Russ Douthat on Critical Race Theory

[temporal1]

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HK:
And [here] she is on BNT where she and the host unpack why having feelings of a desire to kill white people is perfectly understandable even while it may not be actionable .. ..

.. .. These aren't cranks or crackpots, these are influential people with powerful sinecures that explore, unpack and fantasize about killing, maiming and problematizing an entire "race" of people. I think we've seen this movie before...

AsPD

[Szdfan]

There’s a lot of consternation on here abt the uprising in Minneapolis & how the only means protestors can be effective is through non-violence.I hurt for the destruction like everyone else. But the fact of history is non-violent protest has not been successful for blk Americans.

— Ida Bae Wells (@nhannahjones) May 29, 2020 (tweet since deleted)

This is one of the conflicts within the Civil Rights movement -- the question of violence vs. non-violence. In the 1960's it was represented by Malcom X vs. Martin Luther King or SCLC vs. the Black Panthers. I abhor and oppose the use of violence, but also recognize the context here -- there's a long history of violence and terrorism against African-Americans and I can understand the kind of frustration that emerges when it seems that non-violent action just perpetrates an unjust and oppressive system. When people riot and burn down their own neighborhood and community, I think its worth understanding why it happened without condoing it.

I don't agree with the sentiment here -- I think MLK's non-violent movement was extremely successful at bringing change, but it didn't solve everything and some of the inequities that are baked into the system continued.

[Szdfan]

Here is also what appears to be additional tweets from Jones that give more context to her statement. There's more nuance here than the original tweet suggests:

https://twtext.com/article/1266360550306525192#

The Civil Rights Movement was *not* non-violent. It was sparked by violence -- beginning with the brutal beatings of black servicemen coming home from war. And while black protestors were trained to be non-violent, they courted *white* violence as a strategy.

King, Diana Nash, John Lewis, knew most white Americans did not care abt black people non-violently protesting in the streets. These were the same people that had tolerated lynchings, racial apartheid, fascism against black Americans for decades. Why would marching change that?

When King did marches & sheriffs did not respond with violence, the white media did not even bother to cover the protests. The mvmt understood tht the thing Americans understand is violence. Our country was literally born of violent insurrection& act of vandalism in Boston Harbor

So, the strategy became how to bait white people *into* violence in order force other white people to act. They picked the locations of their protests and marches based on the ability to draw violence. And when dogs got sicced on children, white media "discovered" a story.

Peaceful protest did not bring about the great civil rights legislation of the 1960s. Black people being firebombed, water-hosed, lynched, bitten by dogs, beaten to a pulp by police trying to march across a bridge is what brought the changes. Violence.

It's not incidental that this civil rights legislation is passed during the Vietnam war. The images of the Great Democracy violently suppressing its own citizens became an international embarrassment, and it was that, not some newfound racial egalitarian, that forced change.

So, when we talk abt what will or will not work for black communities to get justice when citizens are killed by police and no charges ever come, when they live in desperately impoverished communities w failing schools & no work, communities many of you don't see *until* a riot..

Let's at least be *honest.* Slavery in this country ended because of the deadliest war in our history. Black Americans got full legal citizenship only after a decades-long *violently* repressed rights movement. I am sure destruction won't work here, but neither has anything else.

[HondurasKeiser]

If someone can provide quotes in which Nikole Hannah-Jones or Ibram Kendi promote violence, please feel free to do so. Is that something Douthat claimed they do?

Oh so you mean something like this:
Screenshot (159).png

or this:

There’s a lot of consternation on here abt the uprising in Minneapolis & how the only means protestors can be effective is through non-violence.I hurt for the destruction like everyone else. But the fact of history is non-violent protest has not been successful for blk Americans.

— Ida Bae Wells (@nhannahjones) May 29, 2020 (tweet since deleted)

Thanks, that's the first example I have seen posted in this thread, I posted the question a long time ago. And I agree, these quotes do seem to promote violence, which is bad. There are certainly CRT teachers who do not support violence.

In your other posts, you seem to be picking the most extreme views you can find among people who associate with CRT, implying that this is what everyone is like. That really is a bit like posting quotes from real racists and implying that is representative of the people who oppose CRT. Really, CRT should be evaluated based on what it teaches. And that depends a lot on who you are listening to.

I tend to agree with this:

Critical Race Theory recognizes that racism is more than the result of individual bias and prejudice. It is embedded in laws, policies and institutions that uphold and reproduce racial inequalities. According to CRT, societal issues like Black Americans’ higher mortality rate, outsized exposure to police violence, the school-to-prison pipeline, denial of affordable housing, and the rates of the death of Black women in childbirth are not unrelated anomalies.

In other words, the system can have policies that act against black people even if the people who pass those policies are not overtly racist - they may even be trying to be helpful.

I didn't have to search very hard to find these examples and they're only a small sampling of quotes, essays and excerpts that I come across regularly. One might also say that you seem to be picking the most anodyne summation of Critical Race Theory whilst ignoring the more controversial aspects. For instance:

“critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.” - Critical Race Theory An Introduction

As someone who often comes to the defense of democratic norms and procedures (I don't say that critically by the way), I would think you would be skeptical and perhaps even concerned about a line of inquiry whose aim seems to be the deconstruction of ideas like "equality, legal reasoning, the liberal order, etc." along with the institutions that instantiate those ideas.

I don't deny there aren't benign aspects to CRT and that there aren't CR theorists who are opposed to violence; just as I don't deny there aren't benign aspects to Marxism or Freudian Psychoanalysis. However, one spot-on critique of capitalist excess does not redeem the whole. One good-natured and kindly Marxist does not make Marxism in to a peace-building project. Aside from the fact that I do not need a critical line of inquiry to see extant inequalities between the races - taken as a whole, CRT is inimical to healthy race-relations, destructive of positive social institutions and easily susceptible to the use of violence to achieve its desired ends. The whole of a system of thought, ought to be judged by its real-world consequences. Marxism, however biting and accurate in its critique of capitalism has been proven again and again to be a dismal nightmare that has been directly responsible for the deaths of millions. My old high school English teacher, however affable and generous he was, was not and is not the face of real-world Marxism. Likewise, when taken as a whole and not simply in tweet-sized summations, real world-CRT is not "merely a secular sociological framework for understanding racism as a form of oppression"and we cannot separate the so-called "valid observations/critiques of society" without necessarily affirming and "accepting its proposed solutions." Rather, because it takes as axiomatic the fact that the dominant power structures and institutions are designed to uphold 'white supremacy' the only logical conclusion for a CR theorist worth his salt, is the dismantling of society...by any means necessary. That then is how we get a well-positioned, well-known and highly privileged individual like Marc Lamont talking blithely about the psychology of wanting to kill white people. Or the problematization of modes of being that are considered "White":

If there were another system of thought that led smart, respectable people in positions of authority to unpack the problem of "people group X" or to speak academically about their murder, we would lose our collective minds and those people would be shunned from respectable society. You bang on, or at least you used to, about the threat of Nationalism for fear of exactly that - that a creeping Nationalism might normalize the problematization of certain people groups. I don't disagree with your fears. Where then is your outrage at the logical and real world consequences of CRT? It creates a permission structure for otherwise normal, liberal folk to publicly fantasize about killing you (consequence-free) and yet your response is to accuse me of cherry-picking the worst exemplars and to point to an argument-from-assertion about how that's the "real CRT".

Here's another easy example: A black woman just won the Lt. Governorship of Virginia; she made history. The response from an acolyte of CRT, prof. Michael Eric Dyson?

“The problem is, here, they want white supremacy by ventriloquist effect...There is a black mouth moving but a white idea running on the runway of the tongue of a figure who justifies and legitimates the white supremacist practices.”

“We know that we can internalize, in our own minds, in our own subconscious, in our own bodies, the very principles that are undoing us. So to have a black face speaking on behalf of a white supremacist legacy is nothing new...”

So prof. Dyson accuses of Lt. Gov. Sears of suffering from false consciousness and none of the bien pensants bats an eye because slandering people as traitors to their race or class is perfectly acceptable as long as its done in the name of dismantling "white supremacy".

I am not cherry-picking.

This happens on an almost weekly basis.

It is a direct consequence of the system of thought we call Critical Race Theory.

Indeed, that is the point of all Critical Theories more broadly; the dividing of society along oppressor-oppressed lines.

It will not end well.

[HondurasKeiser]

Here is also what appears to be additional tweets from Jones that give more context to her statement. There's more nuance here than the original tweet suggests:

https://twtext.com/article/1266360550306525192#

The Civil Rights Movement was *not* non-violent. It was sparked by violence -- beginning with the brutal beatings of black servicemen coming home from war. And while black protestors were trained to be non-violent, they courted *white* violence as a strategy.

King, Diana Nash, John Lewis, knew most white Americans did not care abt black people non-violently protesting in the streets. These were the same people that had tolerated lynchings, racial apartheid, fascism against black Americans for decades. Why would marching change that?

When King did marches & sheriffs did not respond with violence, the white media did not even bother to cover the protests. The mvmt understood tht the thing Americans understand is violence. Our country was literally born of violent insurrection& act of vandalism in Boston Harbor

So, the strategy became how to bait white people *into* violence in order force other white people to act. They picked the locations of their protests and marches based on the ability to draw violence. And when dogs got sicced on children, white media "discovered" a story.

Peaceful protest did not bring about the great civil rights legislation of the 1960s. Black people being firebombed, water-hosed, lynched, bitten by dogs, beaten to a pulp by police trying to march across a bridge is what brought the changes. Violence.

It's not incidental that this civil rights legislation is passed during the Vietnam war. The images of the Great Democracy violently suppressing its own citizens became an international embarrassment, and it was that, not some newfound racial egalitarian, that forced change.

So, when we talk abt what will or will not work for black communities to get justice when citizens are killed by police and no charges ever come, when they live in desperately impoverished communities w failing schools & no work, communities many of you don't see *until* a riot..

Let's at least be *honest.* Slavery in this country ended because of the deadliest war in our history. Black Americans got full legal citizenship only after a decades-long *violently* repressed rights movement. I am sure destruction won't work here, but neither has anything else.

I know, I know cue the predictable: "AK-shually, Ms. Hannah-Jones is making a very nuanced argument for why violence is wrong but rioting in the name of justice is understandable and perhaps even justified."

[Szdfan]

Here is also what appears to be additional tweets from Jones that give more context to her statement. There's more nuance here than the original tweet suggests:

https://twtext.com/article/1266360550306525192#

The Civil Rights Movement was *not* non-violent. It was sparked by violence -- beginning with the brutal beatings of black servicemen coming home from war. And while black protestors were trained to be non-violent, they courted *white* violence as a strategy.

King, Diana Nash, John Lewis, knew most white Americans did not care abt black people non-violently protesting in the streets. These were the same people that had tolerated lynchings, racial apartheid, fascism against black Americans for decades. Why would marching change that?

When King did marches & sheriffs did not respond with violence, the white media did not even bother to cover the protests. The mvmt understood tht the thing Americans understand is violence. Our country was literally born of violent insurrection& act of vandalism in Boston Harbor

So, the strategy became how to bait white people *into* violence in order force other white people to act. They picked the locations of their protests and marches based on the ability to draw violence. And when dogs got sicced on children, white media "discovered" a story.

Peaceful protest did not bring about the great civil rights legislation of the 1960s. Black people being firebombed, water-hosed, lynched, bitten by dogs, beaten to a pulp by police trying to march across a bridge is what brought the changes. Violence.

It's not incidental that this civil rights legislation is passed during the Vietnam war. The images of the Great Democracy violently suppressing its own citizens became an international embarrassment, and it was that, not some newfound racial egalitarian, that forced change.

So, when we talk abt what will or will not work for black communities to get justice when citizens are killed by police and no charges ever come, when they live in desperately impoverished communities w failing schools & no work, communities many of you don't see *until* a riot..

Let's at least be *honest.* Slavery in this country ended because of the deadliest war in our history. Black Americans got full legal citizenship only after a decades-long *violently* repressed rights movement. I am sure destruction won't work here, but neither has anything else.

I know, I know cue the predictable: "AK-shually, Ms. Hannah-Jones is making a very nuanced argument for why violence is wrong but rioting in the name of justice is understandable and perhaps even justified."

I think you're ignoring what she's actually saying. When she says that "the fact of history is non-violent protest has not been successful for blk Americans," she's focusing on white violence against black Americans. She's saying that the non-violent protests in the Civil Rights movement weren't really non-violent because of the violence that was committed by the police and other white people that was strategically used to capture the attention and conscience of the country. Non-violent protest didn't capture media attention -- kids being attacked by firehoses and police dogs did.

Jones also says that the country ignores the injustices and inequalities in poor black communities until there is a riot.

She also says that she doesn't think that the violence in Minneapolis will work to change things.

What Jones is saying is saying is that America is a violent country and violence (especially violence against black people during the Civil Rights Movement) is what America seems to understand.

She's not wrong.

That's huge difference from what you are saying about her.

[joshuabgood]

Seems germaine to this discussion.

[HondurasKeiser]

Here is also what appears to be additional tweets from Jones that give more context to her statement. There's more nuance here than the original tweet suggests:

https://twtext.com/article/1266360550306525192#

I know, I know cue the predictable: "AK-shually, Ms. Hannah-Jones is making a very nuanced argument for why violence is wrong but rioting in the name of justice is understandable and perhaps even justified."

I think you're ignoring what she's actually saying. When she says that "the fact of history is non-violent protest has not been successful for blk Americans," she's focusing on white violence against black Americans. She's saying that the non-violent protests in the Civil Rights movement weren't really non-violent because of the violence that was committed by the police and other white people that was strategically used to capture the attention and conscience of the country. Non-violent protest didn't capture media attention -- kids being attacked by firehoses and police dogs did.

Jones also says that the country ignores the injustices and inequalities in poor black communities until there is a riot.

She also says that she doesn't think that the violence in Minneapolis will work to change things.

What Jones is saying is saying is that America is a violent country and violence (especially violence against black people during the Civil Rights Movement) is what America seems to understand.

She's not wrong.

That's huge difference from what you are saying about her.

Serious question - was Jesus' nonviolence not really nonviolence because of the violence done to him? Indeed, was his nonviolence futile or unnecessary absent the violence of the Roman system?

[HondurasKeiser]

More Importantly, who's this Russ fella the OP is about?

[ohio jones]

Serious question - was Jesus' nonviolence not really nonviolence because of the violence done to him? Indeed, was his nonviolence futile or unnecessary absent the violence of the Roman system?

The strategy of baiting or inducing violence brings to mind Jesus making sure his followers were equipped with swords, so that he could be numbered with the transgressors. Perhaps there is a distinction to be made between nonviolence and nonresistance.

More Importantly, who's this Russ fella the OP is about?

Probably Ross instead of Russ.