Chilling Orwellianism at NYU

[Enoch the Red]

Teaching and learning CRT has absolutely nothing to do with policy-making or any attempts to change society. It merely presents a framework for understanding the origin of issues and barriers. As I said, education is descriptivist, not prescriptivist. Educated people might want to change things, and CRT might help understand why various things might not be terribly effective or functional on a meaningful time-frame, but it doesn't tell you how to effect change in society, it tells you what kind of things would need to BE changed if identified issues are to be ameliorated.

I don't think your understanding of the tenets of CRT is very complete.

The first is to understand how a regime of white supremacy and its subordination of people of color have been created and maintained in America, and, in particular, to examine the relationship between that social structure and professed ideals such as "the rule of law" and "equal protection." The second is a desire not merely to understand the vexed bond between law and racial power but to change it." (Crenshaw et al., 1995)

So, I understand that you might want CRT to be unrelated to policy-making or attempts to change society, however that isn't what CRT actually teaches, nor even what it professes to teach. If I teach that global warming is killing the planet, that it will end civilization as we know it, and that unless it is brought under control then our days our numbered, is that teaching divorced from policy solutions, and social change? Of course not, the course is clear - to prevent catastrophe global warming needs to be stopped at any cost. What if I teach that, “Every policy in every institution in every community in every nation is producing or sustaining either racial inequity or equity," and that there are no such things as non-racist ideas? Does that not also contain inherent in it recommendations on policy and society? If you believe a student being taught this would not see the prescriptivist ideas being espoused then I don't feel you are being honest.

And Enoch, your listing of a bunch of individuals is exactly why I harped on your entire social and political ideology being deliberately blind to the core topic of CRT, the identification and root-cause analysis of systemic racial bias, because you flat out refuse to acknowledge that there is or can be such bias if you can identify individuals who have succeeded in the face of such bias. If something isn't a hard barrier that flat out stops EVERYONE it doesn't exist to you. You're convinced that if some handful of disadvantaged people (who may or may not have countervailing advantages in other areas) can still see ultimate success DESPITE the bias then it doesn't actually exist or at least has no tangible effect. Which is just ludicrous.

If you would care to look at what I actually wrote, it was a critique of your stated belief that continued racial progress would require hundreds of years, not an argument that systemic racial bias does not exist. If in a lifetime you went from the Tulsa Race Massacre to black members of the supreme court, a black Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, a black Secretary of State, a black president and vice president, then that is progress that is not glacial, in social space that is breakneck. And while there still may be racial problems in hundreds of years, the rate of change to see a society that is widely free of racial discrimination is not, in my estimation, hundreds of years away. Or at least, such was my belief five years ago. Currently that trajectory is not being maintained.

As far as refusing to acknowledge bias, you are wrong. I freely admit it exists. What I refuse to believe is that the systems of power that are being described and railed against are so rooted in white supremacy and racism that they are irredeemable and require being completely overhauled. An irredeemably white supremacist society does not elect a black president. I agree, a society can elect a black president and still have systemic racial bias, I disagree that a society that does so has not made stunning progress towards equal justice and more equal opportunities. We have seen too slow a pace to combat the very real racism and bias in our country, but regardless of the valid critiques that can be made we have seen real movement. I think much of that can be laid at the feet of liberalism. What I have not seen, and have yet to be convinced of is that overturning the imperfect system that brought us that progress, progress which historically speaking is unimaginable and unheard of, will result in further progress.

What seems to be widely ignored or unrecognized here is that this constant focus on the centrality and intersectionality of race and racism is that it is coming at a cost, and I fear that cost is going to be the galvanization and widespread acceptance of a white racial identity. And when that happens the results will be disastrous - for whites, blacks, and the country as a whole. White nationalism, white supremacy are taboo, they are fringe. That may not always continue to be the case. I for one do not look forward to a return of the darker days of our country's history, and that seems to be the direction we are heading.