Russ Douthat on Critical Race Theory

[Bootstrap]

Request: I would like to make this a structured discussion, using the following rules:

• This is a no-debate, no-fight thread.
• Please do not respond before reading at least one of the articles in the list below. In your response, quote or reference something that Douthat actually said and respond to it.
• Talk about what you think, not about what you think someone else might think.

I heard a podcast where liberal Ezra Klein interviews conservative Russ Douthat. Transcript and audio are available at the above link.

• What Progressives Want, and What Conservatives Are Fighting
• The Excesses of Antiracist Education
• Why a Patriotic Education Can Be Valuable

I don't agree with everything, but I thought there was a lot of wisdom in what he wrote. And he clearly has taken the time to read and understand what he is talking about, I think the people he disagrees with would have to admit that he understood what they are saying and is doing his best to represent them accurately and respectfully.

I liked this summary:

The backlash to 1619 and similar efforts has convinced progressives that the right is desperately clinging to myths of American innocence. But conservatives often see themselves as objecting to the most radical parts of progressive revisionism, not the entire project. As the historian Matthew Karp notes in a perceptive essay for Harper’s, compared with just a generation ago the position of many conservatives has shifted, becoming explicitly anti-Lost Cause, anti-Confederate flag — and, in the recent congressional voting, mostly pro-Juneteenth as well. In its contest with the new progressivism, the right is abandoning Lee and rallying to Lincoln — for its own nationalist political purposes, Karp is quick to stress, but in a way that accepts a different center for historical debate than existed even when I attended high school.

Similarly, Benjamin Wallace-Wells of The New Yorker, reporting on the Texan battle over race and education, notes how quick the Republican spokesman in the legislative debates was to make concessions to the history of racism and discrimination, the failure of the ideals of 1776 to initially extend beyond “white property-owning males.”

This means that you could imagine, out of this controversy, potential forms of synthesis — in which the progressive desire for a deeper reckoning with slavery and segregation gets embedded in a basically patriotic narrative of what the founding established, what Lincoln achieved, what America meant to people of many races, even with our sins.

[RZehr]

Request: I would like to make this a structured discussion…..

Well this might be a short thread. Good luck!

[Bootstrap]

Request: I would like to make this a structured discussion…..

Well this might be a short thread. Good luck!

Well, it might be. But I'll still give it a try.

In the first of the three articles, Douthat points to two different groups of progressives. Here's one thing some progressives want:

One answer is that progressives want to change the way schools teach American history. They want to finally exorcise the ghost of Lost Cause historiography, the romanticization of the Confederacy that still haunts textbooks in some corners of the South. Then they want to broaden the narrative of race beyond the Civil War and the civil rights era, recovering stories of African-American resistance under slavery and the history of racial subjugation from the 1870s onward, giving events like the Tulsa Massacre a special prominence.

I agree with all of that. I would also want that in an American history class taught in a Christian school. American history needs to recognize the history of American blacks too. Romanticizing the South and the era of Southern plantations without acknowledging what that meant for black people and slaves is a problem.

The biggest zone of controversy lies where the second project, the recovery of memory, blurs into the third one, the radical critique — where the impulse to memorialize Tulsa gives way to the impulse to take Lincoln’s name off a San Francisco school, where the indictment of slave owning gives way to an indictment of the American Revolution.

The debate over this newspaper’s 1619 Project is a good example. The project became a locus for backlash because it did several things at once, offering a general (and widely praised) expansion of historical knowledge about slavery and race, but also elevating specific interpretations — in particular, the so-called new history of capitalism, a cotton-centric interpretation of American prosperity — that imply a deeper condemnation of this country.

The backlash to 1619 and similar efforts has convinced progressives that the right is desperately clinging to myths of American innocence. But conservatives often see themselves as objecting to the most radical parts of progressive revisionism, not the entire project.

I agree with those who object to the most radical parts of progressive revisionism, but who support the kinds of things mentioned in the first paragraph.

[PetrChelcicky]

At the moment I have only read "The Excesses of Antiracist Education".
I of course support Douthat's critique of DiAngelo and Kendi.
On the other hand, I am skeptical about his pretence that there is a basic "theory" of "structural racism" which avoids the failings of DiAngelo and Kendi and is not tainted by them.
Racism was sociologically defined as an attitude, i.e. a personal attribute which can be explored by questionnaires et alii. An attitude cannot be ascribed to a "system" or a "structure" whatever this may be.
This is completely different to Marx' analysis of capitalism as a system. Marx formulated a real theory which can be used to make explanations and predictions and which can be falsified if the predictions don't come true. (The Marxists developed some means to make Marxism immune, but Marx' theory can at least be interpreted without those tricks.)
The so-called theory of systemic racism was, as I've said, NOT developed by sociologists or economists, but by lawyers and activists. It gives no well-elaborated explanations, but at best what is called "explanation sketches" (proposals where to look for an explanation). It doesn't even claim predictive value and thus it cannot be falsified.
There is a lot of literature about the causes of inequality. A real conciliatory and middle-ground policy might be to integrate some of the many ideas now connected to "systemic racism" in existing theories of inequality for to round them up. But I am not confident that there is much substance which can be integrated. (I mean, everyone has known for decades that laws can - intentionally or unintentionally - have different consequences for different population groups. It's part of the existing literature. The only new activist/advocate idea has been that all laws who have such different outcomes must be abolished - but then we are just at the point where Douthat cries "excesses" and which he wants to separate from the alleged basic "theory".)

[PetrChelcicky]

Just have found out that there is an "Edit" key here and made use of it. (come true instead of come through). Hooray!

[PetrChelcicky]

According to the standards I should have quoted Douthat. Here I make good:
"These goals, it should be stressed, don’t follow necessarily from the theory of structural racism." But if a theory is a number of sentences, he mentions only one sentence: "the basic claim that structural racism exists has strong evidence behind it". Which I deny (see above, racism as an attitude. We must regard that "capitalism" was not introduced into science as an attitude.)

[Bootstrap]

When Douthat uses the term "structural racism", he means the things that sustain racial inequalities even if most white people are not bigoted or biased.

Again, I want to start with what the new progressivism is interested in changing. One change involves increasingly familiar terms like “structural” and “systemic” racism, and the attempt to teach about race in a way that emphasizes not just explicitly racist laws and attitudes, but also how America’s racist past still influences inequalities today.

In theory, this shift is supposed to enable debates that avoid using “racist” as a personal accusation — since the point is that a culture can sustain persistent racial inequalities even if most white people aren’t bigoted or biased.

Kendi thinks that bad policy is the source of racism, as people come up with various ways to justify policies by blaming the people these policies hurt.

This is one area where I think I agree with Ibram Kendi, as expressed in these two excerpts of an Ezra Klein interview. The school system is one example - how do we justify the public schools that we have in many inner cities? Often by blaming the people who have to go to them. If we had to send our own children to the same schools, we might feel differently.

The argument in “Stamped From The Beginning” is that racist policies don’t follow from racist ideas, the way we normally think they do. Racist ideas follow from racist policies. They are created as rationalizations for racial inequality. And I want to repeat that because it is so important to understanding his thought. Racists don’t make racist policies. Racist policies make racists.

So if you want to change hearts and minds, change policy, and hearts and minds will follow. Kendi says this completely explicitly. In “How To Be An Antiracist,” he critiques, quote, “the assumption that racist minds must be changed before racist policy, ignoring history, that says otherwise. Look at the soaring white support for desegregated schools and neighborhoods decades after the policies changed in the 1950s and 1960s. Look at the soaring white support for interracial marriage decades after the policy changed in 1967. Look at the soaring support for Obamacare after its passage in 2010,” end quote.

I distinguish between the producers of racist ideas and the consumers, so the people who are writing the book or giving the speech or creating the film, publishing that scientific paper or book and the consumers of that. And I wanted to really study the producers to understand, OK, are these ideas being produced and mass circulated or popularized out of ignorance and hate? And I found that actually was not the case. And what was happening was that people were producing racist ideas to defend or justify racist policies that oftentimes benefited them. So I found that actually it was racist policies that were then leading to racist ideas. And then people were consuming those racist ideas, which was then leading to ignorance and hate.

Douthat's columns are mostly about history and what is taught, not about policy. But I think this may help explain what Douthat means when he uses the phrase "structural racism" to describe what some progressives believe.

[RZehr]

Racism was sociologically defined as an attitude, i.e. a personal attribute which can be explored by questionnaires et alii. An attitude cannot be ascribed to a "system" or a "structure" whatever this may be.

I like this.

While they may or may not accurately describe something, and the words may or may not have been invented with innocent motives, the terms “Structural Racism” and “Systemic Racism” have become a dog whistle for liberals, liberals who may not necessarily understand them any more than the typical conservative. And in the process, liberals seem to really enjoy that the words “racism” are in there, because they pretty much believe conservatives are racist people anyway. And they occasionally get to play the intellectual when conservatives take offense at being called racist. It’s a twofer, call conservatives racist and dumb at the same time! Jolly good fun.

[ohio jones]

Racists don’t make racist policies. Racist policies make racists.

But where did the racist policies come from in the first place? They didn't just appear out of thin air. They were either created intentionally by racists (despite the statement to the contrary), or they were created without regard to race and had unforeseen consequences.

What will it take to turn racists into non-racists? If non-racist policies will do the job, where will they come from? Can non-racists make non-racist policies? Racists certainly won't, and unforeseen consequences can't be relied upon.

The argument sounds suspiciously like:
Chickens don't make eggs. Eggs make chickens.

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Racists don’t make racist policies. Racist policies make racists.

But where did the racist policies come from in the first place? They didn't just appear out of thin air. They were either created intentionally by racists (despite the statement to the contrary), or they were created without regard to race and had unforeseen consequences.

What will it take to turn racists into non-racists? If non-racist policies will do the job, where will they come from? Can non-racists make non-racist policies? Racists certainly won't, and unforeseen consequences can't be relied upon.

The argument sounds suspiciously like:
Chickens don't make eggs. Eggs make chickens.

Yes, I agree with you. It's hard to separate the two, and there's a vicious circle.

In 1619, blacks were brought over as indentured servants, just like a very large number of whites were. Were they seen as equal at that time? I doubt it. Were they treated the same as white indentured servants? I have no idea. During the century after that, laws were changed so that blacks brought over as indentured servants did not need to be freed - but only blacks. Whatever attitudes existed towards blacks at the time were probably intensified to justify slavery.

If we had really good school systems in poor neighborhoods, our attitudes toward both the schools and the people who live in those neighborhoods would probably be better. And that can bring a virtuous cycle. With bad schools, we have a vicious negative cycle. To justify the fact that the public schools in these neighborhoods are terrible, there's a real tendency to blame the people who go to them, portray them in very unsympathetic terms, etc. And so we are even less likely to support these schools. And the neighborhoods get even worse.