I’ve read Sowell's Affirmative Action Around the World this year. He documents the many countries in the past that have taken on the essentilist perspective and most of them produced more hatred and misery than what they originally sought to rectify. These days the analysis in the book makes me shutter thinking of the possibility of a CRT oriented United States.
In my opinion, the fact that CRT emanates from the recesses of the minds of academic lawyers should be highlighted, because verbally impressive, semantically logical proposals for social reform conjured up by people poring over case law and constitutional principles day in and day out should be taken with a sack of salt. I speak as a former lawyer. It's a different matter if a community comes together and agrees on the need for a specific social reform and then asks the lawyers to give it legal effect.
Back in grad school, a local referendum came up that my supervisor was involved with. Being a scientist he did a quick questionnaire for the town to see which segments of the population best understood science (and so would be reachable in the campaign).
I don't remember the outcome of the measure, but what lept out at me was that among the people/careers he sampled, lawyers came out as the least savvy segment polled. At the time I was surprised because I thought understanding would be related to the extent of somebody's education. Years later, with some experience under my belt, I had to change my mind. Anybody who, like lawyers, can believe that a corporation is a person has a very shakey handle on the reality most of us encounter. Anyone who can accept that a corporation is a person can believe almost any random thing, if it suits their purpose.
I’m 66, white, male, and a smoker. On the totem pole of life, there’s nobody below me. The absolute dregs. So You all may not like this. A rough sketch of something in a possible future pamphlet. Dunno.
It may seem implausible, but I’m HUMBLE, but have very strong opinions. Maybe this will provide some humor, if nothing else. This coming from someone who doesn’t even CLAIM to be a writer yet. (Wonder if this will even FIT?)
----------------
There Can BE No Debate About CRT – Part 5
As Sir Walter Scott wrote: ‘Oh what a tangled web we weave/When first we practice to deceive,’
As I “said” in Part 4, Your most recent piece, M. Kendi, in that propaganda pub The Atlantic, is called “There Is No Debate Over Critical Race Theory” And what You clearly mean is that no debate will be tolerated. This is one of the foundational features of CRT.
. . .
I’ve put off discussing paragraph two of Your article, M. Kendi, because You link to an article on what CRT is, in the legal sense, by Ms. Crenshaw among others. I’ve read it three times now, and there are so many cases of what can only be called bald-faced li.. Excuse me! “intellectual dishonesty”..
Well, to tell the Truth, I would guess that upwards of 90% of it is what-I-call “intellectual dishonesty”. Basically it’s a rally-around-the-flag piece for SJWs. You now know, M. Kendi, what I think of them.
Contrary to popular opinion, I’m actually trying to keep this short, so will pass on the above linked-to article until, possibly, another pamphlet.
Fortuitously, I just got today an excellent article by the editors of JFBT on the subject. Getting an opinion from someone who didn’t form CRT is likely to be interesting, as well as more honest, right M. Kendi?
The article by the editors of JFBT was titled, “Why Did Critical Race Theory Emerge from Legal Studies?”
So, obviously, the first thing I did was buy Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, Third Edition, edited by Richard Delgado who was one-a the founders of CRT. (Plus another famous person, Jean Stefancic, I’d never heard-a.)
So I got independent confirmation that indeed, just like the JFBT quoted: “critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law” (p. 3).
And that one statement pretty much puts the lie, or rather, the “intellectual dishonesty” to everything in the article You linked to by Ms. Crenshaw, et al.
I also happened to read the entire third page and, unfortunately, that may be as far as I can get to for a long while. And I couldn’t but notice this sentence:
“The critical race theory (CRT) movement is a collection of activists and scholars engaged in studying and transforming the relationship among race, racism, and power.”
And this confirmed a couple things which I already knew:
1. The amount of things I’m ignorant of vastly overwhelms what I do know.
2. The whole of CRT is of the same level of quality as Your scholarship, M. Kendi, for Stamped From the Beginning…
I’m pretty ignorant, but I was in training to be a scientist. (Failed outta the Ivy-League school after freshman year.) So unfortunately for anyone trying to pull the wool over my eyes, I know a fair bit about science. And science is based on the search for Truth, with a capital “T.”
Given that this is maddeningly difficult in the social sciences, yet it is still the goal of that, too. In science, if new information comes up that refutes another idea, then that one is dropped and a new idea takes its place that explains the new information.
And the Way to do that is by following the scientific method.
Now, I don’t say that CRT introduced an insidious idea into science, or if they just made it popular. But I do know for a fact that the scientific method is mutually exclusive with politics.
In cases where this wasn’t followed, things generally came to a bad end. I’m thinking Russia in Stalin’s time I think, but don’t recall the particulars at the moment. I’d seen the 1993 book Words that Wound and noticed that CRT was “avowedly political” I think the phrase was.
So the whole idea that CRT is a theory is dressing up a pig with lipstick. What You actually have is a political movement, who makes the “intellectual dishonest” claim that they are doing scholarly research. It doesn’t take much to go from there to the fact that confirmation bias will out.
If You’re looking for justification for a political movement, then Your research can only find results that confirm Your ignorance. No alternative is POSSIBLE or the world-view of the movement would be shattered. You think these so-called “scholars” are gonna allow that to happen, M. Kendi. If so, read this page again, and think on it.
Now, as the JFBT article says, the political movement of CRT wants to abolish individual rights. This is because of the 14th Amendment and Title VII, which I’m not familiar with. Now I, as I’ve indicated am pretty ignorant about a lotta things. IANL (I Am Not a Lawyer). Part of the 14th Amendment:
“No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
And just like the JBFT says, this runs afoul of CRT who wants to “commit to adopting explicitly race-based policies aimed at achieving equality of outcome, viz., equity.” In Other Words, CRT wants to trample white individuals who are, by their definition, racist and the cause for unequal outcomes.
From now on, I’m gonna use the JBFT definition of “equity” to mean the desire for numerically equal outcomes. Which is the Way I’ve been thinking of the word, but that was, in part, just a lucky guess.
Now, right outta the starting gates, REASONABLE people will see the inherently ILLOGICAL and ANTI-PRAGMATIC underpinning of one whole ton of CRT thinking. And, by no means, not just in the legal sense. You see, M. Kendi, You have this same problem when You want to eliminate “disparities” by force.
It’s a mathematical, scientific LAW that outcomes won’t come out equally, unless unnaturally FORCED to.
It’s called the Law of the Bell Curve. In almost everything You want to measure in the social sciences, results will hover around the middle in a big way. But off to the left and to the right, as You get to further extremes, there will be less and less of the quantity.
Right now, in a large number of areas, the numbers don’t hover around the middle. Whether this is the effects of racism, or the effects of bias, or the effects of a given culture, this needs to be worked out. In Other Words, getting more people into the middle-class.
I was somewhat stunned by the reference to a 1993 essay that promoted the idea that America should adopt the policies of post-APARTHEID South Africa so they can take what they want from whites and give it to Blacks. This was said to be a “foundational” essay of CRT.
Again, a REASONABLE individual would question the comparison between South Africa and America. Yes, America had apartheid. To its great shame. But not since the 60s. That point seems to have been lost in the shuffle to destroy American Democracy.
Now, is there ANYONE reading this that would maintain that CRT isn’t based on Marxist principles? Now, I can’t count the number of times that teachers and journalists, who should both know better, have said that CRT is a legal theory (which I’ve shown it’s not) and that legal theory isn’t taught in K – 12 education.
I’m not debater, but this looks like an inverted reductio ad absurdum. You start with an absolutely ridiculous proposition, defeat it, and think You’ve made a solid point. But there is a definite connection with the views of the legal so-called theory of CRT, and what-i-call the Pop-CRT version You proscribe, M. Kendi.
And here’s where I stop for the day. I’d skimmed the article once, and now read to the bottom including the case law. And I can see that by unscrupulous means, CRT may get away with destroying American Democracy. Sad, but True. Those who are good do NOT always win over those who are, in the “intellectual dishonesty” sense only, pure, unadulterated evil. Personally, I tend to like everybody I talk to. Not so good at that when I'm writing. And I suppose I should add, In My not-so Humble Opinion, though it’s plain for those with eyes to see.
. . .
Tuesday, August 17, 2021. Started up to “And here’s where I stop.”
I don't get why it is so hard to hold two thoughts in one's head at once. If I look at thousands and thousands of black people I can see some disparate suffering/flourishing patterns where the history of Black people in the US is part of that origin story. I think it is good to know that and I get annoyed when some conservatives try to deny it. But recognizing this is a far cry from thinking individual black people somehow embody in some metaphysical way that disparity and are thus all candidates for intervention to "make it right". So many people have difficulty with levels of analysis. You hear for example about redlining, but people never mention that 30% of redlined neighborhoods were white, so there are plenty of white people out there who also have less family wealth than they would because of redlining. It just doesn't follow that if you observe a disparity blacks are more likely to suffer, and that disparity has some connection to history, that any black person can be treated as though they suffer from it and all white people can be treated as if they don't. In DEI land, the people most likely to get benefits because of group disparities are the least likely to individually suffer from them. Adolph Reed Jr. constantly points this out (y'all need him for Free Black Thought). https://nonsite.org/the-trouble-with-disparity/ As did Freddie DeBoer in this great piece: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/why-the-fuck-do-you-trust-harvard This is controversial and it drives people crazy, but groups don't suffer. Groups are not units of suffering. The individuals in groups are. The Holocaust would not have been better if the 6 million killed were just randomly selected. Slavery wouldn't have been better if all those people chained and worked to death had just been random war captives from everywhere. Zionism is another ideology like CRT that imagines groups are units of suffering and thus "the group" has rights vis a vis other groups because of it.
This was an excellent exposition of the legal -- and moral -- paradigms that are currently battling for dominance in our political culture and our government. It reminded me of Thomas Sowell's discussion of the restrained and unrestrained visions.
It also makes the case for more... liberal minded-, as its called here -- people to be more mindful of the potential danger that CRT presents. If there are people who hold a CRT vision of morality, and they are actively attempting to persuade and train lawyers and judges to carry that vision into judgements, then they may grow into a force that could overturn the liberal vision that was articulated by the majority in the Vitolo case. In my mind that would not be a good direction to take for the arc of justice.
I'm going to take a look at the full opinions that y'all summarized here; they seem worth reading in their entirety.
This is probably wrong place to ask, but it came up here. Does anybody know of a SCHOLARLY book that opposes Thomas Sowell's views on Affirmative Action? TY in Advance.
TY (thank You) "editors of JFBT." I skimmed this morning, and studied in detail this afternoon. At this moment in time, it's hard to see where CRTers won't get away with it. But I'll keep an open mind. TYTY again. :)
I’ve read Sowell's Affirmative Action Around the World this year. He documents the many countries in the past that have taken on the essentilist perspective and most of them produced more hatred and misery than what they originally sought to rectify. These days the analysis in the book makes me shutter thinking of the possibility of a CRT oriented United States.
In my opinion, the fact that CRT emanates from the recesses of the minds of academic lawyers should be highlighted, because verbally impressive, semantically logical proposals for social reform conjured up by people poring over case law and constitutional principles day in and day out should be taken with a sack of salt. I speak as a former lawyer. It's a different matter if a community comes together and agrees on the need for a specific social reform and then asks the lawyers to give it legal effect.
Back in grad school, a local referendum came up that my supervisor was involved with. Being a scientist he did a quick questionnaire for the town to see which segments of the population best understood science (and so would be reachable in the campaign).
I don't remember the outcome of the measure, but what lept out at me was that among the people/careers he sampled, lawyers came out as the least savvy segment polled. At the time I was surprised because I thought understanding would be related to the extent of somebody's education. Years later, with some experience under my belt, I had to change my mind. Anybody who, like lawyers, can believe that a corporation is a person has a very shakey handle on the reality most of us encounter. Anyone who can accept that a corporation is a person can believe almost any random thing, if it suits their purpose.
I’m 66, white, male, and a smoker. On the totem pole of life, there’s nobody below me. The absolute dregs. So You all may not like this. A rough sketch of something in a possible future pamphlet. Dunno.
It may seem implausible, but I’m HUMBLE, but have very strong opinions. Maybe this will provide some humor, if nothing else. This coming from someone who doesn’t even CLAIM to be a writer yet. (Wonder if this will even FIT?)
----------------
There Can BE No Debate About CRT – Part 5
As Sir Walter Scott wrote: ‘Oh what a tangled web we weave/When first we practice to deceive,’
As I “said” in Part 4, Your most recent piece, M. Kendi, in that propaganda pub The Atlantic, is called “There Is No Debate Over Critical Race Theory” And what You clearly mean is that no debate will be tolerated. This is one of the foundational features of CRT.
. . .
I’ve put off discussing paragraph two of Your article, M. Kendi, because You link to an article on what CRT is, in the legal sense, by Ms. Crenshaw among others. I’ve read it three times now, and there are so many cases of what can only be called bald-faced li.. Excuse me! “intellectual dishonesty”..
Well, to tell the Truth, I would guess that upwards of 90% of it is what-I-call “intellectual dishonesty”. Basically it’s a rally-around-the-flag piece for SJWs. You now know, M. Kendi, what I think of them.
Contrary to popular opinion, I’m actually trying to keep this short, so will pass on the above linked-to article until, possibly, another pamphlet.
Fortuitously, I just got today an excellent article by the editors of JFBT on the subject. Getting an opinion from someone who didn’t form CRT is likely to be interesting, as well as more honest, right M. Kendi?
The article by the editors of JFBT was titled, “Why Did Critical Race Theory Emerge from Legal Studies?”
So, obviously, the first thing I did was buy Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, Third Edition, edited by Richard Delgado who was one-a the founders of CRT. (Plus another famous person, Jean Stefancic, I’d never heard-a.)
So I got independent confirmation that indeed, just like the JFBT quoted: “critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law” (p. 3).
And that one statement pretty much puts the lie, or rather, the “intellectual dishonesty” to everything in the article You linked to by Ms. Crenshaw, et al.
I also happened to read the entire third page and, unfortunately, that may be as far as I can get to for a long while. And I couldn’t but notice this sentence:
“The critical race theory (CRT) movement is a collection of activists and scholars engaged in studying and transforming the relationship among race, racism, and power.”
And this confirmed a couple things which I already knew:
1. The amount of things I’m ignorant of vastly overwhelms what I do know.
2. The whole of CRT is of the same level of quality as Your scholarship, M. Kendi, for Stamped From the Beginning…
I’m pretty ignorant, but I was in training to be a scientist. (Failed outta the Ivy-League school after freshman year.) So unfortunately for anyone trying to pull the wool over my eyes, I know a fair bit about science. And science is based on the search for Truth, with a capital “T.”
Given that this is maddeningly difficult in the social sciences, yet it is still the goal of that, too. In science, if new information comes up that refutes another idea, then that one is dropped and a new idea takes its place that explains the new information.
And the Way to do that is by following the scientific method.
Now, I don’t say that CRT introduced an insidious idea into science, or if they just made it popular. But I do know for a fact that the scientific method is mutually exclusive with politics.
In cases where this wasn’t followed, things generally came to a bad end. I’m thinking Russia in Stalin’s time I think, but don’t recall the particulars at the moment. I’d seen the 1993 book Words that Wound and noticed that CRT was “avowedly political” I think the phrase was.
So the whole idea that CRT is a theory is dressing up a pig with lipstick. What You actually have is a political movement, who makes the “intellectual dishonest” claim that they are doing scholarly research. It doesn’t take much to go from there to the fact that confirmation bias will out.
If You’re looking for justification for a political movement, then Your research can only find results that confirm Your ignorance. No alternative is POSSIBLE or the world-view of the movement would be shattered. You think these so-called “scholars” are gonna allow that to happen, M. Kendi. If so, read this page again, and think on it.
Now, as the JFBT article says, the political movement of CRT wants to abolish individual rights. This is because of the 14th Amendment and Title VII, which I’m not familiar with. Now I, as I’ve indicated am pretty ignorant about a lotta things. IANL (I Am Not a Lawyer). Part of the 14th Amendment:
“No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
And just like the JBFT says, this runs afoul of CRT who wants to “commit to adopting explicitly race-based policies aimed at achieving equality of outcome, viz., equity.” In Other Words, CRT wants to trample white individuals who are, by their definition, racist and the cause for unequal outcomes.
From now on, I’m gonna use the JBFT definition of “equity” to mean the desire for numerically equal outcomes. Which is the Way I’ve been thinking of the word, but that was, in part, just a lucky guess.
Now, right outta the starting gates, REASONABLE people will see the inherently ILLOGICAL and ANTI-PRAGMATIC underpinning of one whole ton of CRT thinking. And, by no means, not just in the legal sense. You see, M. Kendi, You have this same problem when You want to eliminate “disparities” by force.
It’s a mathematical, scientific LAW that outcomes won’t come out equally, unless unnaturally FORCED to.
It’s called the Law of the Bell Curve. In almost everything You want to measure in the social sciences, results will hover around the middle in a big way. But off to the left and to the right, as You get to further extremes, there will be less and less of the quantity.
Right now, in a large number of areas, the numbers don’t hover around the middle. Whether this is the effects of racism, or the effects of bias, or the effects of a given culture, this needs to be worked out. In Other Words, getting more people into the middle-class.
I was somewhat stunned by the reference to a 1993 essay that promoted the idea that America should adopt the policies of post-APARTHEID South Africa so they can take what they want from whites and give it to Blacks. This was said to be a “foundational” essay of CRT.
Again, a REASONABLE individual would question the comparison between South Africa and America. Yes, America had apartheid. To its great shame. But not since the 60s. That point seems to have been lost in the shuffle to destroy American Democracy.
Now, is there ANYONE reading this that would maintain that CRT isn’t based on Marxist principles? Now, I can’t count the number of times that teachers and journalists, who should both know better, have said that CRT is a legal theory (which I’ve shown it’s not) and that legal theory isn’t taught in K – 12 education.
I’m not debater, but this looks like an inverted reductio ad absurdum. You start with an absolutely ridiculous proposition, defeat it, and think You’ve made a solid point. But there is a definite connection with the views of the legal so-called theory of CRT, and what-i-call the Pop-CRT version You proscribe, M. Kendi.
And here’s where I stop for the day. I’d skimmed the article once, and now read to the bottom including the case law. And I can see that by unscrupulous means, CRT may get away with destroying American Democracy. Sad, but True. Those who are good do NOT always win over those who are, in the “intellectual dishonesty” sense only, pure, unadulterated evil. Personally, I tend to like everybody I talk to. Not so good at that when I'm writing. And I suppose I should add, In My not-so Humble Opinion, though it’s plain for those with eyes to see.
. . .
Tuesday, August 17, 2021. Started up to “And here’s where I stop.”
Hope You enjoy the rest of the day, wherever...
I don't get why it is so hard to hold two thoughts in one's head at once. If I look at thousands and thousands of black people I can see some disparate suffering/flourishing patterns where the history of Black people in the US is part of that origin story. I think it is good to know that and I get annoyed when some conservatives try to deny it. But recognizing this is a far cry from thinking individual black people somehow embody in some metaphysical way that disparity and are thus all candidates for intervention to "make it right". So many people have difficulty with levels of analysis. You hear for example about redlining, but people never mention that 30% of redlined neighborhoods were white, so there are plenty of white people out there who also have less family wealth than they would because of redlining. It just doesn't follow that if you observe a disparity blacks are more likely to suffer, and that disparity has some connection to history, that any black person can be treated as though they suffer from it and all white people can be treated as if they don't. In DEI land, the people most likely to get benefits because of group disparities are the least likely to individually suffer from them. Adolph Reed Jr. constantly points this out (y'all need him for Free Black Thought). https://nonsite.org/the-trouble-with-disparity/ As did Freddie DeBoer in this great piece: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/why-the-fuck-do-you-trust-harvard This is controversial and it drives people crazy, but groups don't suffer. Groups are not units of suffering. The individuals in groups are. The Holocaust would not have been better if the 6 million killed were just randomly selected. Slavery wouldn't have been better if all those people chained and worked to death had just been random war captives from everywhere. Zionism is another ideology like CRT that imagines groups are units of suffering and thus "the group" has rights vis a vis other groups because of it.
This was an excellent exposition of the legal -- and moral -- paradigms that are currently battling for dominance in our political culture and our government. It reminded me of Thomas Sowell's discussion of the restrained and unrestrained visions.
It also makes the case for more... liberal minded-, as its called here -- people to be more mindful of the potential danger that CRT presents. If there are people who hold a CRT vision of morality, and they are actively attempting to persuade and train lawyers and judges to carry that vision into judgements, then they may grow into a force that could overturn the liberal vision that was articulated by the majority in the Vitolo case. In my mind that would not be a good direction to take for the arc of justice.
I'm going to take a look at the full opinions that y'all summarized here; they seem worth reading in their entirety.
Additional comments interesting. FWIW, Part 7 https://www.persuasion.community/p/-how-not-to-think-about-race/comments
This is probably wrong place to ask, but it came up here. Does anybody know of a SCHOLARLY book that opposes Thomas Sowell's views on Affirmative Action? TY in Advance.
TYTY for liking tome. New to Substack, dunno if it's inappropriate to ask Authors for comments or corrections to replies?
TY (thank You) "editors of JFBT." I skimmed this morning, and studied in detail this afternoon. At this moment in time, it's hard to see where CRTers won't get away with it. But I'll keep an open mind. TYTY again. :)