Thread by @JoshuaSealy

A thread on the hilarious @Stop_SOP—rebranded, #FullStop—movement, and its recent email to supporters (pictured below). 🧵

First things first: This movement is not—and never was—principally concerned with “free speech”. As I argued in the @RDO_OLR (see especially pgs. 221-226): “their opposition was not motivated by speech, but rather, diversity”. rdo-olr.org/2020/twelve-an…

This was clear a year ago. But the recent #FullStop email is yet further confirmation. It notes:

-“the infiltration of a political ideology into the LSO”;
-“get[ting] out of the business of identity politics”; &
-“remov[ing] the politicizing influence of extreme ‘woke’ ideology”

And what is this “woke” ideology that so deeply concerns them? #CriticalRaceTheory, of course. Indeed, they admit CRT is “what animates [their] opposition.” Looks like I was right all along. To those who claimed this was all about “free speech”, the movement concedes otherwise.

How does #FullStop define #CriticalRaceTheory? With a hyperlink to James Lindsay’s “New Discourses” blog. For those unfamiliar w/ Lindsay he is a self-proclaimed “kind of world-level expert” (his words literally) in CRT who has never published any peer-reviewed scholarship on it.

https://twitter.com/deonteleologist/status/1382813777943400452

To be fair, #FullStop’s definition isn’t completely off. They say CRT “attack[s]” ideas like equality, legal reasoning, and neutral principles of constitutional law. More precisely, though, CRT scholars often scrutinize these ideas to uncover their hidden ideological meaning.

This is not because CRT is “unreasonable ... by definition”, as Lindsay claims (whatever that even means). Rather, it’s because CRT, as a *critical* method, tends to be skeptical of abstractions that obscure political context and motivation.

Sure, “neutrality” sounds all well & good. But when neutrality signifies holding that racially segregated schools are not discriminatory, CRT scholars have something crucial to say about how these terms operate ideologically (e.g., in the @YaleLJournal: digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewconten…).

Still #FullStop must resist the CRT scourge. Their target? Two Black adjunct professors teaching a body of scholarship spectacularly rare in the Canadian legal academy. This is the “ideology [they] are up against”—“fostered” in law schools & almost “entrenched” in the judiciary🤦🏽‍♀️

But this CRT—i.e., a body of scholarship interrogating race and law—is not the only one referred to in #FullStop’s email. More broadly they oppose “woke” and “identity politics”. In this regard, they conjure a boogeyman in CRT to resist anything moderately progressive at the LSO.

This jejune posturing is straight out of Trump’s anti-CRT crusade in the United States, which *actual* CRT scholar Kendall Thomas recently explained in a lecture @OxfordLawFac: (for anyone interested in what rigorous CRT analysis really looks like).

There are two ironies in all this:

1) Critical racial scholars are actually a group who are often critical of measures like the SOP and “diversity” politics.

2) A movement initially purporting to preserve free speech is pivoting to purging a body of scholarship from the LSO.

On irony #1, #FullStop simply doesn’t understand what it’s talking about. They interpret my reference to “the limits of diversity” as a call for ideological uniformity. But, as my students know, rather, we discussed how measures like the SOP fail to address structural inequity.

On irony #2, it’s difficult to fathom how #FullStop can “welcome” people “of all ... political persuasions” when its candidates “must be committed to ... remov[ing] critical race theory from the Law Society”, i.e., a political persuasion they oppose. How classically liberal!

Or, rather, it’s not difficult to fathom at all. Bc, as I have explained, this movement isn’t about speech, but rather “denying racism in the legal profession.” This email is simply part of the “never-ending” “rhetorical pivoting” I anticipated a year ago.
ablawg.ca/2020/02/20/dis…

This is, I would argue, why *ideology* is so important in analysis. Because, often, it’s only through the lens of ideology—rather than the lens of one’s stated principles, like “free speech”—that we can actually make sense of the routinely implicit dynamics at play.

In my view, a #CriticalRaceTheory lens is crucial to understanding the #FullStop movement, and identifying their actual motivation: concealing racial hierarchy in the legal profession.

No wonder they’re so opposed to CRT—It’s precisely what they’re hiding from.