Cynical Theories Ch. 5 Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality: Ending Racism by Seeing it Everywhere

 "Critical Race Theory holds that race is a social construct that was created to maintain white privilege and white supremacy. This idea originated long before postmodernism with W. E. B. Du Bois, who argued that the idea of race was being used to assert biological explanations of differences that are social and cultural, in order to perpetuate the unjust treatment of racial minorities, especially African Americans." 

Of course, the reality is that this is only partially true. Some physical differences- hair texture, eye shape, skin color, relative susceptibility to certain diseases- are clearly based in DNA reality, not social constructs. The *importance* we put on those differences to divide into classes is not reality based, nor is it reality based that those differences sometimes overcome our shared humanity, the fact that we have so much more in common than we have differences. Some interesting historical examples are given of times when these differences were not significant; we know they existed but apparently weren't worth mentioning. European historians believe that prejudice on the grounds of religious differences gave way to racism. As the victims of colonialism began to convert to Christianity (not as a whole, certainly) new justification was needed to see these populations as inferior or subhuman, and treating them as such. 

"The rise of the sciences- and of an intellectual and political culture that accepted science as legitimate- together with the horrors of colonialism and the Atlantic Slave Trade, led to new social constructions of race. This, we hear form Theorists today, is the 'scientific origin' of racism, which can be taken to mean that these discourses that misapplied very preliminary results form science allowed the first socially contructivist racists to come into existence. In other words, with this oversimplified, overreaching, and self-serving scientific categorization came social constructions associated with extremely low-resolution categories: being black ('blackness') and being white ('whiteness'), to which value judgments were soon attached. Enter racism as we understanding it today." 

The authors give a brief summary of the history of racism in the U.S.: American salves, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglas, W. E. B. Du Bois, Jim Crow laws, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. etc. Even after the victories of the Civil Rights Movement, when attitudes about race changed "remarkably fast in historical terms", some bad things, bad people, bad narratives  remained. CRT was designed to pick away at these remnants. 

CRT came into being in the 1970s beginning with the critical theory of law that had to do with racist issues. Remember that the word 'critical' in these contexts means highlighting problems in order to facilitate political change. Two camps or branches arose, the materialist and the postmodern branches. The materialists focused on material systems (such as economics, legal, political and educational) and their effect on minorities. Postmodernists focused on linguistic and social constructs and discourses that they saw as perpetuating racist attitudes and assumptions and instilled implicit biases. Materialists criticized postmodernists for focusing on intangible and subjective things outside of direct control. Postmodernists argued that changing the language and the culturally instilled attitudes was the only real way to affect the concrete systems that were built on them. Both branches stress radicalism over liberalism (again, think classical liberal, not whatever "liberals" believe and do today.) In the words of Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, 

"Unlike traditional civil rights discourse, which stresses incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law." 

When opposing CRT this distinction is essential. Proponents of CRT will say they are just teaching "honest history" and that racism is bad. They will say that opposing CRT is opposing those ideas. But opponents of CRT are not against those claimed ideas, but the claimed ideas of CRT founding scholars. They stand against CRT *in favor* of equality (not equity), reasoning, rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law. 

As an example, Derrick Bell, often considered the progenitor or CRT, was a materialist, the first tenured African American professor at Harvard Law. His best known work argues that all of the victories of the Civil Rights Movement (and while no one is arguing that those victories were sufficient, we also cannot devalue the huge strides they accomplished) were only given because they were actually in white people's best interest. No *moral* change happened because it isn't possible. White people will always hate black people and keep them down and when they don't keep them down, it's only for selfish reasons. Cheery and full of hope for the future, huh? 

Materialists dominated the CRT scene through the 90s, when the postmodernists started to take over. That's why so many of the terms that are common in CRT discourse focus on the linguistic and social aspects of racism. Terms like "micro aggression", "safe spaces", "hate speech" and "implicit biases" you are no doubt familiar with. This change from materialist to postmodern coincided with some female critical Theorists who became popular in the 80s and 90s promoting black feminist thought. They blended racism and feminism, argued about patriarchy and white supremacy in ways that mixed legal with sociological , and literary. One such black feminist, Patricia Williams, wrote her autobiography, The Alchemy of Race and Rights,  which elicited the following description from Harvard University Press: 

"Williams casts the law as a mythological text in which the powers of commerce and the Constitution, wealth and poverty, sanity and insanity, wage war across complex and overlapping boundaries of discourse. In deliberately transgressing such boundaries, she pursues a path toward racial justice that is, ultimately, transformative." Remember that the blurring of boundaries is one of the principle characteristics of postmodern Theory. 

The authors again clarify--there is truth in the idea that racism persists, albeit in more subtle ways than rampant slavery. There is value in recognizing this and taking steps to combat it. It is in the methodology of CRT that problems are found, not in the goal of defeating racism. No one is saying that racism doesn't exist or isn't evil. The problems with CRT are that white people are all bad and all irredeemable (that will make you a lot of enemies and also, why try if you're doomed to always be racist?)  racism is everywhere all the time (this delegitimizes actual racism when you focus on perceived and insignificant offenses), a fundamental distrust of liberalism (sorry, but the Enlightenment actually brought a lot of good things to humanity, we shouldn't just throw it out), and a commitment to working towards Social Justice (which all too often means a rejection of meritocracy and equity over equality). 

Returning to the black feminists of the 90s that changed CRT from a materialist movement to a postmodern one, we see the beginnings of the idea of intersectionality. The idea was that feminism was insufficient for black women and anti-racism was insufficient for black women. Their experience was a unique mix of both racism and misogyny. They experience discrimination that is different than that experienced by white women and different than that experienced by black men, and different than just the sum of the parts. Kimberle Crenshaw, a very famous name in CRT, called intersectionality, "a provisional concept liking contemporary politics with postmodern theory." Intersectionality involves looking at *all* of the different ways a person can be marginalized, leading to Patricia Hill Collins' term, "matrix of domination". How do we fight this "domination" (because who doesn't want to fight domination, right)? "Openly advocating identity politics over liberal universalism, which had sought to remove the social significance of identity categories and treat people equally regardless of identity. Identity politics restores the social significance of identity categories in order to valorize them as sources of empowerment and community." 

The authors spend some time with Crenshaw's work, showing how she paved a way that eschewed both the universal liberalism of the Enlightenment and the high deconstructivism of postmodernism. This allowed structures of power and oppression to be objective reality (remember postmodernism originally denied objective reality) while also allowing identity groups to define people, something universal liberalism does not allow. "Within this framework, far from being irrelevant socially-as in liberalism- gender and race have become sites of renewed political activism, and identity politics is in the ascendant. Intersectionality is the axis upon which the applied postmodern turn rotated and the seed that would germinate as Social Justice scholarship some twenty years later." 

Intersectionality is incredibly simple in that it reduces *everything* to identity groups, and incredibly complex in that there are so many different combinations of marginalized identities and they are all so highly interpretive. For example, "some people in the United States therefore argue that gay white men and nonblack people of color- generally assessed as marginalized groups- need to recognized their privilege and antiblackness." "Straight black men have been described as the 'white people of black people.'" And although "Twitter isn't real life", I have definitely seen attitudes like this there, so existing outside the realm of this book or discussions specifically about intersectionality. This is the attitude that some people have called the victimhood Olympics, a competition to see whose identity is the most intersectionally oppressed. Is it any wonder that this aspect of CRT garners resentment, raising victimhood to a status marker, a competition? And while it is a competition and does pit marginalized groups against each other, it unites them in a way, a way that exalts victimhood. And as people clamor to have their victimhood recognized, the idea of and the discourse surrounding intersectionality has expanded far from its original intent into what it is today, ubiquitous. 

The last sections of this chapter discuss the ways in which CRT is harmful to those it intends to help. Again, not arguing that they need no help, just that CRT specifically is counterproductive. The pessimism of Derreck Bell is unlikely to lead to a happy, mentally healthy existence. Looking for racism everywhere is training your mind to find the negative, and what you look for is what you see. "If we train young people to read insult, hostility, and prejudice into every interaction, they may increasingly see the world as hostile to them and fail to thrive in it." It aims to end racism by making people more aware of race at all times. It teaches that victimhood is a form of status, so why would you want to rise above it? It's basically teaching the cognitive distortions that were discussed in The Coddling of the American Mind, and these cognitive distortions lead to misery and poor mental health. They need to be challenged and overcome, not reinforced. Neat. I love when past books I've read can be applied to what I'm reading now.