{"id":69663,"date":"2021-07-11T02:26:11","date_gmt":"2021-07-11T07:26:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=69663"},"modified":"2021-07-11T02:26:11","modified_gmt":"2021-07-11T07:26:11","slug":"69663","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=69663","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

Five Tenets of CRT: What they say vs. what they mean<\/a><\/p>\n

One of the problems with discussing and debating CRT is that it\u2019s a complicated set of teachings and beliefs about which people know very little and which probably vary at least somewhat according to whom is doing the trainings. The most pernicious aspects of CRT are often in the details of how the trainings and\/or classes go.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s a set of five supposedly basic tenets<\/a>\u00a0of CRT:<\/p>\n

(1) Centrality of Race and Racism in Society: CRT asserts that racism is a central component of American life.
\n(2) Challenge to Dominant Ideology: CRT challenges the claims of neutrality, objectivity, colorblindness, and meritocracy in society.
\n(3) Centrality of Experiential Knowledge: CRT asserts that the experiential knowledge of people of color is appropriate, legitimate, and an integral part to analyzing and understanding racial inequality.
\n(4) Interdisciplinary Perspective: CRT challenges ahistoricism and the unidisciplinary focuses of most analyses and insists that race and racism be placed in both a contemporary and historical context using interdisciplinary methods.
\n(5) Commitment to Social Justice: CRT is a framework that is committed to a social justice agenda to eliminate all forms of subordination of people.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As with so much jargon, one can use these principles in a benign way or a destructive one. From what I know about CRT in actual practice, they tend to be used destructively and somewhat differently than the words in those five principles would indicate.<\/strong><\/p>\n

For example, let\u2019s take principle #1: \u201cCRT asserts that racism is a central component of American life.\u201d Actually, CRT asserts that racism is\u00a0the<\/i>\u00a0central component of American life and pervades every aspect of it.<\/p>\n

Or #2: \u201cCRT challenges the claims of neutrality, objectivity, colorblindness, and meritocracy in society.\u201d Actually, CRT challenges not just the\u00a0claims<\/i>\u00a0of those things, but also challenges the idea that they are worthwhile goals. CRT considers meritocracy, for example, to be utterly bogus and inherently racist and would like to eliminate it as a goal or standard. CRT would like to substitute color awareness and\u00a0eliminate<\/i>\u00a0colorblindness. Same for objectivity and neutrality, which are defined as white values and inherently racist.<\/p>\n

Or #3: \u201cCRT asserts that the experiential knowledge of people of color is appropriate, legitimate, and an integral part to analyzing and understanding racial inequality.\u201d Is there anyone who disagrees with that? I think you\u2019d find very few people who don\u2019t think that the experiences of black people and other minorities are worthwhile to hear. However, CRT actually asserts that this \u201cexperiential knowledge\u201d is far more important than statistics in the aggregate \u2013 in other words, that anecdotal evidence (which, among other things, can be a misperception even if a sincere one) is of far more importance than anything else, and it\u2019s only the anecdotal evidence of \u201cpeople of color\u201d that matters.<\/p>\n

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Here\u2019s #4: \u201cCRT challenges ahistoricism and the unidisciplinary focuses of most analyses and insists that race and racism be placed in both a contemporary and historical context using interdisciplinary methods.\u201d That\u2019s so jargon-packed that I can\u2019t quite figure out what it refers to (\u201cinterdisciplinary methods\u201d?). But my sense is that it tries to change history by bringing in a perspective that makes history into whatever the CRT people want it to show \u2013 a la the 1619 Project, for example.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

On #5: \u201cCRT is a framework that is committed to a social justice agenda to eliminate all forms of subordination of people.\u201d More jargon that obscures what\u2019s happening. \u201cSocial justice agenda\u201d is an example of what Thomas Sowell referred to in his book\u00a0The Quest For Cosmic Justice<\/i><\/a>\u00a0(highly recommended by me) as an endeavor that is doomed to create more problems than it solves.\u00a0As Sowell writes<\/a>:<\/p>\n

In its pursuit of justice for a segment of society, in disregard of the consequences for society as a whole, what is called \u201csocial justice\u201d might more accurately be called anti-social justice, since what consistently gets ignored or dismissed are precisely the costs to society.<\/p>\n

The costs of achieving justice matter. Another way of saying the same thing is that \u201cjustice at all costs\u201d is not justice. What, after all, is an injustice but the arbitrary imposition of a cost\u2014whether economic, psychic, or other\u2014on an innocent person? And if correcting this injustice imposes another arbitrary cost on another innocent person, is that not also an injustice?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Those who are promoting CRT leave out all the costs and are mum about the anti-white racism inherent in those costs. However, word has been getting out recently, and more people (not enough, but more) are starting to understand what CRT is actually about in practice rather than in the descriptive language that attempts to obscure that practice.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Five Tenets of CRT: What they say vs. what they mean One of the problems with discussing and debating CRT is that it\u2019s a complicated set of teachings and beliefs about which people know very little and which probably vary at least somewhat according to whom is doing the trainings. The most pernicious aspects of … Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[64],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-69663","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-deceit"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69663","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=69663"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69663\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":69664,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69663\/revisions\/69664"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=69663"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=69663"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=69663"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}