What the hysteria over critical race theory is really all about

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

Reasonable, well-informed people can disagree about gun control.

Reasonable, well-informed people can disagree about healthcare policy.

Reasonable, well-informed people can disagree about foreign policy.

Institutional, systemic racism is different. Denying that it exists is denying a basic set of facts.

There is nothing inherent about disagreeing with CRT (or its pop-sociology derivatives) and denying that institutional racism exists. In fact there are several other competing philosophies that treat institutional racism as real but departing from CRT in some very fundamental ways.

Besides, "institutional racism" means different things to different people, and one can reasonably disagree with a specific phenomenon being a result of institutional racism (versus other factors) without discrediting the idea that institutional racism exists at all.

This type of argumentation is intellectually lazy and dangerous, not to mention unconvincing for anyone other than strict adherents. People are not stupid. They recognize that racial justice is a broad movement with ideological diversity, and can recognize that you can oppose racism in several of its forms without needing to adhere to an ideologically narrow and extreme dogma.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

The hysteria is because more and more people are rejecting woke notions offered by neoliberalism that are friendly to elites and finally adopting a strong and real anti-racist speech.

Critical Race Theory = Great
Woke Liberalism = Bad

So people in the top and white elites are feeling threatened and they should be. Stories about how “empowering” it is to have more female CEOs, more Black Police officers, more Gay stickers in stores is NOT something the new generation is willing to buy. People want real and intersectional anti-racist actions and stances, not the old liberal woke speech that pretends to be on their side.

Whatever form CRT may take in to its purest academic form is very obviously corrupted when brought in to the new world, and its corruption more or less is "woke liberalism" adopted by companies looking to use DEI initiatives to cover their own asses and treating racism's most pernicious form as inter-personal (a liberal perspective).

Very few people are going to separate CRT from Ivy League classes on "the construction of whiteness".

On interrogating whiteness

“Well, you know, teaching it or even just having conversations with your neighbor, your friends, it's difficult. We all are projecting on to things in terms of what we want as our expected outcomes. All of that is happening all the time, and yet we can't not have the conversation.

“I think Robin DiAngelo has talked a lot about the fragility of white people in these conversations, how they feel victimized. They see any critique of the system, any reminder of the injustice, as a personal affront rather than understanding themselves as part of a system and investing in that change. And part of the changes is looking at the truth. And so I think, you know, a lot has to happen. You have to navigate people's feelings. You have to navigate truth-telling. You have to figure out where the facts that are reliable are coming from — all of that.”

(from a nationally broadcast June 2020 interview with a Yale Literature professor).

This is woke liberalism! The idea here is that one of the crucial ways to eradicate racism is introspection. What could be more antithetical to the idea that racism is a structural problem than putting the burden on individuals to undergo internal change? Unless your definition of structural racism is "the emergent sum of individual personal animus across society", putting the onus on every individual to tackle racism through a personal introspective journey will be too little, too late for noticing and destroying legacy racism that's enshrined in legislation or built in to institutional function and form.

The wokesters still shop at Amazon, they still shell out a hundred thousand dollars or more to go to college, they still drive their automobiles into city cores while avoiding "bad" neighborhoods. In its popular incarnation, CRT is woke liberalism.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

Disagree, acknowledgement of racism and its running effects on society is not “woke”, just a fact. This kind of critical thinking stimulated by anti-racist theories is inherently anti-system. That’s why CRT is good.

I'm going to take some time to think about your post more (because I think there is a miscommunication or misunderstanding), but for the time being, what in the absolute hell inspired this complete non sequitur? When did I ever equate the acknowledgement of racism with wokeness?

Can people please stop making the very obvious (and transparently cynical) rhetorical move to equate disagreement with a very narrow ideology with the wholesale rejection that racism exists? Nobody disputes that racism exists, or has existed, or has had a massive influence on the history of the United States with an uncountable number of legacy effects that persist to the present day. Trying to pin this opinion to your opposition in this debate is a form of moralistic bullying.

There's a very large and inarguable baseline of racism that the vast majority of Americans accept as historical and present fact. That is basically taken in the conversation as a given. There are other aspects of the ideology that people reject or take issue with, including (for example) a creeping and overly-expansive to the point of useless definition of racism, an internal logic to the movement which is inconsistent and self-servingly applied at the expense of empirical evidence, that its popular forms as implemented in public institutions is inappropriate and damaging for many of its participants, and what is at best an inability to see and at worst an unwillingness to address much larger systemic issues that compound or even explain the racist legacy that everybody already agrees upon.