What, exactly, is CRT?

[Emily Lake]

Obviously, the citation is all the times that Emily has insisted it is true, same as always.

Go read the goddamned foundational material on it. I posted links, along with the tenets of CRT as defined by the fathers of the entire fucking theory. If you can't be bothered to actually read the core concepts, I can't help you.

I would like you to post the parts that make you believe the part I bolded. We shouldn't be expected to go on a mining expedition to understand your thoughts.

https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/publications/human_rights_magazine_home/civil-rights-reimagining-policing/a-lesson-on-critical-race-theory/

Principles of the CRT Practice

While recognizing the evolving and malleable nature of CRT, scholar Khiara Bridges outlines a few key tenets of CRT, including:

• Recognition that race is not biologically real but is socially constructed and socially significant. It recognizes that science (as demonstrated in the Human Genome Project) refutes the idea of biological racial differences. According to scholars Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, race is the product of social thought and is not connected to biological reality.
• Acknowledgement that racism is a normal feature of society and is embedded within systems and institutions, like the legal system, that replicate racial inequality. This dismisses the idea that racist incidents are aberrations but instead are manifestations of structural and systemic racism.
• Rejection of popular understandings about racism, such as arguments that confine racism to a few “bad apples.” CRT recognizes that racism is codified in law, embedded in structures, and woven into public policy. CRT rejects claims of meritocracy or “colorblindness.” CRT recognizes that it is the systemic nature of racism that bears primary responsibility for reproducing racial inequality.
• Recognition of the relevance of people’s everyday lives to scholarship. This includes embracing the lived experiences of people of color, including those preserved through storytelling, and rejecting deficit-informed research that excludes the epistemologies of people of color.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tenet

tenet noun

: a principle, belief, or doctrine generally held to be true

CRT proposes the TENET that racism is widespread throughout society, law, and structures within the US and is the dominate force that creates disparity on the basis of race. It ASSUMES this as a core belief for investigation. CRT then proceeds to examine the US through the lens of that assumption.

Using CRT, people then CONCLUDE that systemic racism is the cause of disparate racial outcomes.

It proposes systemic racism as the cause of racial disparity, then it finds racial disparity and attributes it to systemic racism. Because it literally assumes that to be true before any analysis even begins. Literally. Those are the literal stated actual tenets of actual for-real taught-in-school CRT.

This is the core concept of the entire study.

Which is also why I'm a bit peeved at having previously posted links and excerpts of these tenets, from the actual real source materials for the entire field of study... and then being challenged to support why I think the actual fundamental stated belief of the field of study is the fundamental stated belief of the field of study.

 

[Emily Lake]

CRT doesn't "claim" anything, it's a methodological paradigm based on otherwise well-established facts.

It's a methodological paradigm based on an assumption. It's a method for analyzing the function of law through the lens of the assumption that the law is incontrovertibly racist in structure.

It explicitly REJECTS any possibility of the law being neutral or colorlind.

It's not based on well-established facts at all. It's based on well-established facts the same way that fundamentalist christianity is based on the well-established fact that god made the universe 6000 years ago.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

CRT doesn't "claim" anything, it's a methodological paradigm based on otherwise well-established facts.

It's a methodological paradigm based on an assumption. It's a method for analyzing the function of law through the lens of the assumption that the law is incontrovertibly racist in structure.

It explicitly REJECTS any possibility of the law being neutral or colorlind.

What's the big deal? I don't understand your point. Are you telling me systemic racism, because it occurs within societies is okay?

You are certainly not saying that it isn't real, or that the KKK is colorblind or that we haven't had laws that were systemically racist in their intent and application.

Do you think you spend too much time in ivory towers?

 

[Emily Lake]

CRT doesn't "claim" anything, it's a methodological paradigm based on otherwise well-established facts.

It's a methodological paradigm based on an assumption. It's a method for analyzing the function of law through the lens of the assumption that the law is incontrovertibly racist in structure.

It explicitly REJECTS any possibility of the law being neutral or colorlind.

What's the big deal? I don't understand your point. Are you telling me systemic racism, because it occurs within societies is okay?

You are certainly not saying that it isn't real, or that the KKK is colorblind or that we haven't had laws that were systemically racist in their intent and application.

Do you think you spend too much time in ivory towers?

My point is that it assumes its own conclusion as the premise, and that using that assumption as the basis of policy is a bad idea.

For consideration: Assume as given that god exists and drives all human decisions. Look around at how the world works, with the assumption that it's all driven by god.

Now go develop policies based on what you observed while assuming that god drives everything.

Do you think that's a good idea?

 

[ZiprHead]

CRT doesn't "claim" anything, it's a methodological paradigm based on otherwise well-established facts.

It's a methodological paradigm based on an assumption. It's a method for analyzing the function of law through the lens of the assumption that the law is incontrovertibly racist in structure.

It explicitly REJECTS any possibility of the law being neutral or colorlind.

It's not based on well-established facts at all. It's based on well-established facts the same way that fundamentalist christianity is based on the well-established fact that god made the universe 6000 years ago.

Now you're the one making assumptions.

 

[Politesse]

What's the big deal? I don't understand your point. Are you telling me systemic racism, because it occurs within societies is okay?

You are certainly not saying that it isn't real, or that the KKK is colorblind or that we haven't had laws that were systemically racist in their intent and application.

Do you think you spend too much time in ivory towers?

My point is that it assumes its own conclusion as the premise, and that using that assumption as the basis of policy is a bad idea.

For consideration: Assume as given that god exists and drives all human decisions. Look around at how the world works, with the assumption that it's all driven by god.

Now go develop policies based on what you observed while assuming that god drives everything.

Do you think that's a good idea?

You're claiming that racism is elusively difficult to observe as the Godhead?

 

[laughing dog]

CRT doesn't "claim" anything, it's a methodological paradigm based on otherwise well-established facts.

It's a methodological paradigm based on an assumption. It's a method for analyzing the function of law through the lens of the assumption that the law is incontrovertibly racist in structure.

No. It recognizes from historical observation that racism is a normal part of society. It recognizes from historical observation that the dominant group in society will construct law to benefit itself. Those are not assumptions.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

What's the big deal? I don't understand your point. Are you telling me systemic racism, because it occurs within societies is okay?

You are certainly not saying that it isn't real, or that the KKK is colorblind or that we haven't had laws that were systemically racist in their intent and application.

Do you think you spend too much time in ivory towers?

My point is that it assumes its own conclusion as the premise, and that using that assumption as the basis of policy is a bad idea.

For consideration: Assume as given that god exists and drives all human decisions. Look around at how the world works, with the assumption that it's all driven by god.

Now go develop policies based on what you observed while assuming that god drives everything.

Do you think that's a good idea?

You're claiming that racism is [as] elusively difficult to observe as the Godhead?

Right. This isn't economics 101.

Historical systemic racism is definitely real. No assumptions are necessary. Let's discuss.

Perhaps an actual historical example is in order that illustrates the error of those preceding few sentences. Offer up such a specific error so that I and others can understand your position.

 

[fromderinside]

Hey. Great idea. See hatred, light a match.

RUKRAZ

 

[Lumpenproletariat]

I would like you to post the parts that make you believe the part I bolded. We shouldn't be expected to go on a mining expedition to understand your thoughts.

https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/publications/human_rights_magazine_home/civil-rights-reimagining-policing/a-lesson-on-critical-race-theory/

Principles of the CRT Practice

While recognizing the evolving and malleable nature of CRT, scholar Khiara Bridges outlines a few key tenets of CRT, including:

• Acknowledgement that racism is a normal feature of society and is embedded within systems and institutions, like the legal system, that replicate racial inequality. This dismisses the idea that racist incidents are aberrations but instead are manifestations of structural and systemic racism.
• Rejection of popular understandings about racism, such as arguments that confine racism to a few “bad apples.” CRT recognizes that racism is codified in law, embedded in structures, and woven into public policy. CRT rejects claims of meritocracy or “colorblindness.” CRT recognizes that it is the systemic nature of racism that bears primary responsibility for reproducing racial inequality.
  

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tenet

tenet noun

: a principle, belief, or doctrine generally held to be true

CRT proposes the TENET that racism is widespread throughout society, law, and structures within the US and is the dominate force that creates disparity on the basis of race. It ASSUMES this as a core belief for investigation. CRT then proceeds to examine the US through the lens of that assumption.

Using CRT, people then CONCLUDE that systemic racism is the cause of disparate racial outcomes.

It proposes systemic racism as the cause of racial disparity, then it finds racial disparity and attributes it to systemic racism. Because it literally assumes that to be true before any analysis even begins. Literally. Those are the literal stated actual tenets of actual for-real taught-in-school CRT.

This is the core concept of the entire study.

translation of the above: You (if you're White) are a racist, by nature, and you'll always be a racist, you were born and bred racist by your racist culture, and you can never be anything but a racist, no matter how hard you try to change, because anything you do to try not to be a racist is itself a racist act by you, and anything you do, no matter what it is, will always be racist, because you're incapable of being or doing anything else, including any kind of remedy to racism you propose, because you're incapable of proposing anything that's not just more racism from you -- because even your wish to change or remedy racism is just more of your intrinsic racism in disguise.

Since this racism is built-in, systemically, it's part of anything you do or think, including anything you try to reform or to analyze or investigate in order to correct it. Any correction you try to make to anything has to be inherently racist on your part.

And "It explicitly REJECTS any possibility of the law being neutral or colorblind" also means that CRT, if it comes from Whites, cannot be neutral or colorblind, but must also be systemically racist. Because whatever makes the law inherently racist also makes institutions like CRT essentially racist.

And there is nothing in CRT which says that the CRT scholars themselves are not racists, including all their ideas or beliefs (if they're Whites). The only CRT scholars who might not be racists, and whose ideas or theories are not racist, are those who are non-White.

 

[DrZoidberg]

https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/publications/human_rights_magazine_home/civil-rights-reimagining-policing/a-lesson-on-critical-race-theory/



https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tenet

tenet noun

: a principle, belief, or doctrine generally held to be true

CRT proposes the TENET that racism is widespread throughout society, law, and structures within the US and is the dominate force that creates disparity on the basis of race. It ASSUMES this as a core belief for investigation. CRT then proceeds to examine the US through the lens of that assumption.

Using CRT, people then CONCLUDE that systemic racism is the cause of disparate racial outcomes.

It proposes systemic racism as the cause of racial disparity, then it finds racial disparity and attributes it to systemic racism. Because it literally assumes that to be true before any analysis even begins. Literally. Those are the literal stated actual tenets of actual for-real taught-in-school CRT.

This is the core concept of the entire study.

translation of the above: You (if you're White) are a racist, by nature, and you'll always be a racist, you were born and bred racist by your racist culture, and you can never be anything but a racist, no matter how hard you try to change, because anything you do to try not to be a racist is itself a racist act by you, and anything you do, no matter what it is, will always be racist, because you're incapable of being or doing anything else, including any kind of remedy to racism you propose, because you're incapable of proposing anything that's not just more racism from you -- because even your wish to change or remedy racism is just more of your intrinsic racism in disguise.

Since this racism is built-in, systemically, it's part of anything you do or think, including anything you try to reform or to analyze or investigate in order to correct it. Any correction you try to make to anything has to be inherently racist on your part.

And "It explicitly REJECTS any possibility of the law being neutral or colorblind" also means that CRT, if it comes from Whites, cannot be neutral or colorblind, but must also be systemically racist. Because whatever makes the law inherently racist also makes institutions like CRT essentially racist.

And there is nothing in CRT which says that the CRT scholars themselves are not racists, including all their ideas or beliefs (if they're Whites). The only CRT scholars who might not be racists, and whose ideas or theories are not racist, are those who are non-White.

It's exactly analogue to intersectionalist feminist theory. It's just as dumb.

I shouldn't say it's dumb. It's not. It's only dumb if lifted out of it's litterary critique usage and applied to public policy.

 

[Bomb#20]

CRT doesn't "claim" anything, it's a methodological paradigm based on otherwise well-established facts.

Don't tell us it doesn't claim anything. Tell this guy:

The basics of CRT have been outlined over and over in this thread. You can't fully understand the theory just by reading a summary - because you cannot understand any theory just by reading a summary - but the basics of CRT aren't too hard to grasp if you think about them for a few seconds; the claims being made really aren't all that radical if you've been keeping up with the progress of the social sciences over the 20th century generally.

 

[Bomb#20]

Yeah, but look at the page.

This is postmodernism. All the critique against postmodernism is valid for CRT. Postmodernism is a tool to analyze texts. ... It should stay in the domain of literary criticism and help authors write better books. Which is what this bag of philosophical tools was first developed for.

I'm reminded of a young student named Stephen King, and of the answer* he gave to his English professor's gobbledegooky critique of some short story he'd written for class. I don't think postmodernism was developed to help authors write better books. It was developed to help English professors write better** book reviews.

(* A photocopy of a check from a real publishing company for the short story.)

(** I.e., reviews more impressive to other English professors.)

 

[DrZoidberg]

Yeah, but look at the page.

This is postmodernism. All the critique against postmodernism is valid for CRT. Postmodernism is a tool to analyze texts. ... It should stay in the domain of literary criticism and help authors write better books. Which is what this bag of philosophical tools was first developed for.

I'm reminded of a young student named Stephen King, and of the answer* he gave to his English professor's gobbledegooky critique of some short story he'd written for class. I don't think postmodernism was developed to help authors write better books. It was developed to help English professors write better** book reviews.

(* A photocopy of a check from a real publishing company for the short story.)

(** I.e., reviews more impressive to other English professors.)

I'm a literary nerd. I think that's a perfectly good justification to defend the existence of postmodernism. There's some awesome science fiction written based on postmodernist ideas. Left Hand of Darkness. Handmaid's Tale. I don't think we'd have these without a gang of navel gazing English professors.

And not to knock Stephen King. But he's not a great author. He's a great craftsman of sentences. He's great at putting together sentences. A master of style. But his books are shallow as shit. That guy has nothing to say. He just does it very well.

 

[Politesse]

The only CRT scholars who might not be racists, and whose ideas or theories are not racist, are those who are non-White.

This is some real twisted shit. Your "translation" adds a bunch of racist nonsense to a paragraph that doesn't mention Whites at all. Are you sure CRT scholars are the ones with the guilty consience, here?

 

[Politesse]

CRT doesn't "claim" anything, it's a methodological paradigm based on otherwise well-established facts.

Don't tell us it doesn't claim anything. Tell this guy:

The basics of CRT have been outlined over and over in this thread. You can't fully understand the theory just by reading a summary - because you cannot understand any theory just by reading a summary - but the basics of CRT aren't too hard to grasp if you think about them for a few seconds; the claims being made really aren't all that radical if you've been keeping up with the progress of the social sciences over the 20th century generally.

Do you understand what a paradigm is?

 

[Angra Mainyu]

Don't tell us it doesn't claim anything. Tell this guy:

Do you understand what a paradigm is?

You said claims were being made. Then you said they weren't, it seems. Maybe you misspoke? So, what are the claims being made? I mean, the claims that are not all that radical? Those are claims, right? Are they falsifiable?

 

[KeepTalking]

Don't tell us it doesn't claim anything. Tell this guy:

Do you understand what a paradigm is?

You said claims were being made. Then you said they weren't, it seems. Maybe you misspoke? So, what are the claims being made? I mean, the claims that are not all that radical? Those are claims, right? Are they falsifiable?

One can refer to claims being made by an author of a book on CRT without that necessitating that CRT itself is making claims.

ETA: The post that was snipped in order to make it look like a gotcha, goes on to explain the claims. As noted, since the discussion in that post is about summarizing a book on CRT, those claims are not necessarily claims made by CRT.

 

[Politesse]

Don't tell us it doesn't claim anything. Tell this guy:

Do you understand what a paradigm is?

You said claims were being made. Then you said they weren't, it seems. Maybe you misspoke? So, what are the claims being made? I mean, the claims that are not all that radical? Those are claims, right? Are they falsifiable?

If you're not going to read the post itself (in which I explained the whole thing in exhaustive detail that was predictably ignored) I sure as hell am not going to type it all again.

A person working within a certain paradigm or methodology may well make claims. These would be their hypotheses, not "what CRT claims". Then, too, some of the grounding assumptions of CRT were themselves once hypothetical claims, and these were the topic of my (deceptively quoted) post above. But CRT is, in and of itself, a general framework of thought, an application of existing theory, not the original source of those theories. These are all theoretically falsifiable, and have not to my knowledge been meaningfully falsified. Bomb #20 did object to the claim that race was of social, because he feels that there is a biological foundation to racial difference that can explain social disparities better than the sociological concept of race. He failed to present any evidence in support of his views, however.

 

[Jarhyn]

You said claims were being made. Then you said they weren't, it seems. Maybe you misspoke? So, what are the claims being made? I mean, the claims that are not all that radical? Those are claims, right? Are they falsifiable?

If you're not going to read the post itself (in which I explained the whole thing in exhaustive detail that was predictably ignored) I sure as hell am not going to type it all again.

They also ignore the whole post where TGG talks about all the things you described, happening as described.

Really, "theory" is a misnomer. It's really more of a phenomena, and the theory of it's operation is actually dependent solely on Human Apathy, Ignorance, and Tribal Behaviors all of which are well accepted.