Thread by @AstorAaron

THREAD: There's an important difference between CRT and the "antiracism" campaign of people like Ibram Kendi and various Diversity, Equity and Inclusion consultants. The latter is what produces most objection, and often for good reasons. The former, however, is a useful theory.

https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1405173996560191492

The idea behind CRT is that ostensibly race-neutral legal or economic policies produce enormous racially-defined differences. And the reason is not lack of "natural ability." The reason is the embedding of old openly racist assumptions into things like FHA actuarial standards.

The classic example here is redlining, which codified 1920s white racial attitudes into bank lending policy for 40 years. The result was that even those whites who wanted to live in a racially mixed neighborhood could not sell their homes to an African American family.

The presence of a single black family would cause the neighborhood to be red-zoned, meaning loans would not be insured by the Federal government. Here's an example from Detroit in 1940. Even with "better class of negroes" it was red-zoned.

"Negro infiltration" was a category that could define a whole neighborhood as red-zoned and thus off limits to Federally backed mortgages. The result was a spiraling down of property values. This wasn't fixed until 1968.

But by 1968 these neighborhoods had "turned" from all white to all black - often within weeks - as "blockbusters" exploited the racialized fear and encouraged white panic selling while jacking up the price for black buyers...who immediately discovered all local amenities gone.

The legacy of this is pretty clear, as many of these neighborhoods are still impoverished and mostly African American to this day. CRT acknowledges the history and legacy of policies like this - which don't rely on Southern-style segregation language but produce the same result.

There are various mechanisms that legal scholars have offered to try and address this, some more productive than others. But they are all about addressing the systemic racist legacy, not correcting individual attitudes or laying personal blame on white people a generation later.

"Antiracism" is a different kind of campaign that claims to address the concerns identified in the CRT movement. But it often focuses on getting whites today to examine "privilege" in their own lives and asks of them individually to counter racism around them.

There is certainly nothing wrong with countering racism around you or considering how you might be treated better by, say, the police or realtors or shopkeepers or doctors simply because you are not black. But the prescriptive step is mostly performative at that point.

And that's where the problems come in - DEI consultants asking whites to self-flagellate as if somehow that individual absolution of the sin of racism will eliminate systemic racism. It won't. And even worse, it will make potential allies defensive while accomplishing nothing.

And there are some absolutely terrible ideas that operate in this "antiracist" orbit, including this slide from the "Dismantling Racism" workbook. (Note that this isn't new either - it's 20 years old!). These generalizations are ahistorical, inaccurate and, frankly, just bizarre.

Needless to say, I don't think these kinds of exercises do anything at all to address the ongoing legacies of racial discrimination in housing, education, health care, criminal justice and employment.

The reality is that we DO need to look long and hard at the way race has been used to organize American society. And we need to consider how racialized hierarchies reinforce class hierarchies and divide working classes - and how cross-racial movements can confront those issues.

But it matters how it is done, which requires putting race and class in historical (and often transnational) perspective, and taking time to evaluate America's complex history and legacies today. Performative rituals and individual "call outs" and generalizing slides won't do it.