Wednesday, October 21, 2020

When your outgroup uses your label

I've been following some academics who are pro critical race theory. They cannot fathom how people can be so against their ideology. 

It's like that "what I actually do" meme.


Here is what antiwokester James Lindsay thinks critical race theory is:


To Rod Graham, critical race theory is more like this:


Around the 1:30 mark in the video below, Mia Brett states that none of the CRT materials she uses even mentions the phrase "white privilege."


While I have to credit Lindsay, he does read enough CRT scholarship to become published in the field himself, in most instances there is a survivorship/nut picking bias going on. Any ideas outside your ideology that make it into your timeline will be the most outrageous version. And the outrageous ideas from your ingroup rarely make it into your timeline or are drowned out by all the sensible takes so that you don't even notice them.

So when Lindsay dedicates his whole life to trashing CRT, Graham cannot understand how something as harmless and ordinary can invoke such a reaction. And the response is usually something like "Well, I guess he's just a racist."

It's like the new executive order against CRT training. One group thinks the training is just diversity and sensitivity training. And who could be against that? Racists, that's who.

The other group thinks it's teaching that, well, All White People Are Racist. 

I realized that I do the same thing whenever someone trashes capitalism. I always think: "You don't want choice? You do realize communism has failed miserably every time it's been tried, right? And you do know that those Nordic countries are capitalist countries, with, in many ways, freer markets than ours, right?"

What I've realized is that when people use capitalism in this sense, they usually just mean greed. And everyone hates greed. There is nothing wrong with trying to imagine a world without greed.

The pro CRT folks I follow don't preach that all white people are racist or uphold Robin DiAngelo as their spokesperson. But they also don't speak up when the Smithsonian says things like "showing up on time" and "perfecting a task" are functions of “whiteness”. And I'm not sure it's their job to police their own, but it would help with outgroup understanding and coalition building, if anyone cares about those things anymore.

So I am going to try and give more charitable responses to people trashing the labels and ideas of their outgroup. 

  • I'm going to assume that James Lindsay just means he doesn't like language that has the (possibly unintended) effect of dividing people racially and that people should have the freedom to not have to be exposed to this belief.
  • When someone says Black Lives Matter, I'm going to assume they just mean that they think if a cop kills an unarmed, non-threatening person, they should be held accountable. 
  • When someone says Back the Blue, Blue Lives Matter, or shows support for their local police department, I'm going to assume they just think that cops have a tough and dangerous job and they want them to know they acknowledge and appreciate it.
  • When someone says All Lives Matter, I'm going to assume they mean that they believe in equality and don't understand the purpose of BLM.

If Rod Graham is correct, since I just wrote a whole blog post about "what I really think is going on," then I guess this blog post is Critical Theory. So there you go.

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