends on a history of slavery and racism, in the sense that it owes its existence to a chain of causal events that includes slavery and racism.

Perhaps the US would be even richer were it to not have used enslaved labor. If so that may make the actual use of slavery even more tragic, but does not lessen the US’s responsibility for the enslaved labor it actually did use.

I agree that we should include people who benefited from investing in the US.

I am not claiming that everyone has identical obligation to act to fix things. More power and autonomy probably brings additional duties for action. The poor immigrant is not under the same obligation to act to fix racism as a Rockefeller. And in some cases the immigrant may be so exploited by economic forces that they are not really sharing in the economic and cultural inheritance of the US.

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To me you’re losing your sense of inherited assets / liabilities here. At first it was about inheriting your ancestors’ assets and liabilities. Then it was about inheriting your neighbors assets and liabilities. Then inheriting your neighbors’ ancestors assets and liabilities. Now there aren’t even any assets to inherit, you’re just inheriting total strangers’ ancestors’ debt.

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I think there are a lot of things we share in common, which make our way of life possible.

This includes shared laws, technology, art, ideas, philosophy, science, trust (albeit eroding), social networks, etc. And we also have common physical assets.

Finally, the nature of our economy is such that I still benefit from assets i’d don’t directly own. If I work for a company i don’t own then i am getting paid for my work. But there is also the opportunity to benefit from my work, which happens because the company exists on our capitalist economy. This is not owed to me.

Even the “american dream”, the idea that with hard work you can achieve fulfillment and security, had to be invented.

This is part of the shared inheritance that makes opportunity in this country possible. Really I mean our entire civilization. I don’t mean “inheritance” in the more narrow sense of a set of physical things or money.

And I’d argue its development cannot be separated from the economic development that involved enslaved labor and racism. Economic development always allows other cultural development. And some of what we benefit from is also directly economic, as i mentioned earlier.

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Right, this is an incredibly important point.

The company has to exist, the laws and infrastructure have to exist, someone before us figured out that it was a good idea for insurance companies to model risk and have regulators check the work. There have to be other companies willing to hire you too in order to drive up your pay.

In short there has to be a market for your skills. My husband’s African grandfather might have been a whiz at math but there weren’t jobs for math whizzes in his village. So he did something considerably less lucrative.

247

I completely agree that we inherit the opportunities from our society-- and that, in a fundamental sense people never “build from nothing”. They generally make a small improvement to an already existing economy, that is, to pre-existing technology / consumers / investors / supply-chains / etc.

But I’m not sure how this ties to slavery. To me the counterfactual is that America never allowed slavery. It this alternative universe, it would still be a “land of opportunity”, due to undeveloped natural resources and relative lack of pre-existing social structures. Immigrants would still come to this America. So why does an immigrant owe something to America’s unique history if they don’t benefit from America’s unique history?

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To use a possibly too simple analogy:

If a company steals money from you, and invests it, and makes a lot from that money, then future investors in that company owe you something. It doesn’t matter if the company could have gotten than money in a different way, without stealing from you. The fact is that it did steal from you, and this is what matters.

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I think it’s a good analogy. You can certainly have a innocent and late-arriving shareholder that loses money because of a class action lawsuit.

It’s also good because the shareholder doesn’t need to identify with the company at all-- the company (ie the US government) pays the liability, and the shareholder feels the pain of that without the guilt.

I think it also leads to issues-- what does it mean to have “invested” in America? (How do you buy more and how do you sell) And at what point does it become unjust to punish shareholders / inheritors?

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The Onion put out a handy guide to critical race theory

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251

This article is interesting. An Alabama politician is submitting legislation to ban the teaching of CRT. This reporter asked him what it is:

Whitmire: Alabama lawmaker wants to ban critical race theory, so I asked him what it is - al.com?

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This seems to be the case nearly 100% of the time. I don’t think any of them have the first clue about CRT.

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Fox is attempting to shut down conversations about race and racism

Obviously. Can’t risk their viewers consider America’s racial issues. They might stop blindly following what Fox News hosts tell them to do.

And even though many conservatives who lambast it don’t have a clue what the theory actually is, their efforts are working as 21 states are either introducing bans or have banned what they call “critical race theory.” Many educators in those states have argued that the bills and laws would essentially “whitewash history” and have criticized legislators for making it difficult to have necessary conversations about race.

It’s truly insane. We have at least 21 legislatures full of total idiots. Its surprising that our country still manages to function as well as it does.

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White wash is a good term for what they are trying to do.

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They’ve been doing it since the Civil War ended.

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257

Yes, i think the choice of language, “privilege” is unfortunate. It sounds like “privileged” people are being accused of a moral failing. And the natural response is to think, “i haven’t done anything wrong”.

I prefer “systemic racism”, because i think it captures the fact that we still have issues with racism that AREN’T specifically anyone’s fault, but we who bear no ill-will to members of historically disadvantaged races have work to do to improve the situation.

I think the claim is correct. But i still find the language can be unhelpful, as people’s initial response to it tends to be negative. Heck, my initial response was negative, and it took some reflection to realize why the ideas were solid, despite the off-putting language.

But I’ve gotten past that, and don’t have any better word for taking about specific people, so I’ll use that language for the rest of my post.

I agree with this. I think the goal should be that we all have all the privileges. Black people get white privilege, women get male privilege, men get female privilege, trans people get cis privilege, disabled people get abled privilege…

and that IS how privilege works. You have the privilege of not even noticing what’s going on around you. The example i like to use, because it’s totally apolitical, is that of right-handed privilege. I’m left handed, and live in a world made for right handed people. The little cups they served applesauce in when i was in school were folded so that if you held your spoon in your right hand you sort of squeezed the applesauce out of the cup’s folds, but i, using my left hand, pushed applesauce into them. I’m sure no right-handed children ever noticed that problem with the cups. They had privilege.

BS. I’m a middle aged white woman. I have zero fear the cops will shoot me if i get stopped for some minor traffic thing. Even if I’m driving through a bad part of town. And I’m pretty sure i am looking at this rationally. That’s partly “female privilege” (which exists, and is separate from male privilege) but it’s also partly white privilege.

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I suggested “White normal”. I think it is both more accurate and less confusing.

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I think there are two problems with this. One is that the concept of “privilege” is much broader than just race. The other is that your specific language suggests that non-whites are abnormal.

White normative would be better, but still has the problem of being limited to race.

I think this is a good start, though, in developing better language.

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You did “male privilege”, “female privilege”, etc. I have no problem with “male normal”, “female normal”, etc.

I like “normal” better than “normative” because the first has two syllables and the second three. When you’re doing slogans, syllable count matters.

And, I think 95% of Americans couldn’t tell the difference between “normal” and “normative”.

My idea is that “This is the world that ____ people normally experience. Most of them don’t think it is exceptional. People who aren’t ____ ought to be able to take the same things for granted.”