Racism In Critical Race Theory
By which I mean: racism that is in critical race theory, not racism as discussed in critical race theory.
I'm not exactly a fan of blogs like Gateway Pundit...obvs...but liberals typically can't see / won't admit / don't care that there's a fair bit of anti-white racism on the left, including the academic left. I don't care all that much about it myself...except insofar as I think that ideas matter, and that bad ideas are ideas. Hence they should be criticized...or, at minimum, recognized. I don't take this personally...but I take it seriously.
An infelicitous sentence, even intentionally and obviously misinterpreted in a way that might possibly be vaguely racist against a non-white race might ruin your academic career. But you can build your academic career on overt anti-white racism. In my opinion, such a radical double standard should at least attract a bit of scrutiny.
I'm certainly not suggesting anything like suppression of open inquiry. If someone has arguments that the very nature of whiteness is violence, then they should explain them.* But you and I both know how well such arguments are going to stand up to actual scrutiny outside the academic leftist echo-chamber. There's nothing inherently bigoted about making arguments that allege to find a flaw occurring more frequently in a race or a sex or whatever...but when the flaw is allegedly necessary, and especially when such arguments are systematically bad...it becomes reasonable to conclude that it's something other than a love of truth that's driving them.
* Of course in any other case, this would elicit cries of "essentialism!" Which...is one of those terms the intellectual left loves, but that they don't understand. By 'essentialism', they usually just mean realism. Which, of course, they don't like because something something social construction.
I'm not exactly a fan of blogs like Gateway Pundit...obvs...but liberals typically can't see / won't admit / don't care that there's a fair bit of anti-white racism on the left, including the academic left. I don't care all that much about it myself...except insofar as I think that ideas matter, and that bad ideas are ideas. Hence they should be criticized...or, at minimum, recognized. I don't take this personally...but I take it seriously.
An infelicitous sentence, even intentionally and obviously misinterpreted in a way that might possibly be vaguely racist against a non-white race might ruin your academic career. But you can build your academic career on overt anti-white racism. In my opinion, such a radical double standard should at least attract a bit of scrutiny.
I'm certainly not suggesting anything like suppression of open inquiry. If someone has arguments that the very nature of whiteness is violence, then they should explain them.* But you and I both know how well such arguments are going to stand up to actual scrutiny outside the academic leftist echo-chamber. There's nothing inherently bigoted about making arguments that allege to find a flaw occurring more frequently in a race or a sex or whatever...but when the flaw is allegedly necessary, and especially when such arguments are systematically bad...it becomes reasonable to conclude that it's something other than a love of truth that's driving them.
* Of course in any other case, this would elicit cries of "essentialism!" Which...is one of those terms the intellectual left loves, but that they don't understand. By 'essentialism', they usually just mean realism. Which, of course, they don't like because something something social construction.
posted by Winston Smith at
11:52 AM
1 Comments:
There are some interesting pragmatic concerns over when inquiry should be abridged. Suppose you were a scientist convinced a ghost would appear in an house after chanting n times. If you attempt it and it turns out to be false, it could always be revised to a chant n+1 times. This happens with conspiracy theory a lot, because of underdeterminism, it is very easy for a dishonest actor to manipulate evidence to keep a theory alive.
In defense of the conniving professor, he is at least using language competently enough to generate statements that can bear truth value. The * studies left doesn't even meet that burden, using terms in completely artificial, fraudulent ways, explicitly lying about the nature of social processes, and so forth, and oftentimes spouting outright nonsense: “Research is a colonial, white supremacist, elite process” (even on the purely historical point, tell that to all the researchers in China, Japan, Korea who are doing incredibly good work in maths and sciences especially).
None of the statements given in that piece and none of the considerable additional evidence from decades of "scholarship" in those fields are suggestive of an academic searching for empirical truth, and it is good epistemic hygiene to make sure they are ignored.
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