Lindsay's Outline of CRT

James Linday's doing God's work on this stuff. Here's his two-page overview of CRT. 

Coupla points:

[a] He left out social constructionism about race.

This is apparently a major component of the view (Delgado and Stefancic list it as one of the six-ish components of CRT on p. 9 of their third edition.)

Why leave out one of the most important and well-known components of the view? It's uncharacteristic. I wonder whether it has something to do with him agreeing with it--he and Pluckrose accept it in Cynical Theories. Dunno. 

The thesis of the social construction of race is very probably false--but it's complicated and worth keeping an open mind about. Sesardic, for one, scores what seem to be killing blows against the thesis. "Social constructionism" generally is such a confused and radically underspecified/overused concept that I rarely take any application of it too seriously. (Except when it specifically concerns the creation of social institutions.) 

[b] CRT proponents are deploying a couple of (often dishonest) defenses of the view, and one of them is, basically You're getting CRT wrong. Thing is, there's no single definition/characterization of CRT. Thus some concepts and theses are sometimes included in it and sometimes not. So by switching around among conceptions, it's easy to accuse critics of not understanding the view their attacking.

Even more important, IMO, is the fact (that I tend to go on about) that CRT isn't the real problem. The real problem is a massive complex of weird, outlandish philosophical and political views that's been at the core of the American far left for around 40 years now (at least). Postmodernism used to be the flagship component of that view, and critical theory (generally) was a less-prominent component. Now CRT is the flagship component. But it's a big, seething mass of crazy...and it has no name. This is a problem that many people have noted. For five or six years I've called it, variously, "postpostmodernism" (which is really already taken for a different view), "the postpostmodern mishmash," "postmodern progressivism"...and several others I can't remember...bad form, really... Sullivan calls it something like "the successor ideology." There are a bunch of others. Anyway, under these conditions, using 'critical race theory' (the phrase) to name them all is permissible, I think. Suboptimal...but close enough for government work. That's about as precise as our public debates get, really...

Oops--gotta split. IRL crap to do.