No.325445
I'm glad to see this shitstorm is still going. I've gladly contributed to the shitposting and, I honestly thought the adults would take over at some point with nuanced explanations… but that hasn't happened.
So now I'm going to do the obvious and quote the book in OP's picture. Pdf included.
Critical race theory : an introduction / Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic
>Richard Delgado is John J. Sparkman Chair of Law at the University of Alabama and one of the founders of critical race theory. His books include The Latino/a Condition: A Critical Reader (co-edited with Jean Stefancic; New York University Press) and The Rodrigo Chronicles (New York University Press).
>Jean Stefancic is Professor and Clement Research Affiliate at the University of Alabama School of Law. Her books include No Mercy: How Conservative Think Tanks and Foundations Changed America’s Social Agenda and How Lawyers Lose Their Way: A Profession Fails Its Creative Minds.
<INTRODUCTION
Think of events that can occur in an ordinary day. A child raises her hand repeatedly in a
fourth-grade class; the teacher either recognizes her or does not. A shopper hands a cashier
a five-dollar bill to pay for a small item; the clerk either smiles, makes small talk, and
deposits change in the shopper’s hand or does not. A woman goes to a new-car lot ready to
buy; salespeople stand about talking to each other or all converge trying to help her. A
jogger in a park gives a brief acknowledgment to an approaching walker; the walker returns
the greeting or walks by silently.
You are a white person—the child, the shopper, the jogger. The responses are all from
white people and are all negative. Are you annoyed? Do you, for even a moment, think that
maybe you are receiving this treatment because of your race? Or might you think that all
these people are merely having a bad day? Next suppose that the responses are from people
of color. Are you thrown off guard? Angry? Depressed?
You are a person of color and these same things happen to you, and the actors are all
white. What is the first thing that comes to your mind? Do you immediately think that you
might be treated in these ways because you are not white? If so, how do you feel? Angry?
Downcast? Do you let it roll off your back? And if the responses come from fellow people of
color, then what do you think? Suppose the person of color is from a group other than your
own?
Sometimes actions like these stem from mere rudeness or indifference. The merchant is in
a hurry; the walker, lost in thought. But at other times, race seems to play a part. When it
does, social scientists call the event a “microaggression,” by which they mean one of those
many sudden, stunning, or dispiriting transactions that mar the days of women and folks of
color. Like water dripping on sandstone, they can be thought of as small acts of racism,
consciously or unconsciously perpetrated, welling up from the assumptions about racial
matters most of us absorb from the cultural heritage in which we come of age in the United
States. These assumptions, in turn, continue to inform our public civic institutions—
government, schools, churches—and our private, personal, and corporate lives.
Sometimes the acts are not micro at all. Imagine that the woman or minority standing
alone and ignored at the car lot eventually attracts the attention of a salesperson. They
negotiate, and she buys a car. Later she learns that she paid almost a thousand dollars more
than what the average white male pays for that same car. (See Ian Ayres, Fair Driving, 104
Harv. L. Rev. 817 [1991]; Michael Luo, “Whitening” the Résumé, N.Y. Times, Dec. 5, 2009.)
A fourth-grade teacher, shortly before beginning a unit on world cultures, passes out a form
asking the children to fill out where their parents “are from.” The bright child who raised
her hand earlier hesitates, knowing that her parents are undocumented entrants who fear
being discovered and deported.
<WHAT IS CRITICAL RACE THEORY
The critical race theory (CRT) movement is a collection of activists and scholars engaged in
studying and transforming the relationship among race, racism, and power. The movement
considers many of the same issues that conventional civil rights and ethnic studies discourses
take up but places them in a broader perspective that includes economics, history, setting,
group and self-interest, and emotions and the unconscious. Unlike traditional civil rights
discourse, which stresses incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory
questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning,
Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.
After the first decade, critical race theory began to splinter and now includes a well-
developed Asian American jurisprudence, a forceful Latino-critical (LatCrit) contingent, a
feisty LGBT interest group, and now a Muslim and Arab caucus. Although the groups continue
to maintain good relations under the umbrella of critical race theory, each has developed its
own body of literature and set of priorities. For example, Latino and Asian scholars study
immigration policy, as well as language rights and discrimination based on accent or national
origin. A small group of American Indian scholars addresses indigenous people’s rights,
sovereignty, and land claims. They also study historical trauma and its legacy and health
consequences, as well as Indian mascots and co-optation of Indian culture. Scholars of Middle
Eastern and South Asian background address discrimination against their groups, especially in
the aftermath of 9/11. (See, e.g., Khaled A. Beydoun, Between Indigence, Islamophobia and
Erasure: Poor and Muslim in “War on Terror” America, 105 Calif. L. Rev. ___ [2016]. On the
diffusion of critical race theory to other disciplines and nations, see chapter 7.)
<BASIC TENETS OF CRITICAL RACE THEORY
What do critical race theorists believe? Probably not every writer would subscribe to every
tenet set out in this book, but many would agree on the following propositions. First, racism is
ordinary, not aberrational—“normal science,” the usual way society does business, the
common, everyday experience of most people of color in this country. Second, most would
agree that our system of white-over-color ascendancy serves important purposes, both psychic
and material, for the dominant group. The first feature, ordinariness, means that racism is
difficult to address or cure because it is not acknowledged. Color-blind, or “formal,”
conceptions of equality, expressed in rules that insist only on treatment that is the same across
the board, can thus remedy only the most blatant forms of discrimination, such as mortgage
redlining or an immigration dragnet in a food-processing plant that targets Latino workers or
the refusal to hire a black Ph.D. rather than a white college dropout, which stand out and attract
our attention.
The second feature, sometimes called “interest convergence” or material determinism, adds
a further dimension. Because racism advances the interests of both white elites (materially)
and working-class whites (psychically), large segments of society have little incentive to
eradicate it. Consider, for example, Derrick Bell’s shocking proposal (discussed in chapter 2)
that Brown v. Board of Education—considered a great triumph of civil rights litigation—may
have resulted more from the self-interest of elite whites than from a desire to help blacks.
A third theme of critical race theory, the “social construction” thesis, holds that race and
races are products of social thought and relations. Not objective, inherent, or fixed, they
correspond to no biological or genetic reality; rather, races are categories that society invents,
manipulates, or retires when convenient. People with common origins share certain physical
traits, of course, such as skin color, physique, and hair texture. But these constitute only an
extremely small portion of their genetic endowment, are dwarfed by what we have in common,
and have little or nothing to do with distinctly human, higher-order traits, such as personality,
intelligence, and moral behavior. That society frequently chooses to ignore these scientific
truths, creates races, and endows them with pseudo-permanent characteristics is of great
interest to critical race theory.
Another, somewhat more recent, development concerns differential racialization and its
consequences. Critical writers in law, as well as in social science, have drawn attention to the
ways the dominant society racializes different minority groups at different times, in response to
shifting needs such as the labor market. At one period, for example, society may have had little
use for blacks but much need for Mexican or Japanese agricultural workers. At another time,
the Japanese, including citizens of long standing, may have been in intense disfavor and
removed to war relocation camps, while society cultivated other groups of color for jobs in
war industry or as cannon fodder on the front. In one era, Muslims are somewhat exotic
neighbors who go to mosques and pray several times of day—harmless but odd. A few years
later, they emerge as security threats.
Popular images and stereotypes of various minority groups shift over time, as well. In one
era, a group of color may be depicted as happy-go-lucky, simpleminded, and content to serve
white folks. A little later, when conditions change, that very same group may appear in
cartoons, movies, and other cultural scripts as menacing, brutish, and out of control, requiring
close supervision. In one age, Middle Eastern people are exotic, fetishized figures wearing
veils, wielding curved swords, and summoning genies from lamps. Later, after circumstances
change, they emerge as fanatical, religiously crazed terrorists bent on destroying America and
killing innocent citizens.
Closely related to differential racialization—the idea that each race has its own origins and
ever-evolving history—is the notion of intersectionality and antiessentialism. No person has a
single, easily stated, unitary identity. A white feminist may also be Jewish or working class or
a single mother. An African American activist may be male or female, gay or straight. A Latino
may be a Democrat, a Republican, or even black—perhaps because that person’s family hails
from the Caribbean. An Asian may be a recently arrived Hmong of rural background and
unfamiliar with mercantile life or a fourth-generation Chinese with a father who is a university
professor and a mother who operates a business. Everyone has potentially conflicting,
overlapping identities, loyalties, and allegiances.
A final element concerns the notion of a unique voice of color. Coexisting in somewhat
uneasy tension with antiessentialism, the voice-of-color thesis holds that because of their
different histories and experiences with oppression, black, American Indian, Asian, and Latino
writers and thinkers may be able to communicate to their white counterparts matters that the
whites are unlikely to know. Minority status, in other words, brings with it a presumed
competence to speak about race and racism. The “legal storytelling” movement urges black and
brown writers to recount their experiences with racism and the legal system and to apply their
own unique perspectives to assess law’s master narratives. This topic, too, is taken up later in
this book.
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Now, this still sounds like a legitimate field of study co-opted by intersectionality and IDPOL to me.
But the point is , however, that I'm an uneducated retard so I'm hoping by providing concrete material smarter posters can provide a more informed view other than radlib screeching about teaching slavery in schools.