What we talk about when we talk about "critical race theory," Part II: The academic version of "critical race theory," and why it is bullshit

 Welcome back.  To... no one.  I'm simply going to shout into the void about the irritating public "debate," such as it is, about critical race theory, taking place between people who have either never read the literature, or just refuse to engage in its substance.  As I noted in Part I, there is a puzzle in our national dialog here.  A disjoint.  Those who defend "critical race theory" most vigorously in the public sphere are actually the kind of people attacked quite vigorously by critical race theory in the literature itself.  How did critical race theorists convince modern American liberals to advocate a scholarly model that calls them somewhere between dupes and enablers of permanent racial oppression?  Something weird is happening.  The American left got snookered.

In order to explain how, we need to explain what critical race theory actually is.  Let's do that.

Remember, critical race theory is not the history of racism and racial inequality.  It is not the idea that we should teach a complete history of America.  It is none of these things, and anyone telling you this has either never read any critical race theory, or is just lying.

Critical race theory is not even "systemic racism," about which I write semi-frequently.  It is something very different.

In Part I, I introduced the topic with the hypothetical scenario of a 10-point short answer question on an exam, and a cheater who sneaks a phone into the exam, and Google's "critical race theory."  The student lists five tenets:  counter-narratives, whiteness as property, the permanence of racism, interest convergence, and the rejection of liberalism.  For the purposes of this series, we're just going to go with this.  There are actually a lot of variations of CRT, and you can go and read as much as you want.  Have at it.  Just read it with a healthy skepticism.  What I shall do this morning, though, is give some explanation of these basic elements, along with the reasons that anyone approaching the study of the social world with a scientific or empirical mindset should be extremely skeptical at best of these proposals.

Counter-narratives

Let's just start with the major point, from a scientific point of view.  Critical race theory, as a phrase, uses the word, "theory."  It is not, however, a theory in the scientific sense of the word, "theory."  The word, "theory," is an unfortunate word.  Colloquially, a "theory" is a thing that one thinks to be true but does not know to be true.  If you ask a random person on the street to define, "theory," you will usually get some version of that.  In Political Science, we divide the discipline between four primary subfields:  American Politics (weird enough to get its own subfield), Comparative Politics, International Relations, and Political Theory.  In this context, a theory is something like a normative philosophy.  Think Hobbes, Rousseau, and so forth.  Then, there is the scientific definition of "theory."  A theory is a broad explanation for a set of observations that has been subjected to repeated testing and verification.  In colloquial terms, a theory is something less than a fact.  In scientific terms, a theory is something more than a fact.  To say that evolution is a theory, for example, is an exaltation, not a diminution.  Anyone who ever uses the phrase, "just a theory," has made a mistake in thinking that "theory" is a diminutive.

Critical race theory.  What kind of theory is it?  Closer to the normative than the scientific.  Indeed, it is anti-scientific.  It is postmodern.  Postmodern philosophy rejects the idea of objective truth, or at least, our ability to assess it.  Hence, it rejects science.  Postmodernism can make for fun literature, hence my fondness for Stanislaw Lem and certain other writers.  However, it is useless fucking bullshit when it comes to interacting with the actual world.

Regardless, within the realm of postmodern philosophy, if you reject the idea that truth is knowable, or at least, study-able, then the world reduces to narratives.  There is my narrative, and your narrative.  According to critical race theory, the world is structured around narratives that support a racial hierarchy.  These narratives are to be fought by telling other narratives.  Counter-narratives.

This is really the origin of critical race theory, in epistemological terms.  It is rooted in a general thing called "critical theory."  No race.  You cannot understand critical race theory without understanding how it developed from critical theory.

What is a "critical theory?"  A critical theory has three elements:  it explains the world, it is normative, and it gives practical guidance for changing the world toward normative ends.  Note that this is kinda different from a scientific theory, but remember Marx?  Marx wasn't an Ivory Tower academic.  He wasn't involved in a predictive endeavor, purely speaking.  He wrote that the goal was to use one's writing to change the world.  He was trying to bring about the revolution that he was predicting.  So this should all sound familiar.  Marx just wasn't writing in this kind of general terminology.  He was more interested in spilling as much blood as possible, because he wanted to murder as many people as he could convince the masses to murder.  For, like, the greater good, or something.  (Seriously, read that guy.  He was psycho.  Adam Smith versus Karl Marx, and the hippy-dippy fuckwits go with Marx?  Yeah, this is why we need to get back to teaching basic reading comprehension.  One of these guys wanted to go on a mass murder spree.  The other didn't.  Me = Capitalist.)

Anyway, critical theory came out of post-Marxism.  Marx predicted a worker's revolution in Germany which never happened.  There has never been a worker's revolution.  There have been top-down attempts to impose things like workers' revolutions.  The Bolsheviks, Mao... But at the basic level, Marx made a wrong prediction.  Why was he wrong?  What happened?  Why do workers keep not revolting?  I mean, they're revolting, but they're not revolting, revolting, if you get my meaning.  They're just revolting.

Why do they keep not tearing down the system that Marxists think they should want to tear asunder?

The best Marx takedown, in my opinion, may be found in Mancur Olson's The Logic of Collective Action.  He argued that Marx built his argument on a logical contradiction.  Marx argued that workers were supposed to decide that it was in their self-interest to organize a workers' revolt, but Marx was an idiot who couldn't do math.  Olson did the math, and found the collective action problem.  The math doesn't work that way.  Even if there were a collective interest, no individual would have an interest in paying the price.

Olson did it in theoretical terms, before the collapse of the Soviet Union and Eastern European communism.  At this point, we have basically all the object lessons an empiricist should need that central planning is the dumbest fucking thing ever, but basically, Marx was among the wrongest wrong people who ever wronged at wrong-ing.  And, since we can put both Stalin and Mao on his lap, both of whom topped Hitler in body counts, Marx should go down in history as arguably the worst villain ever.  Marx versus Hitler is a real question, when you add up the bodies.

Yet still, some very, very fuck-witted people keep wanting more Marxist revolutions, kinda like how some very fuck-witted people are still into that Adolph dude.  (And are we really surprised by the reporting that Trump was kind of into him?  Wouldn't you be more surprised if Trump had never expressed any admiration for Hitler?  Let's be honest, the only thing Trump would really dislike about the guy was that he was a "loser.")

Anyway, among those wishing for a true Marxist revolution, the persistent question has been, why isn't it happening?  According to a particular school of thought... "culture."  Stories, narratives, blah, blah, blah.  Marxist critical theorists looked at the post-Marx world, sans-worker revolt, and after much hand-wringing, here is where they landed.

If you guessed "false consciousness," give yourself a gold star.  Or a red one.  Whatever.  I don't give a fuck.  Anyway, yeah, that's basically the Marxist answer for everything.  That way, they never have to challenge their own beliefs.  Being a Marxist means never having to admit you were wrong.

You may notice I do that all the time.  Why?  Well, I'm wrong a lot, but also, intellectual integrity.  I may suck, but at least I know and admit when my meals consist of crow because the egg wound up all over my face instead of in my mouth, which is stuffed with my foot, and that thing went on long past any reasonable capacity to parse, but like I said, I suck.

Anyway, so as always, the Marxist responds to a challenge with "false consciousness," in some form.  Basically, the masses are duped into staying placid by this thing called "culture."  Narratives.  Stories.  Blah, fucking, blah.  Literally, in this case.  They mean, "blah, fucking, blah."  So the challenge of the critical theorist, in a postmodern epistemology, is to tell a counter-narrative.

Whose narrative is true?

Dude, you are so missing the point!  In the world of the postmodernist, ain't no such thing.  Truth is unknowable.  There are narratives that maintain the power structure, and narratives that subvert it, so everything comes down to the normative goal.  The critical theorist selects the narrative that comports with the normative goal, truth being unknowable anyway.

Critical race theory operates the same way.  Take out class, substitute race, and you're there.  That's your explanation for how the world works.  Everything is race.  Everything.  Even the stuff that doesn't look like it's race?  That's race.  Everything is race.  Nothing else exists, or at least, nothing else is important  (we'll get to Crenshaw, and intersectionality anon).  Part one of a critical theory more generally.  This is why you see CRT people direct every topic to race, no matter how tenuously.  They're that asshole at the cocktail party who just wants to talk about his fucking car, and no matter what you are talking about, he looks for a segue to bring it back to his fucking car, or whatever.  (COVID silver lining:  no cocktail parties!)

Anyway, there are narratives that maintain a racial hierarchy.  A critical race theory is a narrative that counters the racial hierarchy.  Truth?  Dude, you're missing the point.  Objective truth is unknowable.  Either you tell narratives that maintain the racial hierarchy, or break it down.  That's it.  That's your choice.

If this is sounding like Ibram X. Kendi's racism versus anti-racism dualism, that's because Kendi is CRT For Dummies.  As in, he's not smart enough to understand the underlying philosophical constructs, but he knows there's something about dualism, so he boils it down to a dualism, which is all he can grasp.  However, this all really does come down to a combination of philosophical postmodernism's rejection of the knowability of truth, what follows from that-- narrative versus counter-narrative, and an insistence on framing the narrative dispute on the normative demand of the theorist.  In this case, race rather than class, because Bell and his followers thought that race was what mattered, rather than class.

Marx would have said Bell was buying into false consciousness, of course!

So here's the question.  How can we assess the veracity of critical race theory, given the postmodernist root of the concept?

On its own terms, we can't, because it tells us that we cannot.  It is structurally nonfalsifiable because, at its core, it assumes the unknowability of objective truth.  If you attempt to derive falsifiable hypotheses from CRT, the response is that you are operating within a "white supremacist" narrative.

I wish I were joking here, but I'm not.  When you see stuff like "decolonize STEM," (often with the British spelling: "decolonise") and all that?  This is straight-up CRT.  Why?  Because CRT is postmodern rather than scientific.  Remember my rant on "anti-racist math?"  The attempt to turn math into a battleground for Kendi's racism versus anti-racism was built on the postmodern underpinnings of CRT.  That's why the "anti-racist" version of math rejects the notion of correct answers on the grounds that "correctness" assumes "objectivity," which is, "white supremacist."  They were serious about that.  That was postmodernism, manifesting as CRT, and one of the directions this series will take is the educational consequence of CRT.  No, nobody assigns Derrick Bell in K-12.  However, the Ed. school curriculum is all built on CRT these days, and as a consequence, the CRT mentality pervades everything, including math.  Which is nuts, and dangerous.  But there's a long way to get there, because I'm just getting through Tenet 1 of CRT, and there are five of these fuckers, none of which are "the history of racism, discrimination and racial inequality."

Anyway, the basic point is that critical race theory rejects objective truth, because it is built on postmodern philosophy.  Hence, it presents the notion that we are engaged in struggles of narrative versus counter-narrative.  There are narratives that support the racial hierarchy, which are the dominant narratives, and the tool CRT offers to combat the racial hierarchy is the counter-narrative.  And if you think that postmodernism is bullshit, and that we should be engaged in a scientific study of the world in order to move ever closer to an understanding of objective truth, which does actually exist, then you are rejecting CRT.

Now, OK.  You may be asking if there is a kind of soft version of CRT.  Like, can we do this without all of the postmodernist bullshit?  Like, maybe we jettison all of the Frankfurt/Foucault fuckery, acknowledge that reality exists and that we can study it, and just say the following.  There can be a dominant culture, which tells stories/narratives, which can reinforce a power structure.  Can we, like, say that without getting into postmodernist bullshit, and have soft CRT?

Well, here's the problem.  At that point, all you are really saying is that there are common myths and prejudices.  In other words, you aren't saying anything new or distinct to make your soft-CRT distinguishable from a statement of the existence of racism, prejudice, etc.  Old wine, new bottles.  CRT is a thing because it is new wine.  New-ish, anyway.  Aging, which either adds character to the wine, or turns it to vinegar, and you can interpret for yourself how I assess this stuff, but the point is that you don't have anything to make CRT distinctive unless the narrative/counter-narrative thing is actually a concept operating within the postmodernist framework.  That's what makes it critical race theory as opposed to just plain, old racism.

So, no, you can't  have soft CRT.  That's just missing the point.  Either you reject objective truth, or you reject critical race theory.  You cannot both accept objective reality and the goal of studying it scientifically, and critical race theory.  They are mutually exclusive.

Sorry, folks.  Science, or CRT.  Take your pick.

And I ain't even close to done yet.  But we gotta move on.

Whiteness as property

We now move to a central metaphor within critical race theory.  Narratives, metaphors... These can be informative.  I spend a lot of my Sunday mornings writing about what we can learn about the world by reading literature, yet we must always read metaphors with skepticism.  The danger of a metaphor is that it can be seductive.  A metaphor can bring to light an observation that one may not have noticed otherwise, yet a metaphor can also use poetry to hide fallacy.  (Hey!  Cover that fallacy!)  Pretty language, so pretty that you don't notice the central vapidity of the claim.  Be leery of metaphors, and be very leery of anyone who writes too cleverly.

That's why you should trust me.  I'm a shitty writer!

(There's a real point here.  Those who cannot write poetically cannot hide logical fallacies behind poetic language.  That doesn't mean you should trust people just because they speak or write awkwardly, but I am serious about my warning.  Be cautious when you read or hear anyone who kissed that Blarney Stone.  I've been to Blarney.  I did not kiss that stone.  It is awkward to reach, and seriously.  Gross!)

Anyway, poetry and related digressions aside, there is an interesting point here, if you don't take it too far.  Alas, CRT theorists follow the Ferris Bueller rule, but let's treat this one with some seriousness.  It is not that whiteness is, literally, property in the same way that, for example, my coffee mug is my property.  Granted, my mug is not particularly expensive, but in the stupid cliche, if someone were to steal it, I could yell, "stop! thief!," and in literal terms, there would be a thief running away with my property.  A police officer in my relative quiet neighborhood would still have better things to do than to chase down whoever wants my mug, and I hope that asshole burns himself on coffee, which is actually long gone by now, and I need more fucking coffee, but you get my point.  That mug is fucking mine.  We ain't no fucking commie hellhole.  It's mine, and you can't have it.

So what about "whiteness."  I'm white.  Kinda.  And when I say, "kinda," that's because race is socially constructed.  That observation is not CRT.  It is an observation on which much of CRT depends, but it is not CRT.  However, I'm one of those people who belongs to a group that wasn't always "white."  How did my particular group become "white?"  Complicated.  Could the definition of whiteness change again to make me not-white?  Sure.

But it's not like the asshole who stole my mug could run away with my whiteness.  It'd be a different group of assholes who would change the definition of whiteness to make me not-white.  They... currently don't consider me white, and this gets at a big problem with the phrase, "white supremacy."  To those who lurve the phrase, I'm a part of this thing called "white supremacy," because as whiteness is now defined, I'm "white," but according to the actual people who subscribe to the actual ideology that actually fucking calls itself "white supremacist," am I white?

Not only is that a resounding, no, but I'm, like, the worst of the worst to them.  Shall I count the many ways they've tried to kill us?  And would still like to kill us?  And I'm part of "white supremacy?"  Really?  Really?

Off track, but only kinda.  Let's get back on track.  Anyway, while the biggest assholes in history-- true white supremacists-- would like to return everyone to a definition of "white" that excludes me, nobody can run off with my whiteness, like a piece of property.

Yet, having this characteristic of whiteness, in this society, does have economic benefits.

Yeah, it does.  How big?  That is hard to measure.  We can do things like the famed "resume" experiments, where we send two identical resumes to employers-- one with an Anglicized name, and another with a stereotypically African-American name-- and see what happens.  Guess who gets the call back.  There are economic benefits to being white.  Yeah, fuck off, racism-deniers.  Racism is real.  Not just systemic racism, but crude, individual racism, and there's money at stake.  This is merely one example among many, famous because it is so easy to show.

CRT proposes that we conceive of whiteness as a form of property, from which white people derive economic benefits, which are to be protected in the same way that any other economically valuable property is to be protected.  No, my mug is not that expensive.  I just looked at what's on my desk, and coffee is always on my mind.  Think, though, about investments.  I have investments.  My investments are property, which provide economic returns.  Financial shenanigans could take that from me!  I mean, I'm not stupid enough to play the meme-stock game, no cryptocurrency, or any of that, but still.  Stuff could happen, and I'd like the SEC to make sure that stuff doesn't happen, thank you very much.

CRT proposes a conception of whiteness in analogous terms, and the notion that white people behave to protect those economic benefits.

This is one of those ideas that, if we treat it as a source of hypotheses, OK!  Let's test some hypotheses!  But remember where CRT originates.  Critical theory.  This is a narrative.

But let's make an observation.  Whiteness as property.  So... how the fuck does the definition of whiteness get expanded?  If whiteness is property to be protected for its valuable economic benefits, then that expansion shouldn't happen.  I shouldn't be white, because my group wasn't white all that long ago!

But there I go, testing hypotheses, all scientifically, 'n shit.  CRT says that's a no-no.  That's white supremacist.  Except that the actual white supremacists say I'm not white, so... this is all lunacy, if you push it too far.

The basic point about this tenet is that you can do a lot with it.  It is an interesting way of thinking about race and whiteness, which can be as valuable as any parsimonious and imperfect model as long as you understand it as such.  Just don't push it too far, and remember that it is necessarily wrong, as all models are.  (All models are wrong, some are useful.  George E.P. Box)  The real problem here is how the tenet relates to the postmodern nature of CRT, and the observation that this is just treated as a story rather than the potential source of falsifiable hypotheses.

But let's move on.  Where this gets complicated with CRT is that it relates in messy ways to the next tenet...

Interest convergence

This one can be misinterpreted.  It is kind of douche-y, broadly paints white people, and not any other racial group, as douche-y, but it isn't quite as douche-y as an overly simplistic interpretation would suggest.  It's still douche-y.

Here's the idea, and if it sounds like Marxist reasoning with race substituted for class, that's because it kind of is.  Remember, Bell was deeply influenced by Marx.  The claim is that white people will only support policies that help black people when those policies also benefit white people, that is, when their interests converge.  If their interests diverge, white people will protect their own interests.  See "whiteness as property."  Remember, that notion was going to get complicated when it ran into this tenet.

See?  I told you CRT was way more complicated, and quite different from "the history of racism, discrimination and racial inequality in America."  But it's a lot harder to fit all this into a Twitter-length soundbite.  Instead, it's the kind of thing that fits into a law review article, or an overwrought, but profane blog post by a schlub of a political science professor, shouting his irritation into the void.

Hi, void!

Anyway, like much of CRT, there's a kernel of a good idea here.  No, there's no "good idea" at the core of the narrative/counter-narrative thing.  That's just postmodernist bullshit.  However, there was a kernel of coolness at the core of "whiteness as property," as long as we keep it as an interesting and parsimonious model, capable of generating some falsifiable predictions rather than treating it as a religious tenet.  Same thing here.

So let's talk about "group interest," and as a political scientist, I'm going to do this in a political science-y way.  That means... empirics!  Or rather, a reminder about what the empirical analysis says if you bother to look at the fucking data.  It has been a while since I have referenced Phil Converse, "The Nature of Belief Systems In Mass Publics," (1964).  This is the most important piece ever written in the study of public opinion, or at the very least, the most frequently cited, widely read, and placed on exams.  (Hence, it is easy for cheater-fuck to Google.  Remember him, from Part I?)

There is a lot in that article, but here is today's lesson:  levels of conceptualization.  Converse ordered the masses into five levels of conceptualization, based on the sophistication of their thinking, meaning, the degree to which they draw connections between issue positions.  At the top, there are the ideologues.  An ideologue has a well-defined belief system which connects Issue A to Issue B to Issue C, and so forth.  A near-ideologue does not understand the underpinnings of any ideology, but by taking cues from ideologues, a near-ideologue can mimic ideologues, and hold the same bundle of beliefs as an ideologue.  Near-ideologues are one step below ideologues in Converse's leveling system.  So that's level 2.

Let's skip around, and go down to the bottom.  Level 5 consists of the clueless people who do not really have any conception of politics or policy.  "No ideological content."  One step above that, is the "nature of the times" level, at which people are only really capable of the following.  If times are "good," reward whoever is in power, because that's just what's-a happenin'.  If times suck, throw the bums out, 'cuz that's-a what's-a happenin'.

That leaves a middle group.  Level 3.  The center.  What about these people?  Converse described this middle level of conceptualization as the "group interest" level of conceptualization.  The group interest level of conceptualization consisted of people who do not hold positions on most issues, nor understand any real philosophy.  Instead, all they can do is ask, how does this affect my group?

Right about now, you're thinking, well, that's pretty compatible with CRT, right?

Kinda, sorta, partly, sometimes, but in practical terms... not really.  Here's the thing.  CRT asserts that for white people, their group is "white people."  Period.  Is it really that simple?  Not even close.  This is a thing that we can study, empirically.  Of course, CRT is built on postmodern epistemology, so if you derive hypotheses and test them as a scientist, you have already broken from CRT, but that's part of the point.

What kinds of groups are and can be salient?  Here's an example.  Hi!  I'm a professor.  I'm also, as whiteness is currently defined, "white."  Which is more salient, for me?  My professional group.

Now, which has more predictive power?  Watch.  If you make a prediction about how a person voted in 2020, based on "group," how would you make such a prediction?  Well, what about for a "white" person?  What about for a "professor?"  For a "white" person, you'd predict Trump.  For a "professor," you'd predict Biden.

Which would have been correct?  The professor-based prediction, obviously.  I dare you to find someone who speaks more disparagingly about Donald Trump than I do.  I fucking hate that guy.  He is the lowest sack of shit in the history of organic life, and he has done more direct damage to the United States of America than any foreign adversary, including Osama Bin Laden.

Let me say this directly:  Donald Trump is worse than Osama Bin Laden.  He absolutely has more blood on his hands.

Now, did I vote for Biden out of some loyalty to professorship?  No, but...

But my aversion to Trump is closely related to Trump's central ideology of liarism.  His anti-intellectualism.  That anti-intellectualism is why, even party biases aside, no Republican has ever repulsed academia as much as Donald J. Trump.  So yeah, there's something there.

Does my "whiteness" mean anything at all to me?  Well, as I periodically remind people, my group wasn't even considered "white" until relatively recently.  No, it means zero to me, and true white supremacists would very much like to murder the fuck out of me, as a not-white person, so no.  My membership card in the group-o'-whities does not mean anything to me, and Robin DiAngelo is a half-wit con artist who is only in it for the money.  If we take up a collection for her to shut the fuck up, maybe she'll do it!  Who's in?  I'll chip in!  It's not cancel culture if we pay them to go away!

So there are a lot of "groups" that can be salient in Converse's model.  Remember Converse?  This is a subtopic about Converse.  Professional groups, religious groups, regional groups... there's a lot.  And remember that this is only one of Converse's levels of conceptualization.  So here's the actual political science.  Group interest is one way that people form policy positions, and people have a lot of ways of identifying with groups.  CRT strips away all of that complexity.  Why?  Two-year-old-with-a-hammer.

In this way, Crenshaw was an improvement over Bell, to some degree.  Intersectionality recognizes that you have more than merely your race.  There is your sex/gender, and lots of other stuff.  All of that matters too.  What is allowed to form your intersectional identity is still limited by intersectional ideology (e.g., height is disallowed, even though height discrimination is real and measurable!), but because it isn't as overly reductive as pure CRT, it is at least an empirical improvement.

The thing is, we come back to that word, "empirical."  What a political scientist, empirically grounded, would do with all of this is ask, "is this true?"  Is it empirically true that "white people" collectively, identify as a group such that they advocate policies that benefit African-Americans only if it also benefits them collectively?

Once you have asked that question, you have already violated the postmodern epistemological rules of CRT.  However, let's take this seriously, for a moment.  CRT theorists are only willing to ask policy questions that give them the answers they want here, e.g. reparations and social security.  White people tend to support social security, which benefits them, and also benefits African-Americans.  Interest convergence.  White people oppose reparations.  Divergence.  (CRT people tend to ignore the fact that polls show opposition to reparations among African-Americans too!)

But what questions don't get asked?  The issues that are no longer on the agenda.  The positions that were once in the Overton Window, and no longer are.  Segregation, for example.  The interest convergence tenet of CRT would predict that white people shouldn't have moved to oppose segregation.  Shouldn't white people favor race-based hiring that favors white people?  Do they?  No.  CRT people don't actually look at this stuff because it isn't what is in the Overton Window anymore, but that's actually a really important point.  It is, however, a kind of scientific empiricism that is impermissible by the rules of CRT.

Does group interest matter in public opinion?  Yeah.  Can group identification be done by race?  Yup.  Are there going to be times when white people and black people differ on issues because of racial group identification?

Of course!

The problem here is that interest convergence is not only overly reductive, but when combined with postmodern epistemology, it rejects empirical falsification so that we don't look for its empirical failures.

Race matters in public opinion.  Oh, hell yes, it matters.  Give me a data set, ask me to crunch numbers on public opinion, and I'd be a fuckin' moron not to include race as a control variable for most policy issues.  But this kind of reductivism combined with a rejection of falsification... no.

OK, since that is a similar point to the point I made about whiteness as property, I'm movin' on.

The permanence of racism

Is racism, individual and structural, just a permanent feature of America?  Any argument about permanence is problematic at best.  As a general rule, here's where I stand, briefly.  Racism is a manifestation of tribalism, and tribalism is pretty hardwired into humanity.  Can racism diminish over time?  Yeah.  Can it go away entirely?  Not likely.  Where this gets more complicated is the question of whether or not the structures and institutions of American politics are intrinsically racist because they are founded on principles of racism.  Hence, the only salvation would be to tear everything down and start again from scratch.  That's basically at the core of CRT.  It is revolutionary in that sense of the word, "revolution."  Racism is the greatest and only real evil, everything is built on racism, racism cannot be extricated from any of the political systems, so it's tear-everything-down-or-there's-no-point.

Yeah, really.  Oh, are they not selling this on lefty news, 'n shit?  Is this a little more Marx and burn-it-down than you expected?  Yeah, the Church of Scientology doesn't put a picture of Xenu on their recruiting booths.  They wait until they suck you in before the full crazy.

So here's the thing.  Is.  There.  Progress?

Look at the world today, stripped of bullshit, look at matters of race, and ask if you can see change from the 1860s to the 1960s to today.  Steven Pinker has a great term:  progressophobia.  The inability to see, or fear of seeing progress.

Look, there are a lot of reasons to be fucking terrified right now.  Like, the GOP is setting up the precise plan of electoral theft about which I was warning in 2020.  Trump was too incompetent to pull it off last year, but it looks very much like they're actually going to do it.  We may be done with democracy.  For real.  This isn't about drop boxes, or any of that stupid, petty shit about which I do not care, and neither should you.  This is about letting legislatures and party hacks over-ride the vote tallies.  This is fucking terrifying.  Add in climate change, the continuing spread of the delta variant because illiterate fuckwits listen to Trump, Fox News and other fucking liars... yeah, there are a lot of reasons to be scared.

But on race, anyone denying the progress... take your head out of your ass.

Alas, this is actually the motivation for CRT.  Recall from Part I that Derrick Bell's impetus was the failure of the early civil rights victories to create rapid effects, as Bell expected.  Politically, that isn't surprising, because that's not how things work.  It's slooooooowwww, but that means you need to take the long view to see the progress.  And if you need to see something fast, you are going to have a bad time of it when that doesn't happen.

The assertion of "the permanence of racism" is not so much an evolutionary biology statement about how people are hardwired for tribalism, so much as jumping to conclusions about Brown v. Board and subsequent victories in law and policy not turning the country into Shangri-fucking-la.  Why not?  Sloooowoowwww.  But if you study things on a short time frame, you see lack of change, and conclude, "permanence."

So how do you react?

How do we react?

Revolution?

Bell, to be sure, did not preach violence, nor do the CRT scholars who write in law journals.  They have that, at least, on Marx.  They do, however, preach an ideology that is a fundamental rejection of the American tradition, which leads us to...

Rejection of liberalism

I teased this in Part I, and there will be more throughout the series, but let's just take all of this together.  What are Bell and the CRT theorists doing?  A critical theory has three components:  an explanation for the world, a normative assessment, and practical guidelines.  So let's say that you see the social world as being a power struggle determined by narrative versus counter-narrative, that whiteness is a form of property, that white people behave according to interest convergence, and that racism is effectively permanent within the existing system.

What do you do?  What normative principles do you derive, and what do you do?

According to CRT, the reason that racism is permanent within the American system is that every narrative within that system-- ideology included-- supports the racial hierarchy.  The reason the civil rights movement kept having "successes" that didn't equalize the black-white wealth gap, etc., was that those policies were nothing more than picayune details in an overall system that was built and maintained for the purpose of that hierarchy.

The teleological fallacy:  to assert that effect or outcome is intent.  It is a fallacy.

Conspiracy theories are often built on the teleological fallacy, and critical race theory is a conspiracy theory built on that fallacy.  Bell and critical race theorists observe empirical phenomena, such as the black-white wealth gap, and conclude that it is intent.  That the purpose of everything about America is to create those kinds of gaps.

The 1964 Civil Rights Act is irrelevant, according to the conspiracy theory, because it is nothing more than a surface veneer put on a structure built for the purpose of creating the gap.

So if you take that interpretation, what do you conclude about liberalism, in its various definitions, as discussed in Part I?  What do you conclude about Locke?  Mill?  Rawls?  King?

Think of a coal mine, run the old way, with a company shop, scrip, the whole deal.  You're gettin' fucked.  The guy who runs the company shop may have been cheating on the books and skimming off the top.  If so, hey, let's fix that!

OK, problem solved, right?

That's basically how CRT thinks of liberalism.  If the problem is the whole, damned system, then tinkering at the edges is either a ploy to manipulate you, or just a mug's game.  Any minor improvement that results will never fix the big problems.  Tear it down, or nothin'.  Remember:  permanent.

Oh, was... this not what they told you when they were getting defensive about CRT?  Yeah, I thought not.

CRT basically looks at civil rights activism of its mainstream variety, and mainstream Democrats for the last half century, and says that they are a part of the system of racial oppression because they are not trying to tear the system down.  (Remember the simplistic dualism of Kendi?)  They're like union reps, looking over the shopkeeper's books instead of doing real organizing.

Where it gets... weird is where this runs into Rawls and King.

So, John Rawls.  A Theory of Justice.  Rawls is famous for the concept of the "veil of ignorance."  In order to assess a system, you imagine yourself behind a veil of ignorance, where you don't know what position you might occupy.  Would you accept the system then?

Sounds kinda... "colorblind," doesn't it?  Somehow, that word is now toxic to the left, and Rawls occupies a weird status with these people.  Now, imagine anyone other than MLK giving that line about the content of our character, not the color of our skin.  The fact that it was King means that the line is unassailable, but if anyone not named King were to say that today, that person would be called a reactionary fascist, banned from Twitter, Facebook, and all college campus speaking engagements.  That person would probably get a fuckload of death threats from a bunch of lefties who sign their emails, "Peace, ___."

Yet because it was King, none of these people will reject the line.

Confront them with the line, and what do they do, every time?

Deflect.

They'll do the following:  "Well, you know, nobody ever talks about this other part of King's speech! ..."

I call so much bullshit.

Here's what's going on.  CRT rejects both classical and 20th Century liberalism.  Why?  CRT is built on the following conspiracy theory, teleological though it is.  Everything about America is structured with the intent of creating and maintaining a racial hierarchy, including ideology.  That includes liberalism in its classical and modern forms.  The reason that the 20th Century civil rights movement did not equalize everything is that it was like throwing out the skimming shopkeeper at the company store.  The problem was the system, ideology included.  So, CRT takes a much more radical position, which rejects mainstream ideology, and yes, that includes both classical and modern liberalism.

Even King.  They're too chickenshit to admit that they don't like that part of King's speech, but they don't.

And if you do, they think you are the problem.

So.  There we have it.  That's CRT, in the shell of a very large Plinian nut.  Notice that this wouldn't fit in a tweet.  I am not on twitter or facebook, or any of that, because fuck that.  However, CRT is complicated.  I did, however, want to conclude on this point so that we have some direction because it is important to understand that the American left-- those defending CRT-- are viewed with suspicion at best by actual CRT scholars.  So how did this come to be?  How do we have this dialog-- this weird dialog-- on CRT, and what are the consequences?  Lots more to say.

Even though, holy shit, this was a long post.  But damn, I'm sick of this shit.  We need to study "the full history" of America, ugly parts and all.  Yup.  Agreed.  That includes racism, discrimination, existing systemic biases, and everything else.  But that's not critical race theory.  Critical race theory is way crazier than that, and this shit's gettin' out of hand.

Oy.  Time for some music.  Gotta go with Nina Simone this morning.  "Mississippi Goddamn."  This one seems fitting, particularly given the "too slow" chant.  Hard to fault the sentiment.  It's Bell's analysis that I contest.