I’m a proponent of Capitalism and was born well after Adam Smith. Yes, Kendi is considered one of the current leading proponents for CRT.
In practical terms, yes there are times when considering race/ethnicity is completely appropriate. Outreach and communication are 2 such areas. Adds and material in English don’t help much in areas where the primary language is Spanish, Vietnamese, or Mandarin. Mistrust of certain types of government agencies is higher in black communities due to historical abuses.
The underlying programs and especially requirements for programs should not be based on race. Equal treatment under the law for everyone regardless of race, creed, religion, or sexual orientation.
They aren’t trolls. But I think they are extremists. The vast majority of liberals want some degree of policing.
I’ve seen examples of where trying to rein in bad policing just ended up giving more money to the bad police, who misused it. But I’m pretty sure that if you just cut the budget from a bad police department, they will stop trying to solve crimes and help endangered people, and spend more time stopping people in speeding traps to increase their revenue.
And if you completely defund the police, and build something new, you are going to end up re-hiring most of the same people. I mean, you need people who want to do police-like stuff, and there are a bunch who just happen to be looking for work and already live there.
Personally, I think we need to change the externalities, of which the most important is qualified immunity. I once saw a map of district courts and how they interpreted qualified immunity, and BOY did that correlate with killings by police. Make it easier to convict an officer who murders people, and fewer officers will do it.
No, it’s not a complete solution. But “reduce police murders” is a really valuable outcome, and one that I think is achievable.
“Pay for” is a really loaded way to say “correct for”.
Is it that hard for white people to understand the concept of white privilege? Are they so fragile that the idea that people of color have to deal with challenged white people don’t?
Seems perfectly reasonable. Here are the next couple sentences in his book:
“As President Lyndon B. Johnson said in 1965, “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘You are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.” As U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun wrote in 1978, “In order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race. There is no other way. And in order to treat some persons equally, we must treat them differently.””
(Fun fact: Justice Blackmun was a Nixon apointee)
What method do you think is better than eliminating racist policies and laws?
So you propose we should use a method identical to CRT to determine which policies and laws lead to the poverty cycle? I don’t know how else you do it.
This is a CRT analysis.
What if this approach leads to racist outcomes? Is your answer that it’s just too bad for the disadvantaged? We can’t ignore the past when we are dealing with the present.
If it doesn’t, every attempted implementation I have seen does.
If you are expected to give up assets you are paying for something.
Yelling racist or white fragility does not a reasoned argument make.
Fund fact Johnson’s quote was over 55 years ago. Not still as relevant today.
Chief Justice Roberts wrote: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”
That’s actually what I am promoting.
CRT views everything through a racial lens. I propose using a soci-economic one.
Umm… no. But you can’t ignore history and facts as they are when trying to deal with real world situations.
This approach specifically avoids race based outcomes. If other factors correlated with race result in racial disparities then you look at possibly tweaking the programs based on those factors. But the goals/changes must not be aimed at engineered racial outcomes. That’s simply racism under cover of law. That should not be allowed regardless of if it provides advantage or disadvantage to any group.
Can you give the examples of implementation that you have seen?
So if my father stole $1B from our neighbor and then my father died leaving the money to me, is it unreasonable for my neighbor to take that money away from me? Or would you argue that I don’t need to pay for the sins of my father?
Not yelling. I’m just saying that if the entire notion of white privilege is so shattering to somebody’s mind that it causes them resentment then maybe there actually is validity to the white fragility argument.
Its just as relevant today because people like you have fought against efforts to make the race fair.
Roberts is wrong on lots of things. Voting rights, racism, etc.
Which is the whole point of CRT.
Why not both?
Its absolutely a CRT analysis. CRT is the analysis of the intersection of race and law/policy. That’s literally what you just did. You don’t have to be afraid of CRT. It’s a perfectly reasonable approach.
Sadly the people most against CRT never seem to understand what CRT is.
So you want us to ignore how policy has led to some races being disadvantaged and as a result having worse outcomes? Why?
So you are arguing that trying to eliminate the racial disparities that have been caused by hundreds of years of US law and policy is “racist”? That’s completely absurd. It’s a way to try and handwave away real problems just because they don’t affect you and you don’t want to do anything that could actually even the playing field. It’s total nonsense. You can’t just cry racism as a way to prevent attempts at fixing problems caused by actual racism in the past.
Reasonable request: I have several relatives/friends in social work/education fields. They have almost all been to CRT inspired trainings where white people have been classified as “oppressors” and beneficiaries of “white privilege” regardless of their own person/family histories. Then they are told that the must engage in anti-racist behaviors or they are supporting an inherently racist system. Followed by having any questions or objections defined as counterproductive and racist in nature by definition.
Dramatic oversimplification for effect without any reasoning or relevance to the true much more complex issues.
If being called a racist when you’re not causes resentment then white fragility is a real thing. (See end of #1 above.)
“Is so still relevant cause you’re a racist. So there.”
“Roberts is wrong cause I say so. So there.”
The academic underpinnings of CRT sound decent. The actual implementation and effects are not. See quote above from I.X. Kendi.
Viewing policy through a racial lens just encourages the separation of people into competing racial groups. I prefer to take Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s stance. Judge people based on their actions and character.
I suppose it could be considered a CRT analysis. That’s not how I got there, but it could have been.
No, I don’t suggest ignoring history. I suggest learning from it and not repeating the same mistakes in new forms.
Committing injustices in the present is no way to make up for past injustices. A large amount of the disparate black poverty is directly due to overtly racial past policies. Only a fool would try to deny that. Those types of policies are not a problem today.
The problem today is the poverty cycle and the crime that goes with it. The best solutions come in the form of effective education, job opportunities, and programs that encourage marriage and smaller family sizes for poor families. These types of solutions are racially neutral and the policies should be as well. They will end up helping blacks in disproportionate amount because blacks are, as a group poorer than others. That’s perfectly fine. What you should not do is exclude other groups in poverty based on race from the programs in order to achieve specific racial outcomes.
Some of the more extreme opinions on “police defunding” remind me more than anything of the kind of utopianism seen in marxism, and sometimes in libertarianism or anarchism.
It is this idea that if we get rid of the police, we will somehow find ways to collectively secure ourselves in a moral way. It was not much more specific than that. It reminds me very much of the communist state wilting away, and everybody simply taking what they need.
Regardless of whether you are a capitalist, I think it tends to be a mistake to talk about “capitalism” as opposed to specific claims. Labels are more useful for academics trying to write histories, and for politicians trying to drum up uncritical support, than for dialogue and learning. At least, this is my experience.
I tend to agree with what you are saying here about equality under the law.
However i think there is a danger to it. We must consider whether people are actually getting equal treatment in practice rather than in principle. These things may be in tension or even conflict. Simply dressing our law in apparent principles of equality doesn’t necessarily give us equality. We can’t allow sentimentality for our liberal ideals, and our personal comfort in the status quo (i’m comfortable at least), to keep us from truly answering this question.
I fully agree with this. We should have equality under the law in practice. My concern is that this is not the same thing as equity. A number of people are pushing equity in outcomes, which perforce requires inequality in practice under the law. That is not okay.
the only way to eliminate racial inequality is through education, and this starts from grade one. There should be a uniform education standard for the whole country. How much would this cost? This is the the root of the whole problem imho
Indeed. Yet we should think broadly about how to achieve that end result. A quick example or two highlighting institutional racism rather than individual is helpful.
Woodrow Wilson demoted all black supervisors in the US Postal system. Just plan racism, agreed? These were jobs that served as entry to the middle class. But they were no more.
the GI bill did not apply to black servicemen. The actual benefits were determined at the state level, and the south was having no part of integrating there existing universities. Now, both my father and father in law used the GI bill to attend universities and get loans for their first homes. This put two men from pretty low socio economic status (widowed mothers with multiple children) on the path to solid middle class, professional lives. I benefited greatly as well from that.
See, I didn’t have to do anything racist to still benefit from the policies. Should I pay higher taxes today so that college tuition is subsidized for everyone? A rational case can be made for that. Am I paying for the past behaviors? I suppose I am.