For future reference.
First, William Galston writes,
Critical race theory is an explicitly left-wing movement inspired by the thinking of an Italian neo-Marxist, Antonio Gramsci. Against classic Marxism, for which material conditions are primary, Gramsci (1891-1937) focused on “hegemony”—the system of beliefs that “reinforces existing social arrangements and convinces the dominated classes that the existing order is inevitable,” as Ms. Crenshaw puts it.
Noteworthy because Galston is center-left. He is burning some bridges here.
Rather than quibbling over whether what critics are criticising is really the theories that emerged in legal studies from the 1970s, let’s address the reality of what critical theories of race look like right now and how they are impacting real people of all races.
In much of the essay, Pluckrose really gets into the theoretical weeds, even though she points out that a different CRT has been popularized than what was created in academia. This reminds me of Keynesian economics in grad school, where there were all sorts of esoteric discussions of what Keynes really meant and what Keynesian economics ought to be. Meanwhile, what took hold in the press and in public policy is what I call “folk” Keynesianism, which is nothing more than “spending creates jobs, and jobs create spending.” The academic arguments matter only to the academics.
Similarly, I expect that academic discussions of critical race theory no longer affect “folk” critical race theory, or FCRT, if you will. FCRT is what K-12 teachers and journalists carry with them. I think it includes a belief in the moral inferiority of white males. It includes a belief that “privilege” is a very important concept. I think it includes some Puritan sensibilities, particularly an unforgiving stance regarding heretics. But these are tentative thoughts about FCRT. I do not feel confident that I have it pinned down yet.
According to Christofer Rufo “Critical Race Theory” should now be used as a catch all to describe anything at all politically unpopular with Americans.
https://twitter.com/realchrisrufo/status/1371541044592996352?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1371541044592996352%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2021%2F07%2F13%2Fopinion%2Fcritical-race-theory.html
If my county proposes a property tax increase, that may be politically unpopular, but nobody would call it “critical race theory”.
I’m reminded of the old phrase about pornography, “I know it when I see it.”
When people post crazy DEI seminars hosted by their institutions online…everyone immediately understands that’s critical race theory just by looking at it. When a school board decides that an advanced math program has to be shut down because of “Equity” concerns, that’s critical race theory. These things are indeed unpopular, but they are specific things and not just something that is generically unpopular.
>—-“If my county proposes a property tax increase, that may be politically unpopular, but nobody would call it “critical race theory”.
Really? You’re sure no one would complain that the tax increase was being used to pay for CRT incursions into education and/or increase racial “equity”? I agree it would be linguistic malpractice to use the term that way. Guess who doesn’t agree?
It’s your hero Rufo who wants to attach the term to (in HIS words) “the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.” Tax increases are unpopular so they easily qualify.
If a tax increase is used to fund CRT, then it would be fair to call it CRT. Just like it would be fair for the tax my town has to pay for the small baseball stadium we have in the middle of town to be called the “baseball stadium tax” (which it literally is in my tax statement).
I am not all that well versed in CRT.
But it strikes me as not Marxist.
Marxist analysis is class-oriented.
CRT is obsessed with race, sex (gender), other IDs. Many upper-class women are full-on CRT.
Note how easily the multinationals and large institutions embraced CRT.
Apple (Disney, BlackRock, WalMart, Bain, etc) can run some woke ads, hire by ID.
The idea that Apple is sourcing where labor share of income is lowest is not discussed. That globalism, in part, is always sourcing where subsidies are highest (taxed from the population) and labor share of income is lowest. The idea of comparative advantage is from outdated textbooks.
For US economic elites, the ID politics is perfect—import more cheap labor. If you against illegal immigration, it is because you are racist. (BTW, the most ardent immigrationists in US history were…the slavers).
The CIA runs some woke ads. The US military as global guard service for multinationals is not an issue, as long as they fly the rainbow flag. Rachel Maddow salutes.
CRT will do nothing to bring back middle-class living standards in the US.
In some ways, Trump populists and BLM have the same roots—declining results for the bottom two-thirds of the American labor force.
CRT turns people on each other. How nice.
>—“But it strikes me as not Marxist.
Marxist analysis is class-oriented.”
True, but you are missing the point Ben. Just like the term “racism,” the term “Critical Race Theory” has become an all purpose pejorative epithet with little connection to its former meaning. It’s bad faith argumentation on both sides.
What else would you call all this stuff?
Just like it’s absurd that what Kendi is hawking goes by the name ‘Antiracism’, I agree it’s unfortunate things have settled on ‘CRT’.
But what name would you give it that won’t just cause a lot of quibbling and bad faith dissembling about what this person or that theory ‘really’ means, or whether that is *exactly* what is or isn’t being taught in school or organization lecture sessions?
Now, one of the reason’s ‘CRT’ is an unfortunate term is that, ironically, and like Douthat, McWhorter, and Loury, most of those upset white parents probably don’t even disagree with about half of it. They tend to wishful thinking liberals and race optimists – not race realists – and are willing to go along with many of the claims regarding the unnaturalness of the big racial disparities, that diversity is our strength, the justness and need for race preferences and affirmative action, and so forth.
So, it would be better to have a name for just the objectionable bits they are getting upset about. Which, let’s face it, amount to little more than “White Devilism”.
The whole humiliating and demonizing, unfalsifiable faux-intellectual framework is just a bunch of gobbledygook cover for what, at it’s heart, is just agitprop for power-and-money-grabbing via weaponized resentment with a designated evil archetype to take all the blame.
“So, it would be better to have a name for just the objectionable bits they are getting upset about.”
I nominate “neoracism.” It is a simple term. It is kind of intuitive, easy to rally against, it sounds bad enough that nobody would want to be called one, and certainly nobody wants their kids brainwashed to become one.
I get what you’re saying by neoracism, but you gotta admit, that would make any progressive just roll his eyes. It just raises the question, “What do you want to prohibit teachers from saying?”
And the answer, it seems to me, is not really ‘CRT’ in any strict sense, but simply “All white people and literally everything is racist; everything bad that happens to – and indeed, any negative feeling experienced by – any black person, is, in the final analysis, white people’s fault; American society is structurally white supremacist, socially unjust, unfair, worthy of condemnation, and requiring radical interventions and upheaval to merely make things fair; that anyone who questions or objects to any of this is a conscious or unconscious bigot who should be ostracized unless and until they get with the program.”
In order words, those parents thought they could accept everything from the 60’s and 70’s, but somehow hold the line at 2003. But unfortunately, all that above has been the elite progressive consensus in this country for decades and it was only a matter of time before the dam broke on the Great Awokening and it eventually trickled down into ordinary suburban public school classrooms.
To Handle,
Yeah, I agree with everything you say (I am a big admirer of your comments). I think the non-left needs to have a simple and morally unfavorable term for this package of leftist beliefs.
Telling a child he is privileged because he is white is neoracist.
Telling a child she is a victim because she is black is neoracist.
Sorting and separating individuals by race is neoracist
Lowering standards due to disparate impact is neoracist
Nobody should be a neoracist. Nobody should associate with neoracists. Nobody should allow neoracists into their schools. Nobody should send their kids into schools run by neoracists. Any public school allowing or encouraging neoracists should be closed immediately and the parents offered neoracist-free educational facilities free of charge.
Freedom from neoracism should be a right!
I am exaggerating for effect of course. But that is the level of discourse needed to fight back the woke. And I am not using the term “fight” lightly. We need to draw a line in the sand on this one, and eradicate neoracism.
White Devilism is certainly a part of it, but in a way the White Devilism is necessary if you are going to hawk a kind of aggressive affirmative actionism that goes beyond the existing detente on the matter.
How do you admit unqualified blacks to a magnet school that’s too Asian without establishing that “merit is white supremacy” and “Asians are white adjacent”?
Affirmative Action agitprop hit a wall were there were no more easy sinecures to hand out and nobody wanted to sign up for reparations or other nonsense. Breaking through that wall required ratcheting the rhetoric up to 11 to overturn the common sense limiting instinct of average liberals.
I’ll add on other thing.
The Slavers couldn’t be content keeping Slavery where it was, they had to expand.
They had to expand in part because if they did not expand they would lose political power versus an expanding North, which might end them one day anyway.
They had to expand because they had decided their way of life was not just an unfortunate necessity, but a positive good, largely in refute of the abolitionist accusation of it being a great evil.
Affirmative Action is much the same way. The longer it goes on without achieving its stated goals, the less legitimate it is. Sandra Day O’Conner literally placing a 25 year time limit on it. So the less legitimate it becomes, the more it must loudly assert its own legitimacy.
It also needs to grow in order to increase its practical power in order to preserve itself. The more DEI gets its claws in every aspect of society, the harder it is to remove.
So like the pre-Civil war Slavers the AA crowd has a conundrum. They need to expand or die. Yet, their very expansion causes backlash that may kill them.
>—“What else would you call all this stuff?”
I don’t really care exactly what you call it and I am not here to defend CRT in any of its forms.
Rojellio’s suggestion of “neo-racism would be a big improvement. Probably you need more than one term to refer to “all” this stuff.
When you use one term to refer to “the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans” (to quote the exact definition given by the person most famous for promoting the use of the term CRT) then you will inevitably dilute the potency of the term. This is what has happened with the word “racism.”
Here’s an idea: Deliberately sloppy language is NOT the best way to combat deliberately sloppy language.
“I am not here to defend CRT in any of its forms.”
You seem a lot more concerned about the people fighting CRT then you are with CRT.
Rufo clearly means cultural constructs related to race (and perhaps gender) issues associated with the rise of Wokeism in the last decade.
People don’t need a new word every time some woke person comes up with a new dingbat theory. Is it LBGT, or LGBTQ, or LGBTQIA+:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/21/style/lgbtq-gender-language.html
Rufo is right that we should just pick a term for “all that bullshit” and run with it.
It’s not absurd. “Racist” means “white.”
Yes. In Kendi speak, racist = white.
White identity politics is what the left fears most. Hence we should replace CRT with anti-white racism or just anti-whiteness. Our rhetoric should be that these people hate white people, want to tear them down and vilify them, want them to be less successful. It has the advantage of being true of many leftists. We should try to force leftists on television to say things like “it’s okay to be white” or “we want white children to be confident and successful.” When the leftists can’t do it, send those clips around the country over and over and over again. Repeat the message again and again. In many states and cities, the population remains 85% white. Get as much political control as possible and use it as countervailing force against elite media and academia. Create state and local laws banning discrimination against political viewpoints in the office and public accommodations.
Right, this isn’t traditional Marxism. CRT is something that capital can embrace, because it doesn’t threaten the position of capital. If you read people on the old left, they’ve been pointing out that CRT/anti-whiteness alienate potential allies, namely lower class whites who might otherwise support a leftist candidate for the sake of higher minimum wages, Medicare for all, etc. Medicare for all may sound nice to some people, but if the people pushing it seem to hate you, its awfully hard to entrust them with your medical care.
“In some ways, Trump populists and BLM have the same roots—declining results for the bottom two-thirds of the American labor force.”
Martin Gurri suggested something similar on his recent appearance on the Bari Weiss podcast Honestly. The interview is very good. Martin traces the origins of Trump populism and BLM activism to a shared nihilistic desire to negate or rebuke (founded in his view in the shattering of unified sensemaking by the news media), but with no actual positive policy to replace what is torn down. In his view, neither movement can have a positive policy platform because they are only able to suggest policy through mass movement slogans. Once they move to a deeper level of detail the various factional differences become visible and the coalitions break down.
It reminds me of how Ayn Rand used to write and speak when she would say “And then what is their answer to this problem? Nothing. Blankout.” The idea of the blank out. The lack of reflectivity is apparent here.
One difference is that if it is true that Trump could shoot someone on 5th Avenue in broad daylight and not suffer any loss of support, he could have had a positive policy program that overall helped his supporters or delivered on their priorities even if many of the details were unpopular. I think that the “Muslim ban” would be one example of this. “Kids in cages” is another.
A similar effect can be seen with MMT, where FMMT is, “The government can spend as much as it wants with no problems.” We might be finding out whether this is true over the next few years.
Real MMTers advocate raising taxes when inflation occurs.
For example, due to a spike in inflation, an MMT policy today might be a $500 per head $1,000 per family lump sum tax payable next April 15th, a sort of anti-stimulus check requiring people to save in order to make the tax payment.
The term “liberal” got co-opted in the 1920s (or perhaps earlier) to mean the exact opposite of the original meaning.
Likewise, the terms “woke” and “CRT” got co-opted in 2020/2021 as a pejorative and to great effect.
Is that a problem? If so, why? Any marketing majors out there that are willing to opine?
Not a marketing major here but some history could be of more help on this than marketing expertise.
When classical liberalism began, it began in opposition to something. That something was a conservatism that wanted to preserve mercantilist economics, the power of established religions, and pre-existing hierarchies. Conservatives always opposed classical liberalism and still do for those same reasons. See F.A. Hayek’s essay “Why I Am Not A Conservative.”
William F. Buckley Jr. started the modern movement in America to make the word “liberalism” a pejorative. Ronald Reagan’s defining it as what he was opposed to was the key move in the redefinition. There has always been a part of the political left that was illiberal. Today illiberalism is resurgent on both right and left.
Whether or not you think these language changes are good or not depends on whether or not you think this is just a “marketing” issue or whether or not some FIT style intellectual integrity should attach to the discussion. Opinions vary on that apparently.
I think this is too much a “Great Man” theory of rhetorical history. The distinction between ‘modern liberalism’ and ‘classical liberalism’ goes back to around the time of JS MIill and similar thinkers who began supporting welfare state type policies in addition to free trade etc. The identification of classical liberalism with conservatism in America was much more organic than merely an invention of Buckley. The fact that American conservatives were less sanguine about a powerful central government and a state church (since they couldn’t agree on the right church) meant that American conservatives genuinely did have a greater overlap with classical liberalism than European conservatives did. Which is why Hayek didn’t even need to wrote a book called “Why I’m not a Progressive.” No one would have thought to accuse him of being one.
All good points Mark but let’s remember there never was a time when self identified liberals and self identified conservatives weren’t on opposite sides of most active policy disputes.
I can think of a few contradictory examples. The German National Liberal Party allied with Bismarck against the (at the time, communist) Social Democratic party. I believe in the early 20th century, the Liberals in the UK were often closer to the conservatives than they were to Labour. Even to this day in Germany, the liberal Free Democratic Party is much closer to the Christian Democrats than to the Social Democrats.
And in the early days of British liberalism, the working class left was generally supportive of the corn laws along with the conservative aristocrats, no? The liberals were opposed to everyone.
“Not a marketing major here but some history could be of more help on this than marketing expertise.”
Not a history major either?
(Also, lmk when you’re ready to address the substance of my comment)
Here is the footnote on pp. 15 of Yergin’s book, “The Commanding Heights.”
***
How was the meaning of this word altered so dramatically in the United States? During the First World War, some of the leading Progressive writers began to use the word liberalism as a substitute for progressivism, which had become tarnished by its association with their fallen hero, Theodore Roosevelt, who had run and lost on a Progressive third party ticket. Traditional liberals were not happy to see their label transformed. In the 1920s, The New York Times criticized “the expropriation of the time-honored word ‘liberal’ ” and argued that “the Radical-Red school of thought … hand back the word ‘liberal’ to its original owners.” During the early 1930s, Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt duked it out as to who was the true liberal. Roosevelt won, adopting the term to ward off accusations of being left-wing. He could declare that liberalism was “plain English for a changed concept of the duty and responsibility of government toward economic life.” And since the New Deal, liberalism in the United States has been identified with an expansion of government’s role in the economy.
>—” And since the New Deal, liberalism in the United States has been identified with an expansion of government’s role in the economy.”
Yes, but not just since the New Deal. Since the beginning actually.
Early classical liberals favored an increased government role in maintaining the currency, regulating weights and measures, facilitating the expansion and maintenance of roads, canals, harbors and other infrastructure they believed would promote the general welfare.
Conservatives at the time objected to this expansion of the government’s traditional roles. Liberals have always been in the center between illiberal conservatives and illiberal progressives and revolutionaries. Same as it ever was.
Yergin > Greg G. Sorry and not even close. However, keep typing away if you want.
I know of a few continental European liberal parties like the German FDP that support smaller government, as did the French Liberals of the late 19th century a la Bastiat. A small government classical liberal would’ve been recognized by Marx as a liberal, not a conservative. I think you’re engaging in a bit of presentism here. ‘Liberal’ in the 19th century seemed to run the gamut from minarchist to what would today be considered a ‘pro-welfare-state liberal.’
As for the issue of presentism Mark, there has never been a time in the past (and won’t be one in the future) when political terms like this haven’t been continuing to evolve in their meanings. That is because the same underlying general principles are applied to different issues as time marches on.
Liberals have always had a focus on increasing equality of opportunity. This inevitably results in more change than conservatives are comfortable with and more inequality than Progressives and revolutionaries are comfortable with.
Greg G, My understanding is that liberalism did indeed begin in opposition to “mercantilist economics, the power of established religions, and pre-existing hierarchies.” The biggest threats to people’s liberty (same root as liberal) and happiness were considered to be bad government actions: restrictive laws, giving special treatment to hereditary nobles, incompetent administration, etc. So “liberalism” meant small government.
But beginning around the 1880s there arose a school of thought that the biggest threats to liberty were now from the big corporations and the chaos of cities. Increasing liberty would now mean bigger government, but no longer run on a hereditary or corrupt basis. Now it would be run by public-spirited experts, liberally the best and the brightest.
Which allowed “liberals” to make common cause with people coming out of the socialist tradition, and for much of the left to call itself liberal.
This meaning gradually took over among ordinary people and in popular political discourse. People like Hayek and Friedman complained but they were way too late.
Kendi himself has stated that his own work has been influenced by academic CRT. I have pointed this out to my son’s Head of School when she tried the common pedantic dodge of “CRT is a legal theory and we don’t teach it” to dismiss my concerns. But having taken the time to read much of the foundational CRT work – along with Kendi, Coates & D’Angelo – I’m now fairly sure I’m on firmer theoretical ground than any educator I am likely to meet. I suggest other parents start using the term Critical Race Pedagogy or CRT influenced pedagogy. And read & engage with at least the 3 mentioned above to be able talk to teachers in the language they are now using. Activate your Scout mindsets!
Kendi was for CRT before he was against it.
(Hat tip to John Kerry from back in the day)
If this doesn’t make you feel like the fCRT agenda has been effective, then I don’t know what will.
However, if you’d like to masturbate over semantics then have at it. But, I’m looking for results. GSD vs. Hail Mary passes.
CRT in the everyday world represents today’s iteration of the undying quest for the great moral orgasm (or experience of the Transcendent). Necessary practices include seeking status through making merits — performing good works — demonstrating knowledge of the catechism and leaning into any self-identity that radiates oppression.
Good works teaching that white hetero males are guilty a great sin. Showing you know the catechism includes confessing that silence truly is violence. And leaning into self-identity of oppression includes “understanding” that white hetero males have the least authority of any human.
CRT in the everyday world represents today’s iteration of the undying quest for the great moral orgasm (or experience of the Transcendent). Necessary practices include seeking status through making merits — performing good works — demonstrating knowledge of the catechism and leaning into any self-identity that radiates oppression.
Good works include teaching that white hetero males are guilty a great sin. Showing you know the catechism includes confessing that silence truly is violence. And leaning into self-identity of oppression includes “understanding” that white hetero males have the least authority of any human.
I kept seeing people say, “This isn’t CRT. CRT isn’t taught in high school. Read Delgado and Stefancic’s ‘CRT: An Introduction’ if you want to know what CRT really is. So I read it. And I learned that all the stuff I was being told isn’t CRT is in fact CRT.
Amusingly, the third edition contains an anecdote about an earlier edition being used in a high school class. So I learned that CRT, even in the strictest sense, is sometimes taught in high schools. But even those PowerPoint presentations that keep getting leaked to Christopher Rufo are CRT. Vulgar CRT, perhaps, but the basic ideas behind them are unmistakably derived from CRT.
I also learned that CRT is mostly a bunch of poorly-reasoned just-so stories. It arose out of the cognitive dissonance experienced by civil rights activists when their legal victories failed to translate to rapid socioeconomic convergence with whites the way it had for Jews and Asians.
Since race is socially constructed, CRT theorists reasoned, racism must be the cause of any socioeconomic disparities. So they looked for subtler forms of racism to root out and destroy. And as society gets less and less racist with no material progress to show for it, ever more disproportionate power must be attributed to ever subtler forms of racism in order to avoid confronting the possibility that racism isn’t actually the cause of socioeconomic disparities.
So they tell these just-so stories about generational wealth (not a real thing; wealth rapidly dissipates across generations rather than compounding), racist policing (can explain at most a small percentage of criminal justice outcomes), school segregation (most of the test score gap is between students at the same schools), employer discrimination (research suggests that this may occur to some degree at the low end of the labor market, but test scores explain more than 100% of the gap at the high end), and so forth. All these stories have a superficial verisimilitude, but they can explain at most a very small portion of the socioeconomic disparities that we observe.
The irony is that, about hegemony, Kimberle Crenshaw was right. It’s just that the existing social arrangements are being enforced or reinforced by people on the left, so people on the left aren’t going to cast a critical eye on themselves.
What they themselves do “convinces the dominated classes that the existing order is inevitable.” Convincing the dominated classes that “collusion” theories are in no way similar to conspiracy theories, for example. Semantic obfuscation, 24 hours a day, rewriting history, reversing every position as the moment requires.
Pretending that Kamala Harris never said, on the debate stage on TV, that she wouldn’t take Trump’s vaccine. Lying about how Harris and Amy Klobuchar and Ron Wyden and Adam Schiff never said a word about voting machines or hacking a vote. Claiming that it was easier for a black man to vote in 1959 than in 2019, and that actual Jim Crow laws were less restrictive than what the president is calling “Jim Crow on steroids.”
Fawning profiles in the NYT and the New Yorker pretending that Randi Weingarten has always been eager to get kids into schools, memory-holing Randi Weingarten’s theories about “the ownership class” trying to get kids into schools.
From one side of the mouth we’re told that the race theorists have nothing to do with the curriculum and from the other side of the mouth we’re told that the race theorists must be placed at its core.
it seems to me that the very existence of CRT – a field of scholarship that has grown consistently in now 5 decades and is extending its influence across multiple academic disciplines – undermines its foundational premise of a powerful white supremacist hegemony in the US that uses all power structures to undermine & oppress people of color