Thread by @deonteleologist

Response to Cathy Young: a thread 🧵

@CathyYoung63's recent piece for @ArcDigi claims that, compared to James Lindsay's PragerU video on Critical Race Theory, my "defense" of CRT "isn't much more convincing." The problem? I never wrote a defense of CRT. cathy.arcdigital.media/p/the-fight-ov…

What I did write was a blog post (conceptualdisinformation.substack.com/p/james-lindsa…) explaining how the boogeyman James is selling is a complete strawperson representation of CRT, according to which critical race theorists think all human interactions are racist. Rick Roderick puts it best:

So the only sense in which I gave a defense of CRT: I criticized CRT's critics. A subtle distinction, but an important one.

Here I will do the same. First: these phenomena aren't things CRT is meant to explain. The theory of gravity can't explain why people go vegan -- so what?

Young continues, here claiming that CRT paints with a broad brush because... the 1619 project does? There is nothing in CRT that contradicts the claim that "the overall picture of race relations in the U.S. in 2021 is incredibly complex and multilayered."

Given the first sentence of this paragraph, it seems like Young is claiming that "microaggressions" are a tenet of CRT. But then she writes that the concept of microaggressions is "very much a part of" CRT, citing a Google Scholar search. This is not very convincing.

Also citing the discussion of microaggressions in a CRT book. But the fact that CRT scholars have addressed microaggressions does not in any way make it a tenet of CRT, any more than empiricists discussing billiards balls makes billiards a tenet of empiricism.

Now, the juicy stuff! As I said above, Lindsay claims CRT scholars think racism is literally everywhere, in every human interaction, relationship, etc. I criticized this. Young says that I am "doing definitional nitpicking" here, pointing to a tweet by a pro-CRT Education prof.

I understand why Young cites the prof's thread on CRT -- much of it is overstated, I think. Several claims that leave much interpretation to the reader. But the claim that CRT "starts with the broad presumption that [racism] exists in most interracial dynamics" doesn't appear.

Here Cathy seems to be begging the question -- suggesting that activism based on aggressive white privilege rhetoric, accusations of complicity, and imperatives to detoxify themselves of "whiteness" represent CRT, when no connection between those camps has been established.

My "defense" isn't more convincing that Lindsay's Prager U video. I point out that people use D&S' claim that CRT "questions... the liberal order" as proof of CRT being anti-liberal when it's anything but. Questioning mainstream ideas is central to liberal thought.

Also: while one can certainly claim it's anti-liberal to have anything but an absolutist stance on free speech, CRT scholars are far from the only ones to claim there ought to be exceptions--including many liberals! See: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fighting_…

Young then claims that my Bell reference was a quote that was "deeply skeptical of freedom of speech." That's one way to read it. I read it in the context of the very politicized obscenity case against 2 Live Crew. I don't think Bell would have sided with the prosecution.

The quote from which Young is drawing here contains more than just "emancipation" and "liberation" in its affirmation of the value of liberalism. But Young ignores all the other pro-liberalism language -- appraisals of modernism, enlightenment, and traditional civil rights.

I follow up my discussion of Harris by giving the most transparent appraisal of liberalism by a CRT scholar I know of, from an article by Mari Matsuda. Curiously, Young does not address this in her criticism of my piece, which, again, she compares to a PragerU video. Interesting!

I agree with the claim that some of the backlash against some so-called "antiracism" is against some genuinely terrible stuff; I have criticized what I think of as shoddy antiracism scholarship myself (see link in bio). Still, Young hasn't demonstrated that CRT is to blame. [fin]