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I’ve never met anyone who complains about critical race theory who can explain what critical race theory is.
Down with CRT! Flat-screen is the future! No more pointing electron guns at children!
Don’t see the issue. I sat close to CRTs as a kid, and I turned out just fine.
OK guys, who is going to tell them?
What, I have horrible vision and get headaches fairly frequently and… Oh my God!
Flat Screens are just a conspiracy to make us complacent, with high latency and accept that the absence of light is the same as dark gray lite.
Quantum dots and organic leds? Man, people really believe in anything these days.
I can’t believe you libruls want to take my God-given right to a NES Zapper away 😤
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Yeah! Fuck melee players!
Interestingly there were some CRTs with flat screens compared to the typical curved ones. Used to have this absolute monster 57 inch widescreen one that weighed like 160 pounds
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They all literally do what they are told to do by their network news handlers.
I hate all the fuss about CRT… it’s just history, and the concepts are pretty simple.
If your great grandparents were slaves, practically or literally, then your grandparents were likely very poor. Those grandparents weren’t allowed to get a good education or a good job, which means your parents likely grew up in poverty. This means you are far less likely to have inherited any wealth, and thus the cycle of poverty, drugs, incarceration, etc. continues.
It always gets me that full blown slavery in the US was not very long ago at all, and very little changed for black people during the 100 years between the end of the civil war and the beginning of the civil rights movement.
Of course this is just one facet of CRT, but I just don’t understand why right wing white people are afraid of reality. The first step in addressing an issue is acknowledging the existence of the issue. Is it just white guilt or are they just racists?
To be blunt, even this isn’t CRT.
CRT is more generally “for the longest time, non-white people have been excluded from civic participation which has led to laws and structures that implicitly benefit white people”.
That is, it’s a concept about political and legal power in the US.
And what’s more disturbing is what the right ACTUALLY means by CRT. They are mad about civil rights AND the historical facts about racism BEING TAUGHT AT ALL. Literally “we don’t want kids taught that slavery and segregation existed and/or that it was morally wrong”.
I think correctly defining CRT somewhat misses the more disturbing problem of “wait, what DO you mean by CRT”.
Are you saying that systematic generational poverty imposed on black people via discriminatory policy and law is not a component of CRT?
Good point though… what the far right means when they say/hear the term CRT is as disturbing as it it incorrect.
Are you saying that systematic generational poverty imposed on black people via discriminatory policy and law is not a component of CRT
As far as I understand, no. Related for sure but not really what CRT is about.
The important thing about CRT, in my understanding, is that it takes a view that even with non-racist intent, racist laws are setup due to the lack of participation.
For example, let’s say a city wants to build out a mass transit system, however, nobody on the board lives in neighborhoods where POC live. As a result, when placing the lines they don’t consider the problems with running them through those neighborhoods or not having enough stops in those neighborhoods. A racist outcome even though the people making the decisions may have never considered race while making those decisions. It’s simply the fact that nobody affected by those decisions had representation.
The critical in CRT refers to critical theory, which posits that problems in society can generally be attributed to social structures more than anything else.
Another example would be in policing. Consider what may seem to be a good policy “Let’s send police to areas with high rates of crime.” The issue is, crime rates are a result of policing so a natural consequence of sending police to where crimes are found is police will find more crimes which creates a feedback loop. Add in just a few cops with racial biases (even unconscious) and now this seemingly benign policy has racist enforcement.
What CRT would posit is that getting more POC into positions of power would ultimately limit the effects of legal racism. A failure of the CRT notion is that while race is related, so is socioeconomic status. The issue with just seating a black person is black people like Clarence Thomas exist. Further, the black people you would seat are highly likely to have participated in the education and social situations that have caused the issues of systemic racism in the first place. You can’t just pick the person from the same neighborhood as the rest of the board that has melanin and think “This solves racism”.
In otherwords, America is broken on more than just race, class is a major issue. Which is what you touch on. People of color have by and large historically been forced into a lower class and that’s where a lot (not all) of the racism problems stem.
Hope that makes sense. This is mostly just my understanding though so feel free to correct it if you’ve got good resources on it. I’m not an expert, just interested in the rantings of my political enemies.
This is great insight, thank you for taking the time to elaborate.
No problem. It’s such a mellow concept that it’s hard not to overstate what it’s about. The fact that racists took it to mean “stuff that makes white people feel bad” and the stuff that makes them feel bad is rather telling. But then that’s the power of propaganda.
The far right is jerks.
Living with privilege is a lot more comfortable if you pretend you don’t have it. There’s an ancient Greek virtue, Aidos, which is the knowledge when you’re richer than the people around you that you don’t really deserve it, and the shame and humility that result from that knowledge. None of those feelings are pleasant; easier to pretend that the world is fair and you earned everything you have.
Pretty much anyone criticizing crt hasn’t read even the wiki article about it.
They are in fact just racists.
Oh no the terrors of checks notes teaching kids about the reality they live in
How do you mean?
A reality in which the thread of racism has been so pervasive throughout our history that we can find its downstream effects in surprising ways. A reality in which - and I’m dead serious about this - we can clearly trace the path from prehistoric mineral deposits, to slavery, to congressional districts. A reality in which the implementation of fundamental institutions can be shown to work in favor of white people. A reality where it took until Google decided to do something about before we began to redesign cameras so they produced equally good photographs of black people as they do white people.
I could go on but I hope you get the picture
I had to look up what critical race theory was after your comment, and am less confused. Whilst it not something I’d argue against, I wouldn’t give it that name. Maybe I’m just too European, but it seems quite American
While America has it especially bad, because of our history with black slavery, the subject isn’t limited to America by any means, and isn’t limited to black people.
For example, the camera issue I discussed above is not limited to the US.
Racism exists all over the world. And anywhere that racism exists, and the racists held authority or leadership positions, you will find applications of critical race theory. Because even really, really subtle racism gets institutionalized in crazy, unexpected ways.
EDIT: I’ll add that it’s not just race either. There are all sorts of weird ways that preferential treatment of the majority in power sneaks into our lives.
Here’s a silly one: Novelty coffee mugs are biased against left handed people. No joke.
The mug example is an excellent example of systemic or institutional bias.
It’s worth explaining.
No one sat down and said “we’re only going to make right handed mugs”.
It’s just that most people and therefore most designers are right handed so when they are designing the mug they imagine it in their own hand. Et voilà, most mugs are for right handers.
This goes one step further: a template is made for said right hand mug, now all the left handed designers are also designing right handed mugs.
Thank you for taking the time. It definitely is worth explaining! I didn’t have time and am glad you did :)
And this is the thing so many people don’t understand: Bias doesn’t have to be intentional. Racism, bigotry, privilege, etc can all happen purely because we’re flawed beings that find it difficult to think outside our own lived experiences
I like to make a point of calling out the difference between “fault” and “responsibility”…
As a cis white man born in the 1980s, it’s not my fault that black people in America suffer from the long term consequences of slavery and segregation
But as a cis white man born in the 1980s, who has comparatively benefited from the systems built on the foundations of slavery and segregation, I am - and others like me are - responsible for making it right, today.
And anyone who doesn’t believe that should read some T.M. Scanlon
OMG yes. Re the difference between fault and responsibility.
I’m an inheritor of generations of the benefits of systemic bais (as well as deliberate), it is my responsibility to try and make that right.
Much to the chagrin of too many around me who thinks that it’s unfair.
There’s also the fact that there was a concerted effort to beat left-handedness out of people for a very very long time.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bias_against_left-handed_people
If you go down to Unfavourable Perceptions, there’s a load of info on this. Efforts in North America to switch everyone to right-handedness ended around ghe 60s and lefties were more socially accepted by the late 70s. That said there’s still a lot of places in Asia that attempt to force lefties to be righties.
My mum is a leftie and in school was beaten for writing with her left hand.
Hopefully we’re now in a slightly more enlightened time.
Hell, the word “sinister” meaning “evil” in modern English comes from that bias, etymologically it means something to do with the left hand side.
Another example: all sound recording and amplification technology was developed to make white men sound good. So all audio equipment makes masculine voices sound better than feminine ones.
True! It wasn’t until recently that female singers became popular enough to warrant better audio engineering for their voices. And even so, much of the pro-sumer hardware, and all of the casual consumer mics (like gaming headsets) is geared towards the existing customer demographic majority: white men
It’s definitely not only American. A European example would be the France-backed African CFA franc which works as an enabler and barrier to development.
In what respect?
What terrors? I’m confused
To expand on the other reply, conservatives in America are staunchly opposed to teaching students of any age about critical race theory. They argue that it’s anti-America, unfair, and divisive. Of course the reality is often that they don’t think there’s anything wrong with it and don’t want to be faced with the reality that they have undeserved privilege
The imaginary ones that conservatives warn everyone about.
“We are. We’re going to learn about how racist people use coded language to reinforce racism. They made up this bullshit when schools started actually teaching about slavery instead of god damn military general positions and battles in the civil war”
We should rebrand critical race theory as “race realism” which is something awful that chuds are in favor of but that we don’t actually want children to be indoctrinated with.
So we usurp the place it would have come to occupy in their minds, and whenever any of the chuds try to tell them about it they will argue against it with facts, figures, and evidence.
The white people divided division so much that people can’t see it anymore.
Those kids seem a bit young for legal theory.
