The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 22
Critical Race Theorists like to claim that they have inherited and continue the noble legacy and justice work of the Civil Rights Movement, but this is an abject lie. In this episode of James Lindsay OnlySubs, my subscribers-only podcast, I take about half an hour to make the case definitively that, while they are content to portray this illusion, it is a grotesque distortion of reality, using their own words. By exploring the book Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic (Delgado is something of a founder of Critical Race Theory) and the paper “Mapping the Margins” by Kimberlé Crenshaw, who is regarded as one of the true founders of CRT and the founder of intersectionality, the case against the Woke claim on the Civil Rights Movement is easily and definitively made. Join me to hear the details and the argument!
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8 comments
The question that keeps needling me is how large numbers of white people are going to live in minority communities in the America of the future. Civil rights law protects white people too! If it is dismantled in favor of race based preferences – probably not full Jim Crow but edging in that direction – white people will either refuse to live in the minority or try to navigate within a system of legally sanctioned discrimination. That can be done – in fact, black people did it for hundreds of years – but it is not a difficulty that most people will want to impose upon themselves. At best, we end up as a more segregated and unfair society. A worst, the country pulls itself apart completely.
When you come between two people in a fight there comes a point when both parties are at peace with the sittuation if you’ve done your job right! That can change by degrees or in a flash depending on how each party handles themselves from that point forward. If they let go of their anger it’s possible for peace to survive but if one or both backslide into bickering the argument and next the fight is back on! People in the area have a choice of supporting peace or argument depending on how they react to each new comment. They can egg on the fight or promote peace. We have far too many people egging on the fight in our country to find peace. These are the true racist, not those accused of racism. They are in our media and gleefully helping from the grandstands of political office where they won’t get hurt.
We the people lose property and get damaged in the melees while the media earns money selling stories about it and big tech covers up just enough to keep it going. Government trained them during the Trump years to do their bidding or face recalls to Congress. As big as they are they can be bullied too. I wonder when all of us will wake up, face the bullies and end this dumb self destruction of our Nation? We don’t need to wreck ourselves over racism or the Russian’s! But we do need to stop wrecking ourselves.
The requisite and irrational anti-Trump arguments are to push for peace?
This podcast is a great book idea!
They’re literally saying now “civil rights is not enough.” Right, it’s not enough to not be racist, you must be anti-racist… meaning racist the other way. But a lot of civil rights era folks (legit older people who marched during the 60s) are using the term anti-racist for the civil rights era work they did now! They’re conflating these terms while acknowledging they’re different at the same time. The cognitive dissonance with this is incredible.
Schuyler-
I think you are making a critical error in your assessment of the narrative.
Humans rationalize, they are not rational!
It is only a relatively few cursed individuals who recognize the difference (rationalization v being rational). Humans are also selfish, but not in a productive, Randian way. Humans tend to be destructively selfish.
Years of working with clients in the CJ system as well as the “normal” individuals with mental health disorder lead me to the above conclusions.
Sadly, humans are paradoxically primitive and complex. I dispute Steve Pinker’s belief that humans are
prosocial creatures.
BTW, all humans are capable of heinous behaviors under the right circumstances.
I would like to believe humans have a great capacity for goodness; the data shows otherwise.
Ironically, rationalizing is typically the exact opposite of being rational. What’s worse, if we are doing the rationalizing, we will nearly always claim it as being rational.
This was a great way to contrast two concepts of social justice, one constructive and humanist, the other deconstructive and identitarian. One with actual progressive results to account for its effectiveness, the other resting only on sanctimonious claims of moral superiority. I am commenting only to share an analogy that occurred to me after listening to the podcast. The Civil Rights movement could be compared to a program within an operating system, that proved functional yet needed upgrades as time went on. The Critical Theory movement presents itself as an upgrade, CivilRights 2.0 or some such iteration. It requests to be installed under this label, yet (for anyone looking clearly at the code as you have done) it is programmed to undermine the previous program . It was in actuality a virus in disguise. As the viral program infects and reverses the operating system’s functions creating problem after problem, the unwary end user will have a hard time attributing the issues to the “upgrade” and likely conclude the entire product was defective from the start. Which is the point, right? Thanks again for the amazing work.