What, exactly, is CRT?

[Politesse]

"Theory" was originally in reference to the conept of a legal theory; it's not surprising that Crenshaw chose to frame it in those terms, given the original point of CRT. We've since adopted some CRT-influenced thinking periodically into the arts, politics, the humanities, and the social sciences, and I'd argue its valid to think of CRT as a social scientific theory in the same sense that, say, functionalism or behavioralism are theories. It's not unusual to see scholars adopt overarching paradigms of thought with respect to particular issues. One thing I think we are seeing in this thread is a very limited understanding of what theories are and how they are used in the sciences, be they the physical or social sciences. Theories are not "truth claims" as per internet arguments over philosophy or the existence of God, but rather modifiable working entities meant to aid in the exploration of the universe, for exactly as long (and no longer than) they prove useful in explaining observed phenomena. For a scientist, social categorizations like "race" (or "species", or "colors", or...) are always understood to be an artificial means of modeling reality in a comprehensible way, not eternal truths handed down to the elites of academia. We do students a disservice when in primary and secondary school we give lip service to the scientific method but in practice present scientific knowledge as though it were dogmatic rather than dialectic. You see the result here: people unable to reliably distinguish between science and religion, and managing to misportray both of those magisteria.

 

[Angra Mainyu]

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.

First, you are again making up claims about B20. Where did he ever say that there is a biological foundation to racial difference that can explain social disparities at all?
Obviously, there are races, and that's a biological distinction. B20 already beat you and many others in different threads. You and the majority here will never realize that, but that is another matter. In any event, at no point did he make any suggestions about explaning social disparities. You claim otherwise, but you just made that up (else, do you have a quote?).

Second, your post was not deceptively quoted. It was quoted correctly. You implied that CRT does not make claims, and you implied it does. Maybe you misspoke, but you did that. Even if those claims were made by people before CRT, those are still claims, and made by CRT. Well, if CRT is as you described, that is. You identified some of those claims, regardless of what you call them.

"Race is fundamentally a social construct, situated within political frameworks that produce inequities between various demographic groups created by cultural categorizations of personal difference based on heritage and entrenched by collective social behaviors and institutions such as the legal system, and the social inequalities thus created both reflect and create the divide. "

B20 showed - again - that the claim that race is a social construct is false (for example, see this post, or others in other threads debating you and other people). So, one of the claims of CRT is falsified. As for the framework, here's a question: can it work without that claim? Yes, I realize you do not realize that the claim about races is false. My question is: does the CRT framework provide a tool for making accurate assessments under the hypothesis that race is not a social construct?

 

[Bomb#20]

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.

Politesse, you should be ashamed of yourself. I at no point indicated that the biological foundations of racial difference are what account for social disparities. You just made that up. Fabricating positions and imputing them to your political opponents is dishonorable. You know it's dishonorable. And yet you do it anyway, over and over. You have evidently contracted a contagious mental illness that cripples your ability to tell right from wrong -- which is to say, a religion. You are committing pious fraud, again.

He failed to present any evidence in support of his views, however.

Why do you think you can get away with behaving that way? What, are you just preaching to your choir? Do you figure everyone you care about will ignore what I say and will take your word for what my views are? I did present evidence for my views. What I didn't provide evidence for was evidence for views that aren't my views.

 

[Politesse]

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.

Politesse, you should be ashamed of yourself. I at no point indicated that the biological foundations of racial difference are what account for social disparities. You just made that up. Fabricating positions and imputing them to your political opponents is dishonorable. You know it's dishonorable. And yet you do it anyway, over and over. You have evidently contracted a contagious mental illness that cripples your ability to tell right from wrong -- which is to say, a religion. You are committing pious fraud, again.

He failed to present any evidence in support of his views, however.

Why do you think you can get away with behaving that way? What, are you just preaching to your choir? Do you figure everyone you care about will ignore what I say and will take your word for what my views are? I did present evidence for my views. What I didn't provide evidence for was evidence for views that aren't my views.

Perhaps I misunderstood you. You do accept that racial disparities are the result of social constructions of race, then?

 

[Trausti]

Politesse, you should be ashamed of yourself. I at no point indicated that the biological foundations of racial difference are what account for social disparities. You just made that up. Fabricating positions and imputing them to your political opponents is dishonorable. You know it's dishonorable. And yet you do it anyway, over and over. You have evidently contracted a contagious mental illness that cripples your ability to tell right from wrong -- which is to say, a religion. You are committing pious fraud, again.


Why do you think you can get away with behaving that way? What, are you just preaching to your choir? Do you figure everyone you care about will ignore what I say and will take your word for what my views are? I did present evidence for my views. What I didn't provide evidence for was evidence for views that aren't my views.

Perhaps I misunderstood you. You do accept that racial disparities are the result of social constructions of race, then?

Hang on. For all racial disparities? Or just those that fit the new religion? The NFL just got its first White cornerback since 2002. But still no Asians. Damn these social constructs.

 

[TomC]

Politesse, you should be ashamed of yourself. I at no point indicated that the biological foundations of racial difference are what account for social disparities. You just made that up. Fabricating positions and imputing them to your political opponents is dishonorable. You know it's dishonorable. And yet you do it anyway, over and over. You have evidently contracted a contagious mental illness that cripples your ability to tell right from wrong -- which is to say, a religion. You are committing pious fraud, again.


Why do you think you can get away with behaving that way? What, are you just preaching to your choir? Do you figure everyone you care about will ignore what I say and will take your word for what my views are? I did present evidence for my views. What I didn't provide evidence for was evidence for views that aren't my views.

Perhaps I misunderstood you. You do accept that racial disparities are the result of social constructions of race, then?

Can you accept that some racial disparities are the results of social constructions of race, but some are not?
And, just possibly, the one's that are are a small and shrinking minority?

Honestly, that's not what I see from CRT or the Woke. It's easier to blame wypepo than recognize what the problems really are, here in the 21st century. That's what I see.
Tom

 

[Trausti]

USA women’s basketball team won against El Salvador women’s basketball team 114 to 19; guess the Salvadorans didn’t train enough.

 

[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.

Now you're the one making assumptions.

The only assumption I'm making is that CRT does exactly what CRT says it does:

[

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.

 

[Emily Lake]

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?

I'm observing that racism as the answer to all social dynamics is as absurd as god as the answer to all social dynamics.

"racismdidit" is just as ridiculous as "goddidit". Sometimes racism will be the dominant factor in a specific situation, sometimes it will be a contributing factor, and the vast majority of time in modern society it will not be a contributing factor at all. Assuming that racism is the major dominant factor is all social situations is dumb.

 

[Emily Lake]

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.

Pretty much. Intersectionalism as a whole has very limited usage. It is useful in looking at situations and understanding that many factors intersect and affect the experience of any given person.

But the premise adopted by intersectional feminists boils down to "everything is sexist and all men are misogynistic and anything that involves men is sexist". Which is patently stupid short-circuiting thought.

 

[Emily Lake]

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.

Some yes, some no. I've found King to be very dichotomous. Some of his books are shallow and uninteresting. Others are more complex. While it's not a perfect categorization, I generally feel that books written within the paradigm of the Dark Tower universe are better than those written outside of it. With the exception of Cujo, which I still think is one of his better books... although perhaps not for the reasons that most people would assume. I never found it particularly scary, I mostly found it sad. But the writing from the perspective of the dog was fascinating and well done.

 

[Emily Lake]

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?

Have you read anything by DiAngelo or Kendi, both of whom are recognized as CRT scholars?

 

[Emily Lake]

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.

The assumption that race is social and not biological is one that I accept.

But how would you falsify the other tenets? So far as I can tell, they haven't even been tested.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

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?

The fundamental issue is that CRT takes it on faith that all the issue is due to racism.

Continuing to prove that small bits are due to racism doesn't prove that the rest is.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

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?

That's basically what CRT is saying.

Can't find the racism? It's because it's baked into systems. Examine the systems, you don't see it--therefore it must be baked in even deeper.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

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.

I don't see anyone arguing that historical racism wasn't a severe problem. You're attacking the wrong thing.

The question is whether what we see now is racism, or the aftereffects of racism. The former can be cured by removing the racism, the latter can't be.

 

[laughing dog]

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.

I don't see anyone arguing that historical racism wasn't a severe problem. You're attacking the wrong thing.

The question is whether what we see now is racism, or the aftereffects of racism. The former can be cured by removing the racism, the latter can't be.

True, but it can addressed by acknowledging the reality instead of denying it.

 

[Trausti]

I don't see anyone arguing that historical racism wasn't a severe problem. You're attacking the wrong thing.

The question is whether what we see now is racism, or the aftereffects of racism. The former can be cured by removing the racism, the latter can't be.

True, but it can addressed by acknowledging the reality instead of denying it.

You can acknowledge past racism without imposing present and future racism, nah?

 

[Bomb#20]

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.

That appears to be a reference to an attempt that was made in the early 2000s to use the HGP's then brand-new sequencing of the whole human genome to identify individuals' races. The attempt failed; the failure was widely publicized; race denialists have been making hay over that failure ever since. Of course, when the HGP first sequenced the human genome, all the genetic material it sequenced came from five people. There was simply nowhere near enough data to work out baselines for ethnicities. At every locus where one of those five people had an allele different from the others, the HGP had no way to know whether that was a random quirk of that individual or was a trait he shared with most other members of his ethnic group. So of course the attempt failed.

Getting the first genome sequence cost about three billion dollars. Today you can get your genome sequenced for a thousand dollars. We have enough data now.

 

[Trausti]

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.

That appears to be a reference to an attempt that was made in the early 2000s to use the HGP's then brand-new sequencing of the whole human genome to identify individuals' races. The attempt failed; the failure was widely publicized; race denialists have been making hay over that failure ever since. Of course, when the HGP first sequenced the human genome, all the genetic material it sequenced came from five people. There was simply nowhere near enough data to work out baselines for ethnicities. At every locus where one of those five people had an allele different from the others, the HGP had no way to know whether that was a random quirk of that individual or was a trait he shared with most other members of his ethnic group. So of course the attempt failed.

Getting the first genome sequence cost about three billion dollars. Today you can get your genome sequenced for a thousand dollars. We have enough data now.

If you admit that Kenyans have a different build than the Yoruba, one that works better in the marathon, or that Pygmies are short, or that Tibetans thrive at altitudes that would wreck you, you’re admitting that regional selection can make people noticeably different. And if they differ in those traits, they can differ in any trait.