Thread by @timjacobwise

Brief thread on Critical Race Theory: The most absurd criticism of CRT is the idea that it says white people are inherently racist. For any group to have "inherent" tendencies, that group must exist as an organic entity, but CRT rejects race as a scientific category altogether...

Whites cannot be inherently racist because whites, as such, do not exist as an entity with an inherent essence--at least, according to CRT. The folks who think race is real and groups have inherent tendencies are right-wingers who embrace The Bell Curve, not leftists (2)...

Whites, as such, did not exist until the 1600s. Whiteness was socially constructed for the purpose of aggregating European peoples under one umbrella for the sake of exercising domination over those not in the club (3)...

Which means whatever biases and prejudices individual "white" people developed thereafter towards Blacks, for instance, would not have been inherent to them as people, but also constructed by the workings of the social structure...(4)

This leads to the second problem with the critique of CRT. By assuming it's aimed at labeling white people bad or evil or racist, it misses that CRT really isn't about critiquing people, as people, at all. It's not concerned with personal racism, per se (5)...

Rather, it's aimed at examining social structures and institutions as the cause of racial inequities. Obviously, conservatives reject the structural arguments. Fine. Those can be debated. But to ban CRT bc it's 'racist against white people' is intellectually bankrupt (6)...

CRT is about critiquing the systemic forces connected to racial inequity, not about critiquing the individuals who fall prey to its distorting logic. Ironically, rejecting CRTs arguments about systemic causes for inequity leave critics w/only one alternate explanation (7)...

And that alternative is actually pretty intrinsically racist: namely, that the inequities we continue to see are obviously the fault of Black people who are in some way inferior, either biologically or culturally. That Black people are irresponsible as a group (8)...

But if you believe that, YOU are the one making the racist argument about a group, not us. YOU are the one who embraces an argument that leads to discrimination (bc if you think that about Black people how could you treat them fairly in the workplace, schools, etc)? (9)...

Fact is, the anti-CRT position leaves its adherents with no choice but to believe there is something wrong with Black people. Yet they insist WE are the ones making an essentialist argument that stereotypes a racial group? Fascinating, truly fascinating...