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I feel like I have a better understanding of what "critical race theory" means than about 90% of people who follow me and worse than the other 10%, so I& #39;m gonna write my understanding of it for the benefit of the 10% and if you& #39;re in the 10% please correct me:
1) Race is not an actual biological category. The physical characteristics that become signifiers of race are all spectrums and ambiguities. But: it is a social truth that people are understood by others to be within these categories (sometimes depending on context).
2) So, why does this category exist? Because, in the middle of the second millennium AD, European capitalists and elitesâcrucially, NOT "white people" as a categoryâstarted committing massive atrocities. To justify these, they had to categorize the victims as not fully people.
Consider slavery in the 17th century: if you& #39;re doing unthinkably evil things to your workers, some other workers might be concerned, either because of conscience or fear that you might do it to them, too. So you convince them that they are protected by virtue of this category.
So "race" becomes this idea that structures society. Some people are eligible to be utterly exploited and treated as less than human, others get at least *some* protection from this abuse.
From this, the big conclusion of CRT follows: "racism" isn& #39;t something one person at a time believes. It is this structuring process. So eliminating racism involves changing structures, not (merely) beliefs. That is the core of it!
Note: VERY CLEARLY THIS DOES NOT IMPLY THAT WHITE PEOPLE ARE WORSE THAN BLACK PEOPLE! That isn& #39;t even coherent, since those categories are fake. In fact, it holds that many white people are among the *victims* of this structure, which justifies all kinds of inhumanity.
For example, white victims of police violence: CRT as I understand it would explain police violence as something we have permitted, created, justified because race makes the usual victims not matter. But that machinery of violence can easily be turned against white people too.
Bernie Sanders& #39;s theory of politics could actually be grounded in CRT as I understand it: the elites use race as a way of "dividing the working class," i.e. breaking the WC& #39;s solidarity by this category. Then politics becomes about this category rather than control of the MOP.
Anyway, maybe this is a slightly over-generous gloss from a liberal perspective of CRT, but the beliefs the anti-CRT "liberals" claim are so bad about CRT are held by a slice of the population so tiny and academic as to reveal the absurdity of treating this as a top issue.
The "critical race theory" that "the left" actually believes, I think, is described above and is pretty clearly true. The more galaxy-brain stuff is sometimes interesting, sometimes frustrating, and obviously never a good reason to vote for Donald Trump instead of Joe Biden
