Politesse
Lux Aeterna
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- Feb 27, 2018
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- Jedi Wayseeker
If your thesis is that racism is a communal product of an unequal society, people can be victimized by others without those others consciously intending to harm anyone per se, and if they do intend harm that isn't ncessarily the only or even most important factor producing inequality. From a CRT perspective, the question to determine is whether a structural inequality exists, not whether individual actors within the system feel personally guilty/aggrieved/sad/angry about it except insofar as those feelings play a role in reproducing and reinforcing racist institutions (which they do). You do have the power to create consicous changes to the patterns of social interaction if you and others apply yourselves to the project, but it's not as simple as "feeling like" you are doing so or wanting to do so; the fundamental ideas of your culture must be critically considered and rejected, and the material circumstances that drive inequalities forcibly reversed. This is not impossible, but is much harder and therefore less likely, for the recipient of social privilege to do as it is against human nature to strive consistently against one's own wellbeing, or even to risk it. It is easier to cultivate a feeling of anti-racism than to truly challenge empirically observeable material bases of inequalities.
I note that "Critical Theory" in the social sciences has always meant the same fundamental thing: the holistic study of the power structures constructed within social institutions, inclusive of but not defined by the actions and thoughts of individual actors. Critical Race Theory is an application of this general methodology, not, as some here would seem to have it, a challenge to its most basic tenet.
Fair enough. But the largely missing ingredient in CRT and the like, as far as I can see, is criticism (or critical analysis) of non-whites.
I earlier asked if something like John McWhorter's critiques, for example, had been integrated into CRT yet. I was only half-joking.
That still assumes that blame-seeking is the point to begin with. If that is what you mean by criticism. Non-whites obviously are and must be a part of the critique of the whole social system; their perspective on their own situation is in fact the focus of most CRT-based activism, hence the whole discursive conversation about becoming empowered and recovering means of agency, or in modern slang "woke" to one's own situation. Liberal whites may co-opt this phrase to mean more or less whatever they want it to apparently, but it was originally cribbed from a poem about the author's growing awareness of the context of her life, and that accepting dominant cultural narratives is ultimately optional. The perception that CRT exists to find fault with whites on a racial basis is projection; CRT fundamentally treats racism as a production of a whole society together.