CRT dates back to the 1970s. I assure you that the liberal NYU and Northwestern professors quoted in the article didn’t just wake up in 2022 and decide to complain about people saying that “mass incarceration is bad social policy.”
These trends are hitting academia and the non-profit sector first. At my law school, one of the top ones in the country, the Dean got up and declared himself a “white supremacist” at a town hall meeting: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/northwestern-univers...
My friend who works at a public interest organization—herself very liberal—has been surprised by attorneys refusing to work in cases because of the political beliefs of clients and donors (which have nothing to do with the organization’s purpose).
My constitutional law professor did some CRT scholarship in the 1980s and brought this perspective to our class* in an interesting way. The syllabus was pretty traditional, but he would add color, giving what he called "the conventional view" (basically, that the Supreme Court has steadily and inevitably protected the rights of minorities) and then his own view challenging this. It was far from indoctrination. Rather, he encouraged us to think critically about each decision and what it did and didn't do, and the institutional capabilities of courts vs. legislatures, rather than just vaguely celebrating social progress won through landmark decisions.
* circa 2009, when "CRT" was better known as a near-obsolete display technology than a boogeyman of the American political right.
> My constitutional law professor did some CRT scholarship in the 1980s and brought this perspective to our class* in an interesting way
Exactly. Which is why it's bizarre to suggest that liberal professors at NYU and Northwestern are suddenly upset in 2022 about something that was routinely taught when they went to law school. It's more reasonable to assume that they're responding to something else that they're observing.
> * circa 2009, when "CRT" was better known as a near-obsolete display technology than a boogeyman of the American political right.
"CRT" is just a vernacular shorthand for a collection of ideas that have become prevalent in certain circles in the last few years, which share common threads such as abandoning the ideal of race neutrality in law and policy. It's similar to how "supply-side economics" being used to refer to Reaganite economic policies. Whether those ideas are technically CRT is beside the point.
Opposition to that collection of ideas is not limited to the "American political right."
The "American political right," moreover, is hardly the only one that has realized that these ideas and policies share common roots. Emmanuel Macron, of the French center, has come out against them too: https://www.newsweek.com/macron-france-reject-american-woke-...
Insofar as more Democrats don't oppose CRT, I suspect it's because they haven't heard much about it or are skeptical that it's just a right-wing effort. But I sent this article to my dad--an immigrant from a Muslim country who has supported Democrats since Carter--and he expressed concerns about "critical race theory." Because he's a strong proponent of "color blindness" as a foundational principle of law and society. He was alarmed, as a public health expert, by proposals to prioritize non-whites for vaccinations. He was likewise alarmed by TJHSST, the high school I attended, recently abandoning its admissions test under the theory that it was "racist." I suspect there are a lot of Democrats like him who are skeptical that Republicans are acting in good faith, but don't actually agree with progressives that we need fundamental changes to our legal system.
>sent this article to my dad--an immigrant from a Muslim country who has supported Democrats since Carter--and he expressed concerns about "critical race theory."
Not sure how far this is the case in this instance, but immigrants (and many Americans) generally have a blind spot where race and law intersect in US history. Most have only consumed the prevailing narrative of US history promoted by the dominant society which is heavily sanitized to say the least.
After studying what would be considered heterodox US history (much of which can be verified by economic history) and becoming aware of the how gears have really worked in the US, I wonder how much of this "general ignorance" reality that I'm describing applies to your anecdata.
I would argue that what you call a “blind spot” is actually a fresh perspective: we judge for ourselves what America is like now, without our view being excessively colored by what happened in the past.
There’s lots of “data” you can bring to bear on this—poor asian children are more than twice as likely as poor white children to become affluent as adults. Hispanics (who mostly come here in poverty) have similar economic mobility to whites and converge economically with whites within a couple of generations. Etc.
My dad remarked the other day that, after more than 30 years in the US (in a county that was solidly red for the first 15 years we lived there, including right after 9/11), he was pleasantly surprised by how he had encountered almost no racism. My family members, who have immigrated all over the country, most recently to Texas, have had the same experience. And I don’t think these experiences are unrepresentative: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/09/16/miss-americ...
Why do we need some history course to tell us that we’re oppressed?
For the people just arriving (post 1970 immigrants), ignoring this history can have little personal cost, atleast in the short term.
For the people that fought for the rights of non-European (Asian, African, South/Central American) immigrants including your Dad, to come here and also fought for the seemingly non-racist present your Dad enjoys, ignoring history is a betrayal of their sacrifices.
This ignorance is also used as a tool to attack their valid claims about extensions of the racist past that leak into the present and their long term losses as the earliest uncompensated investors in the US project.
The thing I find scary is what I call the "LatinX" phenomenon--(overwhelmingly white) progressives being able to dictate policies affecting minorities over the preferences of those minorities: https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2020/08/11/about-one-in...
A sobering example: if Justice Thomas votes against race-based college admissions in the Harvard case, white progressives will call him "racist" for adopting a view shared by 62% of Black people.
the latinx term is interesting, because ... it's purely made by whites for whites to be sure that they are not accidentally discriminatory in their language. because whites won't call out a latino person for using the term latino. (at least this is how I understand it.)
and even if latino folks have spoken up against it ... it's no use, because it's not about them, it's about (virtue signalling :D and partly) about a slightly justified ignorance of the needs of minorities. (and nowadays everybody writes to every single person on the planet at once - thanks to twitter - so maximal inclusive language became a proxy for actual inclusiveness.)
I don't think there's any conceit that it's about Hispanics qua Hispanics; isn't it supposed to be about gender? Like, I don't think a white progressive would claim they say that to make a Hispanic person feel comfortable, I think it's more about a) women and non-binary; b) a more abstract notion that this somehow makes the language less "sexist"
It was made up by a Puerto Rican academic, or so I’m told. But it was made popular by white people, who have the institutional power to decide which ideas coming from minority communities to promote or not, and which minorities to platform and not. Academic and activist ideas relating to minorities largely become popular based on how appealing they are to the white people who control the institutions, donor networks, and platforms.
To use a different example, my dad remarked the other day he was upset that Ilhan Omar had “become the face of Islam in America.” Of course, it’s white progressives in the media decide who gets used in stories as a proxy for minority groups. (There’s almost certainly more Muslim Republicans than Muslim DSA members, but you’ll never see one of the former be given the mike to speak on “Muslim issues.”) Likewise, it’s white liberals in university faculties that decide who gets tenured as an “Islamic Studies” professor. It’s also white liberals who bankroll most political activist groups claiming to speak for Muslim Americans. (CAIR might be an exception given foreign funding.)
Barring a recreation of the Muslim-GOP alliance of 2000, it’ll be white liberals who have the biggest say in appointing the first “Muslim” Supreme Court Justice. It will be no surprise that this person will think white liberals are right and the vast majority of Muslims are wrong on every issue where the two disagree.
I'm Muslim, and not particularly a fan of Ilhan Omar (though I also agree with her on many things). But she's not the "face of Islam in America" because "white progressives in the media" decided that. She's one of like 3 Muslims in Congress, all of whom happen to be very progressive. She's the only one who wears a hijab (i.e. she's more obviously Muslim and probably more genuinely religious than Ellison or Tlaib, as far as I can tell). I would bet Republicans would want her to be the face of Islam in America too--she unites two conservative bogeymen: Muslims and progressives.
> It’s also white liberals who bankroll most political activist groups claiming to speak for Muslim Americans. (CAIR might be an exception given foreign funding.)
??
What your dad is complaining about also represents a generational gap within the Muslim community. There are a lot of young Muslim Americans who are quite religious (more personally pious and abiding by the dictates of the religion than me, certainly) and simultaneously very comfortable identifying as progressive and allying with groups who hold views contrary to our religion's beliefs. For example, I was briefly the president of the Muslim Law Student's Association at Columbia. Our year and the previous year were not that practicing, but the year I was president, we had two incoming 1Ls join who were two hijabi girls who were simultaneously very religious and very progressive. They wanted to partner with all sorts of organizations whose beliefs are, in my view (and your dad's), inconsistent with Islam (i.e. pretty left LGBTQ groups). They also wanted to lobby the law school for prayer space within the building because they pray 5x a day.
What's more, plenty within the Muslim community, irrespective of age or views on social issues, believe that far-left positions on economics and also the environment are more consistent with Islam than moderate or conservative positions on those issues. Shit, I know a Muslim guy who voted for Trump because he hates feminism who agrees that market socialism is the most consistent economic position from an Islamic perspective.
> It will be no surprise that this person will think white liberals are right and the vast majority of Muslims are wrong on every issue where the two disagree.
Whose fault is that? Why fault liberals for appointing an ideologically-aligned justice instead of faulting Christian conservatives for their bigotry and short-term thinking w/r/t Muslims?
With due respect to you given our back-and-forth in this thread, what you're saying does not strike me as logically tenable, and instead seems more driven by a kind of emotional response. I agree with the general sentiment of being against this stuff, but I think you want to see what basically amounts to a kind of "conspiracy" here that doesn't exist. A huge part of why all of the issues raised in this thread exist is because of a dynamic where this country has tended to skew heavily conservative (compare us to the rest of the Western world) and biased, and substantive change seldom happens. IMO, there's a huge backlash factor at play that makes contemporary progressives more extreme than they should be.
Yeah the latinx thing is really dumb (REALLY dumb), but also harmless, esp since almost no actual Hispanic person says that shit.
Luckily Dem voters reject far left candidates in broader elections; see Biden, Eric Adams. Dems currently seem to elect moderates at a higher rate, whereas Republican moderates tend to have to retire (Flake, Kinzinger) or suffer vicious attacks and get voted out (Liz Cheney)
> Yeah the latinx thing is really dumb (REALLY dumb), but also harmless, esp since almost no actual Hispanic person says that shit.
It's harmless if you consider it in isolation. But I think it reflects a troubling power dynamic. At Northwestern they renamed "Hispanic Heritage Month" to "Latinx Heritage Month" (https://www.northwestern.edu/msa/programs/heritage-months/la...). Big deal, sure. But it shows that white progressives and their allies have tremendous power over issues relating to minorities--down to what to call a group of minorities--and minorities have very little power to assert their own preferences. I don't think that's harmless.
> Luckily Dem voters reject far left candidates in broader elections; see Biden, Eric Adams.
I think this illustrates my point, though. In the primary, Black and Latino New Yorkers overwhelmingly supported Adams, while Asians supported Yang. But the Black, Latino, and Asian progressive activists mostly opposed both and sided with the candidates preferred by white progressives. Matt Yglesias wrote an excellent article addressing the disconnect between Asian actvists and asian voters: https://www.slowboring.com/p/yang-gang?s=r.
But there's a whole lot of things--especially the things addressed in this article--that are not put to a popular vote. Do so-called "people of color" actually want the ABA to change well-worn principles of color-blind justice in favor of affirmative anti-racism? Do "people of color" want hospitals to send white people to the back of the vaccine line? Do they want hiring policies that expressly consider race? It doesn't matter because they don't get a vote.
One of the great things about Islam and also one of the problems where race and law are involved, is muslims have an extremely diverse racial distribution.
When somebody says Muslim, a particular race doesn't come to mind amongst the informed.
So their experiences and perceptions in a society where race has historically been a reasonably large part of weighting can be drastically different.
> It's harmless if you consider it in isolation. But I think it reflects a troubling power dynamic. At Northwestern they renamed "Hispanic Heritage Month" to "Latinx Heritage Month" (https://www.northwestern.edu/msa/programs/heritage-months/la...). Big deal, sure. But it shows that white progressives and their allies have tremendous power over issues relating to minorities--down to what to call a group of minorities--and minorities have very little power to assert their own preferences. I don't think that's harmless.
Our Latino law school classmates at places like Northwestern and Columbia are by and large progressive, and thus that change likely reflected the preferences of the Hispanic student body at Northwestern Law. I'm not sure why the preferences of moderate Hispanics who aren't there should matter in that context.
> I think this illustrates my point, though. In the primary, Black and Latino New Yorkers overwhelmingly supported Adams, while Asians supported Yang. But the Black, Latino, and Asian progressive activists mostly opposed both and sided with the candidates preferred by white progressives. Matt Yglesias wrote an excellent article addressing the disconnect between Asian actvists and asian voters: https://www.slowboring.com/p/yang-gang?s=r...*It doesn't matter because they don't get a vote.*
Bro, as you stated, they literally voted in the mayor in one of the most important--if not the most important--cities in the country lol. While the academic bubble is getting more progressive, New York went from having a progressive dodo for a mayor to having a moderate ex-Republican ex-cop as the mayor.
> At my law school, one of the top ones in the country, the Dean got up and declared himself a “white supremacist” at a town hall meeting
To explain this a bit more: there was a fairly wide conversation during 2019/2020 about systemic advantages for white people in America. One observation was that systemic racism which favors a specific race could be described as inherently supremecist - in this case, white supremecist. If you accept that argument then benefitting from the system admits sympathy with white supremacy, and so saying “I’m a white supremecist and I’m trying to do better” is a way to admit to systemic problems and to state a desire to rectify them. If anybody remembers the blowup at the Basecamp all-hands meeting, this was the conversation that happened there. Unfortunately the line of logic is hard to communicate because “white supremecist” typically suggests an active intent to displace or destroy other races, which is why the dean’s statement seems so bizarre without context.
All of these conversations and examples are practically worthless without heaps of context, imo. The topic is too nuanced to look at a high-level list of events and draw general conclusions. It almost feels like our culture hasn’t developed a nuanced enough shared vocabulary to even be sure we’re talking about the same thing half the time. And that environment makes it incredibly easy to obscure truth with facts.
The metaphor I like to use is image resolution. In mass-communication, we communicate with 2x2 pixel images. Among friends with a lot of trust, we speak in 1080p. 2x2 communication just can't carry the context that we bake into each word during a conversation. I think this is an inherent property of mass communication and you really have to tailor your 2x2 message if you want to take it outside of high-bandwidth conversations.
I'm aware that left-wing activists use the term "white supremacy" to refer to a range of things other than what people understand as being "white supremacy." But it's not an academic term--it confuses rather than clarifies by taking a word that most people understand to refer to explosive racist animosity and applying it to inanimate "systems." It's an activist term, under which every white person is a "white supremacist," which was deliberately chosen for the resulting inflammatory effect.
So I'm at a loss how you think that the "context" helps. The whole point of the article is that law schools have adopted radical activist ideology. The fact that folksy faculty members of a Midwestern law school are using radical activist rhetoric (which, as you acknowledge, seems "bizarre" to the 95% of folks who are unfamiliar with the terminology) seems to support the article's thesis.
The dean didnt actually say (or write) that. The article links to the tweet screenshot which shows what they did say. (I have no idea if they 'stood up' while typing it).
Someone else said something a little closer to that, but still not that. I've also linked to the Dean's response elsewhere in the thread.
No, the line of logic is hard to communicate because the people proclaiming themselves white supremacists keep their jobs instead of replacing themselves with a black person and going to work as cashiers or Uber Eats drivers.
It doesn’t help that many of the people who advocate for this milquetoast definition (and CRT more generally) also drive the blurring of lines by persecuting ordinary people as though they were conventional white supremacists, invoking Nazi and KKK imagery, etc. Roughly the same group did the same thing with “feminism” earlier in the decade (“‘feminism’ just means ‘gender equality’”) and then again with “racism” (“you are against racism, aren’t you?”). It’s really remarkable how often so many CRT folks stumble into motte and bailey rhetoric relative to the wider population.
You say “unfortunately it’s hard to communicate”, but I think it would be absolutely trivial to avoid overloading words in the first place or failing that, to use words consistently. It definitely feels like the confusion is a feature of CRT discourse rather than a bug.
> You say “unfortunately it’s hard to communicate”, but I think it would be absolutely trivial to avoid overloading words in the first place or failing that, to use words consistently. It definitely feels like the confusion is a feature of CRT discourse rather than a bug.
It is a feature. If the ideology is splintered into many subfields, and has a legion of names, but all have broadly the same thrust, it's hard to talk about the phenomenon in a way that's easy to grasp. And in any case, you will have to give it a stable name you can refer to because the advocates themselves will just switch what name they're using, while the underlying ideal and methods stay the same.
This is one reason people are so angry at Rufo for pulling the CRT stunt and calling related things CRT. Is it wrong? Yes, in detail, but not in substance. And importantly, it is right in the part that matters and caught on, so people are losing their minds over it. Notice how they're not in the least visibly upset about, say, Wesley Yang calling wokeness "the Successor Ideology" - it never caught on, never managed to give people a name for the wrongness they could see with their own eyes.
There is a rhetorical strategy coined the motte and bailey, which gets its name from the motte and bailey fortification setup with a fortification (the motte) in the center and a broad, lucrative field around it. The idea is you can live in the lush bailey and expand it, and if attacked retreat to the more defensible motte to frustrate attackers. Once they are defeated or leave, you resume work in the broader field that can't be defended as well.
The motte and bailey rhetoric works the same way: When not pressed, you advance shakier, ambitious claims people might want to challenge, but when pressed equivocate that you're just talking about something unobjectionable.
As one example, second and third wave feminism unquestionably had an entire history and culture around them, with detailed theories of society w/ patriarchy, sex vs. gender and all - this wide, deep culture and spreading it is the bailey. Press people on some of the more tenuous aspects of this, and they'd retreat about "feminism being about equality" - this is the motte fortification, since barely anyone in the West is against equality at least in some form or another. Once the attacker goes away, back to spreading theories of patriarchy and oppression it was.
The modern wokeness runs this strategy all over the place. Want to curtail what you see as a blinkered approach to teaching history? You clearly don't want people learning about slavery or segregation, and so on. Racism is simultaneously the ordinary state of affairs in a country people actively want to immigrate to, and Klansmanship.
> attorneys refusing to work in cases because of the political beliefs of clients and donors
It's ironic that I heard Ketanji Brown Jackson at her Supreme Court confirmation hearing this morning, defending her work defending Guantanamo detainees as their public defender.
As she (rightfully imho and more eloquently) put it, a core aspect of the US legal tradition is that everyone deserves representation. Regardless of what they're accused of doing and who they are.
> Over the past week, certain corners of the Internet have identified and mischaracterized the events of a community conversation held at Northwestern Law on June 3, together with a few comments made at that event. Although we had hoped not to dignify these mischaracterizations with a response, they continue, with potentially harmful effects both to individual members of our community and to our community as a whole.
The wonderful thing about Zoom is that everything is in print and nobody needs to rely on after-the-fact "characterizations." There is no allegation that the screenshots of what he said were doctored.
Fair enough. He said he was “a racist” and another person in the administration said she was a “gatekeeper of white supremacy.” I was going by memory and mixed the two together in my head.
> These trends are hitting academia and the non-profit sector first. At my law school, one of the top ones in the country, the Dean got up and declared himself a “white supremacist” at a town hall meeting: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/northwestern-univers...
The only thing shown here is the fear of being ostracized, and the costs with being contrarian. You think this was contrition? I think it was simply them realizing they were better off lying than being genuine.
Maybe. None of the folks mentioned in the article are radicals—the interim Dean is a telecom lawyer and extremely average Midwestern dude. But the whole thing has a tone of “quasi-religious ritual” that gives me the creeps. (Also, as a “brown guy” I’d have been mortified to have had my professors get up and declare themselves "gatekeepers of white supremacy.")
These trends are hitting academia and the non-profit sector first. At my law school, one of the top ones in the country, the Dean got up and declared himself a “white supremacist” at a town hall meeting: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/northwestern-univers...
My friend who works at a public interest organization—herself very liberal—has been surprised by attorneys refusing to work in cases because of the political beliefs of clients and donors (which have nothing to do with the organization’s purpose).
The changes at the ACLU are well documented: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/06/us/aclu-free-speech.html
Efforts by the ABA to impose commitments on lawyers that could interfere with the duty of zealous advocacy are well documented: https://judicature.duke.edu/articles/a-speech-code-for-lawye...