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My layman's understanding of CRT is that it's a study performed at the collegiate level of how a system can systemically and disproportionately disadvantage min

• xupybd 4y ago
  That is one of the goals of CRT. But one of assumptions is that lack of equity is evidence of systemic oppression, there are arguments for and against this idea. There are claims that it is the modern adaption of Marxist theories into the realm of race. https://www.google.com/amp/s/nypost.com/2021/05/06/what-critical-race-theory-is-really-about/amp/ https://www.google.com/amp/s/nypost.com/2021/05/06/what-crit...
• roenxi 4y ago
  That is, fundamentally, not an argument that can be differentiated from "your skin colour changes what you can expect to achieve in our society". It is an argument by the same academic racists that crawl out from time to time, who've figured out that if they put a lot of new words between the start and end of the argument that they can expect to be given the benefit of the doubt. The healthy form of "systems have outcomes" is economics; but economics suggests personal effort and decentralisation get good results rather than obsessing over inherent facts about bodies and so the CRT people had to form their own new quasi-conomics to try and influence how policy is written.
  • thrwawy74 4y ago
    I wrote a response to your comment that I don't think was fair. I acknowledge and I do believe what you're saying: I've seen racists articulate something terrible with enough complex words to hide that message in academic settings and pretend it's not hot garbage. That exists. I've been to Berkeley, California as a visiting student. :-) Social justice can wrap around to ugly places. Economics - to me - seems like a study from a much higher perspective. I don't believe economic theory would go to all the places of why a class of people is being advantaged or harmed. Do you believe systemic racism exists? Should we study it? I don't understand why a large group of folks are very against asking these questions. You seem like a rational person, and I wouldn't hold you among these. Do you believe the media has skewed and tailored the image of what CRT is? Is it possible to rally or radicalize a lot of people behind the idea that "these teachers are telling your kids to be ashamed"? For most of my life I've seen an assault on public schooling, and I was never taught to feel guilty about my race. I did learn of things like the Trail of Tears in college, however.
    • roenxi 4y ago
      > Do you believe systemic racism exists? No, the idea is absurd. Every policy will affect different demographics differently - be that race, age, class, location, schooling and profession. If the academics could come up with a way to tease out individual threads from that tangle then we'd probably find that everything else is more important than race. There are racists using the system to achieve their aims - but that tends to be intentional. I like to cite the efforts at stymieing Asians from getting into top-tier universities for example. But we don't need academic study to identify it, and teaching people to go look for a race angle is a bad idea. The academics are going to be people who focus on race all day, see race issues everywhere and are going to get caught up thinking racialist policies are the solution to problems - which will then fail massively as racist policies tend to do. > I did learn of things like the Trail of Tears in college, however. That is the central issue, isn't it? All the people involved have been dead for more than a century, the political ideologies at the time have largely been washed away and have no public support and I don't know much about that specific incident but there are unlikely to be special lessons there given how many horrible things happen in history (which is a large and horrible place!). Compare that the large amount of damage authoritarianism and war has done recently, and there is a pertinent question of why are children being told to focus on race? The communists did more damage to their own people than any other faction. The Nazi's famously managed to get their empire dismantled through warmongering. The Cold War was not a racial issue, it was a clash of major ideologies. We're in a situation that looks to me like the prelude for WWIII and people don't seem to be able to recognise the hubris of being reckless in internationally tense situations. I'm not against the idea of teaching a few nasty race incidents, but there is so much more history to look at that is recent, relevant and more important. We don't need people analyzing Russia-Ukraine-US-Europe through a race lens. We don't need racial dynamics of Afghanistan, Iraq and friends. We don't need to study economic hardship through race. We need policies that are race-blind and benefit everyone that promote peace and prosperity. Studying things based on their impact on peace and prosperity is where the focus should be. It also means suddenly we'll have divisions being created on racial lines which is a waste of effort arguing against. > I acknowledge and I do believe what you're saying If we're going to be overcome by reasonable discussion, not that the policy in the article is wildly stupid, because the premise is that parents are leaving their children in the care of known racists and the authorities are going to control the situation by adding more bureaucrats. - If they have misjudged the situation they're going to look really silly. - If they have correctly judged the situation they're attempting to deal with it in a stupid and ineffectual way. They'll probably end up with even worse ideologies than race creeping in if they have one person picking the reading list. They'll rue this particular aspect of the law if it ends up achieving anything, at best it is a well executed own goal.