… like Andrew Sullivan, attempts to get at the fatal disconnect between liberal culture and critical race theory.
Critical race theory is not the same thing as Marxism, but some of its more facile popularizers share with Marxists the deep conviction that their way of seeing the world is the only way worth seeing the world. Moreover, some have encouraged people to behave as if this were the only way of seeing the world. The structural racism that they have identified is real, just as the class divisions once identified by the Marxists were real. But racism is not everywhere, in every institution, or in every person’s heart at all times. More to the point, any analysis of American history or American society that sees only structural racism will misunderstand the country, and badly. It will not be able to explain why the U.S. did in fact have an Emancipation Proclamation, a Civil Rights Act, a Black president. This is a major stumbling block, not so much for the legal scholars (some of whom actually merit the title “critical race theorist”) but rather for the popularizers and the scholars-turned-activists who want to force everybody to recite the same mantras.
June 28th, 2021 at 8:01PM
You will be pleased to hear that the governor of Florida, Mr. DeSantis, also is concerned about critical race theory and has ordered a survey of all college students in Florida to detect any wrongthink on the subject.
Indeed GOP operatives have been storming various school boards in a huff about the dangers of critical race theory, something one feels they probably couldn’t pick out of a multiple choice question. So to be on the safe side, they “argue” any historical event that makes white people feel bad, or discloses some racial discrimination that has occurred should be sent down the memory hole. No more learning about Tulsa.
June 29th, 2021 at 3:03AM
Matt: It’s not clear why people think it’s polemically effective to reduce the many thoughtful people who object to critical race theory in the schools to Trumpy reactionaries, but, you know, go to it.
June 29th, 2021 at 5:25AM
It is easy for Applebaum and Sullivan to make sport of the most extreme adherents of CRT, the ones who see nothing but racism in every heart and every institution, who consider the United States an irredeemably evil nation, and who won’t be satisfied until we level the Washington Monument and the Jefferson Memorial. But I do think CRT has something to teach us and could legitimately be integrated into the curriculum at all levels. For example, rather than making the facile suggestion that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 invalidates claims of institutional racism (I caricature Applebaum’s argument here, but not by much), critical race theorists might ask why, nearly sixty years after the passage of the Act, outcomes for black and white Americans remain so disparate. (They aren’t the only ones, of course; I am a quantitatively-oriented social scientist, and I would likely come at the question from a different theoretical and methodological perspective.)
And white privilege is a thing. I hate the term because of how it lands on the ear, especially the ear of, say, a middle-aged unemployed white machinist. Nevertheless, there are certain negative experiences from which white people are generally exempt, though age and social class also play into the equation. I was out of town a few weeks ago and, shortly after leaving my hotel on my morning walk, found myself in a rather stunningly upscale neighborhood. It occurred to me, as I was walking past the mansions in my grubby t-shirt and torn sweatpants, that it was likely that nobody was lunging for the panic button to summon security and that this was largely because I was white. It is, of course, possible that I was entirely wrong and had simply absorbed too much CRT, but the anecdotes do add up.
It is surely impossible to tell the history of the United States without explaining how, among other things, redlining, blockbusting, urban freeway construction, and, of course, slavery, violence, and policing have contribute–and continue to contribute–to racial inequality. Certainly, anyone who says that 2021 is no different from 1921 or 1821 is a fool, but those people are few in number, if easy to isolate for partisan purposes. (And, no, Sullivan and Applebaum don’t go that far, but they do, I think, exaggerate CRT, its adherents, and its grip on the academy, in order to stir the suburban masses into anti-Democratic fervor.)
At its base, CRT asserts that racism is more than the sum total of individual bigots, but rather inherent in certain systems and institutions, and that it benefits even those of us who harbor dreams of everlasting brotherhood and equality. It’s a point, I think, that’s both easy to exaggerate and hard to deny.
June 29th, 2021 at 8:26AM
TAFKAU: All reasonable points, though your defense rests on confidence that in its actual application in American education, possibly at all levels, CRT will make us proud. I think the chances of its fair and enlightened curricular implementation are zilch. I think it is likely to make people toxically and resentfully self-conscious about skin color in general, and that it will create social distance and distrust rather than greater understanding. Anyone who has followed mandated race-conscious pedagogical exercises for, say, freshmen at some American universities and employees at some corporations knows that most of them are more destructive than constructive.
Notice that even you can’t help caricaturing Applebaum — it’s just too easy, in the framework CRT encourages, to go after people who think it’s empirically and indeed morally valid to cite gains in civil rights, growth in the black middle class, etc., in this country.
I think it’s striking that an old lefty like Richard Rorty, in Achieving Our Country, takes for granted that racial and sexual minorities in this country have made very significant progress, and indeed that racism/sexism/homophobia among the general population has significantly declined (see for one instance the burgeoning support – currently 70% – for same sex marriage). In fact, Rorty’s book (based on a series of lectures) is animated by anxiety that we will slide back from what we have achieved. Doesn’t mean he denies ongoing injustice, structural disparities, and indeed the white privilege you (and I) experience. It means that he thinks we should start trying to make things better from a position of fairness, a position that doesn’t self-sabotagingly demonize America, Americans, American history, and American institutions.
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An addendum: Here’s Damon Linker.
“[T]he country needs liberal-minded leftists to ally with liberal centrists in taking a stand against the pious simplicities proffered by illiberal ideologues on both extremes. Public schools should be teaching the story of the past and present in a way that foregrounds the admirable as well as the shameful, that shows students how to hold contrary and complex views in their minds at the same time, that highlights our noblest principles as well as our most egregious faults, in the past as well as in the present.”
June 29th, 2021 at 10:08AM
I remember just enough about statistical inference to be dangerous, so here goes. It’s probably closer to a statement of faith than to a valid empirical claim to lay off any residual difference in labor market outcomes or wealth holdings to racist attitudes. I don’t want to get into the econometric weeds of difference-in-difference methods, that is, if average wealth holdings have gotten closer, or average earnings are converging, or what have you, since Emancipation or enhanced voting rights or what have you, why has that happened? In addition, people will likely quibble about whether to aggregate up (national average) or disaggregate (the favorite cuts being quintiles and deciles) or attempt to use nationally representative samples (the various panel studies) and whether the other regressors might not be truly independent variables. Whether serious attempt to do those investigations, which strike me as what TAFKAU is after, would lower the temperature, or whether the True Believers would scold the researchers daring enough to give it a go, remains as an exercise.