What, exactly, is CRT?

[Politesse]

The even more Cliff's Notes version:

• Race is a biological fiction, but a social reality
• The "realities" of race are the measurably different social and economic circumstances that affect people depending on how they are categorized by others
• These inequities aren't the sole work of individuals, so they cannot be addressed solely by educating individuals about race issues as seen by scientists
• Systematic racism both helped to create, and was eventually further created by, massive sociocultural institutions such as the legal, punitive, and labor systems of the colonial world
• Ending those systems requires a substantial reimagining of the social, political, and legal institutions that they left behind
• Also left behind are people, whose intergenerational situations vary widely but tend to reflect severe racial inequities
• Analyzing these disparities becomes complicated by the intersectional boundaries between race, gender, wealth, and other forms of social categorization that may greatly impact any one individual's life
• Meaningful solutions to systemic racism need to focus on the systemic before the individual, but take the variability of individual circumstances into account
• The narratives and categories we use to talk about racial issues are also products of this suspect past, and many may need to be altered or retired
• Greater diversity in the academic and legal professions is a necessary element of reform, as experiences of race differ widely and often in non-overlapping ways.

 

[Trausti]

The even more Cliff's Notes version:

• Race is a biological fiction, but a social reality

• 
  
  LOL, no.
  
  Reading Race: AI Recognises Patient's Racial Identity In Medical Images
  
  

  Findings: Standard deep learning models can be trained to predict race from medical images with high performance across multiple imaging modalities

 

[Politesse]

The even more Cliff's Notes version:

• Race is a biological fiction, but a social reality

• 
  
  LOL, no.
  
  Reading Race: AI Recognises Patient's Racial Identity In Medical Images

• 
  
  Aside from trying to get us off on a tangent about AIs and racism, that has next to nothing to do with our conversation. I can analyze the paper if you really like, but I don't feel like the result would be on topic, since the goal of proving biological racism is not in view. Even if you were entirely correct about what happened and why, there's more to the social concept of race than physical appearance. Indeed, there is no rational reason whatsoever that a computer, left to its own devices, would (for instance) choose to differentially sentence darker-skinned persons to longer prison sentences, confine them to cramped barrios, or defund their elementary schools. And that's not actually what this AI was doing anyway. If you are, in fact, arguing that the computer was correctly identifying people's "biological race", then I note that you are in open disagreement with the paper's 23 highly qualified authors, who clarify right in the first few paragraphs that this is not what they were up to. I quote:
  
  

  In this work, we define racial identity as a social, political, and legal construct that relates to the interaction between external perceptions (i.e. “how do others see me?”) and self-identification, and specifically make use of the self-reported race of patients in all of our experiments.

  In short, there is no such thing as biological race; what the software was doing was making accurate guesses about racial self-identification: an explicitly social phenomenon. There's no other form of race to identify. This is, in fact, the standard scientific view, and was well-established long before the development of CRT.
  
  
  This paper actually presents a case study of CRT in action, since neither the AI nor the imagers had or could have had any preconceived biases about the self-identified race of the patients, data they did not have had access to, but the results of AI patterning that unintentionally identify the race of patients can end up nevertheless exacerbating historic structural inequalities within the medical system. As, again, the authors themselves note:
  
  

  We emphasize that the AI’s ability to predict racial identity is itself not the issue of importance, but rather that this capability is trivially learned and therefore likely to be present in many medical image analysis models, providing a direct vector for the reproduction or exacerbation of the racial disparities that already exist in medical practice. This risk is compounded by the fact that human experts cannot similarly identify racial identity from medical images, meaning human oversight of AI models is of limited use to recognise and mitigate this problem.

  
  And you should really learn to read papers before posting them as evidence for your favroite ideoological positions. What is this, the fifth time in a month that you've posted something in response to one of my posts that is supposed to contradict my point but actually straightforwardly agrees with it?

 

[Jarhyn]

Aside from trying to get us off on a tangent about AIs and racism, that has next to nothing to do with our conversation. I can analyze the paper if you really like, but I don't feel like the result would be on topic, since the goal of proving biological racism is not in view. Even if you were entirely correct about what happened and why, there's more to the social concept of race than physical appearance. Indeed, there is no rational reason whatsoever that a computer, left to its own devices, would (for instance) choose to differentially sentence darker-skinned persons to longer prison sentences, confine them to cramped barrios, or defund their elementary schools. And that's not actually what this AI was doing anyway. If you are, in fact, arguing that the computer was correctly identifying people's "biological race", then I note that you are in open disagreement with the paper's 23 highly qualified authors, who clarify right in the first few paragraphs that this is not what they were up to. I quote:

In this work, we define racial identity as a social, political, and legal construct that relates to the interaction between external perceptions (i.e. “how do others see me?”) and self-identification, and specifically make use of the self-reported race of patients in all of our experiments.

In short, there is no such thing as biological race; what the software was doing was making accurate guesses about racial self-identification: an explicitly social phenomenon. There's no other form of race to identify. This is, in fact, the standard scientific view, and was well-established long before the development of CRT.


This paper actually presents a case study of CRT in action, since neither the AI nor the imagers had or could have had any preconceived biases about the self-identified race of the patients, data they did not have had access to, but the results of AI patterning that unintentionally identify the race of patients can end up nevertheless exacerbating historic structural inequalities within the medical system. As, again, the authors themselves note:

We emphasize that the AI’s ability to predict racial identity is itself not the issue of importance, but rather that this capability is trivially learned and therefore likely to be present in many medical image analysis models, providing a direct vector for the reproduction or exacerbation of the racial disparities that already exist in medical practice. This risk is compounded by the fact that human experts cannot similarly identify racial identity from medical images, meaning human oversight of AI models is of limited use to recognise and mitigate this problem.

And you should really learn to read papers before posting them as evidence for your favroite ideoological positions. What is this, the fifth time in a month that you've posted something in response to one of my posts that is supposed to contradict my point but actually straightforwardly agrees with it?

Besides the mostly tangential fact that if humans can recognize and differentiate morphological trends among communities, so can computers. That, however, doesn't mean that all the additional wild claims of racists re: superiority have biological or even real basis. In fact, the only real basis I know that exists is built around systemic adversity, both planned specifically to be racially selectively averse and not.

Honestly, I'd think this systemic, planned adversity is likely to select strongly for very adaptive traits. Which would rather imply that the reverse of the claim of the racist may have some truth.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

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.

The problem is what keeps being said amounts to pretending that a differential outcome is proof of discrimination. In other words, there can't be other factors involved. Thus, if you see other factors involved they must be the result of discrimination and the situation changed.

Thus atomic bombs are racists because they burn blacks more than they burn whites. Never mind that the sun is a reverse racist because it burns whites more than it burns blacks.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

The even more Cliff's Notes version:

• These inequities aren't the sole work of individuals, so they cannot be addressed solely by educating individuals about race issues as seen by scientists

• 
  
  In other words, we must make a deliberately racist society in order to be fair. Sounds like something out of 1984.

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

The even more Cliff's Notes version:

• These inequities aren't the sole work of individuals, so they cannot be addressed solely by educating individuals about race issues as seen by scientists

• 
  
  In other words, we must make a deliberately racist society in order to be fair. Sounds like something out of 1984.

• 
  
  It doesn't sound that way at all. That is a perception some people add for no reason. For example, results can be unequal because of what you can think of as inertia. Individuals and policies no longer in place could have been racist, but extant individuals and policies can provide conditions that make historical inequities linger longer.

 

[Trausti]

Aside from trying to get us off on a tangent about AIs and racism, that has next to nothing to do with our conversation. I can analyze the paper if you really like, but I don't feel like the result would be on topic, since the goal of proving biological racism is not in view. Even if you were entirely correct about what happened and why, there's more to the social concept of race than physical appearance. Indeed, there is no rational reason whatsoever that a computer, left to its own devices, would (for instance) choose to differentially sentence darker-skinned persons to longer prison sentences, confine them to cramped barrios, or defund their elementary schools. And that's not actually what this AI was doing anyway. If you are, in fact, arguing that the computer was correctly identifying people's "biological race", then I note that you are in open disagreement with the paper's 23 highly qualified authors, who clarify right in the first few paragraphs that this is not what they were up to. I quote:

In this work, we define racial identity as a social, political, and legal construct that relates to the interaction between external perceptions (i.e. “how do others see me?”) and self-identification, and specifically make use of the self-reported race of patients in all of our experiments.

In short, there is no such thing as biological race; what the software was doing was making accurate guesses about racial self-identification: an explicitly social phenomenon. There's no other form of race to identify. This is, in fact, the standard scientific view, and was well-established long before the development of CRT.


This paper actually presents a case study of CRT in action, since neither the AI nor the imagers had or could have had any preconceived biases about the self-identified race of the patients, data they did not have had access to, but the results of AI patterning that unintentionally identify the race of patients can end up nevertheless exacerbating historic structural inequalities within the medical system. As, again, the authors themselves note:

We emphasize that the AI’s ability to predict racial identity is itself not the issue of importance, but rather that this capability is trivially learned and therefore likely to be present in many medical image analysis models, providing a direct vector for the reproduction or exacerbation of the racial disparities that already exist in medical practice. This risk is compounded by the fact that human experts cannot similarly identify racial identity from medical images, meaning human oversight of AI models is of limited use to recognise and mitigate this problem.

And you should really learn to read papers before posting them as evidence for your favroite ideoological positions. What is this, the fifth time in a month that you've posted something in response to one of my posts that is supposed to contradict my point but actually straightforwardly agrees with it?

If your first premise if false, everything after that is irrelevant. Note that the correlation between self-reported race and genetic ancestry is quite high. The researchers did not teach the AI this; it figured it out all on its own. Maybe for your Critical Race Theory to work we need to inject artificial intelligence with natural stupidity.

 

[Trausti]

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.

The problem is what keeps being said amounts to pretending that a differential outcome is proof of discrimination. In other words, there can't be other factors involved. Thus, if you see other factors involved they must be the result of discrimination and the situation changed.

Thus atomic bombs are racists because they burn blacks more than they burn whites. Never mind that the sun is a reverse racist because it burns whites more than it burns blacks.

Why have 79 of the last 80 men to qualify for the Olympic 100 meter dash finals going back to the 1984 Olympics been black? Systemic racism, of course.

 

[Trausti]

The even more Cliff's Notes version:

• These inequities aren't the sole work of individuals, so they cannot be addressed solely by educating individuals about race issues as seen by scientists

• 
  
  In other words, we must make a deliberately racist society in order to be fair. Sounds like something out of 1984.

• 
  
  It doesn't sound that way at all. That is a perception some people add for no reason. For example, results can be unequal because of what you can think of as inertia. Individuals and policies no longer in place could have been racist, but extant individuals and policies can provide conditions that make historical inequities linger longer.

• 
  
  So what is the policy that stops most black fathers from marrying the mother of their children? I mean, if we're concerned about inter-generational wealth and all that, surely, having your father stick around would help out a lot. Is it that nasty but invisible miasma, White Supremacy?

 

[Politesse]

The even more Cliff's Notes version:

• These inequities aren't the sole work of individuals, so they cannot be addressed solely by educating individuals about race issues as seen by scientists

• 
  
  In other words, we must make a deliberately racist society in order to be fair. Sounds like something out of 1984.

• 
  
  What you wrote bears no obvious relation to what I wrote, despite ostensibly being a reply.

 

[Worldtraveller]

The even more Cliff's Notes version:

• These inequities aren't the sole work of individuals, so they cannot be addressed solely by educating individuals about race issues as seen by scientists

• 
  
  In other words, we must make a deliberately racist society in order to be fair. Sounds like something out of 1984.

• 
  
  What you wrote bears no obvious relation to what I wrote, despite ostensibly being a reply.

• 
  You've met LP, right?
  
  Anything that's sytemic, even if caused by individual behavior, and even if it's not conscious, intentional racism, simply can't be fixed according to the denialist mindset.
  
  So red-lining in real estate (as one of probably thousands of examples), which is sometimes done knowingly, and sometimes done unknowingly, falls into the category of "can't be fixed because that would be REAL racism."
  
  Thank you, Poli, BTW, for your posts in this thread. They are clear, lucid and straightforward. That is, of course, why they are mostly ignored by everyone who doesn't actually want to learn what CRT is.

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

It doesn't sound that way at all. That is a perception some people add for no reason. For example, results can be unequal because of what you can think of as inertia. Individuals and policies no longer in place could have been racist, but extant individuals and policies can provide conditions that make historical inequities linger longer.

So what is the policy that stops most black fathers from marrying the mother of their children? I mean, if we're concerned about inter-generational wealth and all that, surely, having your father stick around would help out a lot. Is it that nasty but invisible miasma, White Supremacy?

You have to have wealth in the first place for it to be a factor in not passing it down. Nice try, though, bringing in outdated narratives from 1965.

THE NEGRO FAMILY, THE CASE FOR NATIONAL ACTION

The truth about Black fatherhood

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

The even more Cliff's Notes version:

• These inequities aren't the sole work of individuals, so they cannot be addressed solely by educating individuals about race issues as seen by scientists

• 
  
  In other words, we must make a deliberately racist society in order to be fair. Sounds like something out of 1984.

• 
  So are we talking, white people being prevented from voting racist society, white people being barred from being educated racist society, whites aren't allowed to live in nice neighborhoods racist society, or some tie breakers don't always go in the white person's favor type of racist society?

 

[Politesse]

Thank you, Poli, BTW, for your posts in this thread. They are clear, lucid and straightforward. That is, of course, why they are mostly ignored by everyone who doesn't actually want to learn what CRT is.

I figured the rest of the crowd here might have an interest, even if the usual conservative rogues gallery does not. It's certainly true enough that these things aren't common knowledge, at least as a coherent school of thought; many people recognize words like CRT, equity, or intersectionality from the way they get dragged into politics or, but rarely get to hear a full contextualized explanation of them.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

The even more Cliff's Notes version:

• These inequities aren't the sole work of individuals, so they cannot be addressed solely by educating individuals about race issues as seen by scientists

• 
  
  In other words, we must make a deliberately racist society in order to be fair. Sounds like something out of 1984.

• 
  
  It doesn't sound that way at all. That is a perception some people add for no reason. For example, results can be unequal because of what you can think of as inertia. Individuals and policies no longer in place could have been racist, but extant individuals and policies can provide conditions that make historical inequities linger longer.

• 
  
  That is not a rebuttal.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

The even more Cliff's Notes version:

• These inequities aren't the sole work of individuals, so they cannot be addressed solely by educating individuals about race issues as seen by scientists

• 
  
  In other words, we must make a deliberately racist society in order to be fair. Sounds like something out of 1984.

• 
  
  What you wrote bears no obvious relation to what I wrote, despite ostensibly being a reply.

• 
  
  Your failure to see where your position leads doesn't make it go away.
  
  The only rule changes that can do what you hope to accomplish is to seriously stack the deck.

 

[Emily Lake]

A Lesson on Critical Race Theory by the American Bar Association

Introduction to Critical Race Theory by Delgado and Stefanic


Overview of concepts and syllabus for CRT class at Brandman University


Tenets of CRT:

 

[Trausti]

It doesn't sound that way at all. That is a perception some people add for no reason. For example, results can be unequal because of what you can think of as inertia. Individuals and policies no longer in place could have been racist, but extant individuals and policies can provide conditions that make historical inequities linger longer.

So what is the policy that stops most black fathers from marrying the mother of their children? I mean, if we're concerned about inter-generational wealth and all that, surely, having your father stick around would help out a lot. Is it that nasty but invisible miasma, White Supremacy?

You have to have wealth in the first place for it to be a factor in not passing it down. Nice try, though, bringing in outdated narratives from 1965.

THE NEGRO FAMILY, THE CASE FOR NATIONAL ACTION

The truth about Black fatherhood

What are talking about? 72% of black children are born to unwed mothers. You’re really taking a position that this would not impact inter-generational wealth? Really?!?

Blacks struggle with 72 percent unwed mothers rate

Statistics show just what that fullness means. Children of unmarried mothers of any race are more likely to perform poorly in school, go to prison, use drugs, be poor as adults, and have their own children out of wedlock.

”Blacks as a group will never be equal while they have this situation going on, where the vast majority of children do not have fathers in the home married to their mother, involved in their lives, investing in them, investing in the next generation."

 

[JohnG]

You have to have wealth in the first place for it to be a factor in not passing it down. Nice try, though, bringing in outdated narratives from 1965.

THE NEGRO FAMILY, THE CASE FOR NATIONAL ACTION

The truth about Black fatherhood

What are talking about? 72% of black children are born to unwed mothers. You’re really taking a position that this would not impact inter-generational wealth? Really?!?

Blacks struggle with 72 percent unwed mothers rate

Statistics show just what that fullness means. Children of unmarried mothers of any race are more likely to perform poorly in school, go to prison, use drugs, be poor as adults, and have their own children out of wedlock.

”Blacks as a group will never be equal while they have this situation going on, where the vast majority of children do not have fathers in the home married to their mother, involved in their lives, investing in them, investing in the next generation."

Curious as to what you believe drives that stat