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Notes -
I am surprised that the author of this article is surprised, since there's a lot of critical theorist writing that dovetails well with what is happening in these anti-racist workshops.
For context, I've been reading a bunch of critical theorist scholarship recently. While it's been aggravating because much of it has been written in intentionally long-winded and obfuscatory language and almost all of it describes an underlying belief system so inherently objectionable that I'm convinced exposure to it is inevitably going to damage people's sanity, I've found it's been useful in understanding what this particular cohort of ideologues believe. It's become abundantly clear that the beliefs espoused in these workshops don't start and end with some radical, offended grievance-obsessed students, this insanity exists at the very core of Critical Social Justice ideology.
For example, this:
This is an idea that has cropped up multiple times. I'm sure everyone here already knows about the infamous infographic that labels "objective, rational linear thinking" as a quality of "whiteness" and "white culture". This is, however, not new: the seed of this idea can be traced back very far in critical race scholarship. For example, here's an article by John Calmore called "Critical Race Theory, Archie Shepp, and Fire Music: Securing an Authentic Intellectual Life in a Multicultural World", which came out in the early 1990s. It was so influential it got included in a compilation book called "Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement" by critical race theorist par excellence Kimberlé Crenshaw. I first found it cited in this video and initially struggled to find the text online so I could read it, but eventually managed to download the full text from this admittedly seedy-looking file upload site.
In the article, Calmore declares: "As a form of oppositional scholarship, critical race theory challenges the universality of white experience/judgment as the authoritative standard that binds people of color and normatively measures, directs, controls, and regulates the terms of proper thought, expression, presentment, and behavior." So you can see here the expression of the idea that the standards that white people create in their societies are the standards that people of colour are bound to follow, and CRT stands in opposition to this because adapting to these standards supposedly renders people of colour inauthentic. "Hence, a major theme of critical race theory reflects the colored intellectual's persistent battle to avoid being rendered inauthentic by the pressures of adapting to the white world and to take instead an oppositional stance by relying on one's true existential life, which is rooted in a world of color even though not stuck there."
With that covered, Calmore begins attacking the expectation of objectivity and neutrality in scholarship as one of these dictates and pressures that supposedly prevent Black folx and other people of colour from being authentic, and what he instead endorses is an approach characterised by
the production of intentionally biased scholarshippersonal expression: "As a reflection of authenticity, critical race scholarship also rejects the traditional dictates that implore one to write and study as a detached observer whose work is purportedly objective, neutral, and balanced. In the classic sense of “professing,” critical race scholars advocate and defend positions. Fran Olsen points out that traditional scholarship's appearance of balance presupposes a status quo baseline that hinders both understanding and social change. Critical race theory tends, in response, toward very personal expression that allows our experiences and lessons, learned as people of color, to convey the knowledge that we possess in a way that is empowering to us and, it is hoped, ultimately empowering to those on whose behalf we act. Those of us who profess critical race theory are, in simplest terms, trying to be true to ourselves."And here's the author disparaging neutrality in legal discourse. "When people of color deemphasize an individuality that tries to transcend color—when we attempt, in other words, to express valid generalizations generated out of race consciousness—we challenge the underlying inadequacy of dominant legal discourse, that which Kimberlé Crenshaw has labeled “perspectivelessness.” This position of perspectivelessness holds that legal analysis is possible without taking into account various conflicts of individual values, experiences, and world views. According to Crenshaw, by stripping away the analysis of any particular cultural, political, or class characteristic, this perspectivelessness is presented as the objective, neutral legal discourse, with a corollary of “color blindness,” used to reduce conflict and devalue the relevance of our particular perspectives."
The text then launches into an incessant, repetitive lament about how black intellectuals supposedly often uncritically bend to the pressures of dominant white academia and white culture, and eventually at the end advocates that "As African Americans in dominant white society, we must guard against institutional co-optation that socializes us away from our own identities and value systems."
In other words, the critical theorist view is that these academic and scholarly virtues we're familiar with have no value in and of themselves, they are only considered to have value by white academia (this is also true for other aspects of "dominant white American culture"). Critical race theorists think this is racist, they think that "Black thought" or the deprioritisation of objectivity and other such values in favour of Black experience and Black racial consciousness is equally good (or in fact better), but that it is denigrated and devalued simply because of White society. And when coloured scholars and intellectuals endorse and practice "white virtues", they consider them to be people who have lost their racial identity and who are just inauthentically capitulating to the pressures that White society places on them. So being a person of colour doesn't save you from criticism.
The Telluride professor seems bewildered by Keisha, but really all she was doing in her workshops was teaching them ideological tenets that have long existed in critical race theory. As James Lindsay notes in his criticism of critical theory, objectivity is thought of in critical theorist circles as a "myth that’s used to marginalize other ways of knowing and uphold dominant systems of power." The reason why these students reacted to the citation of incarceration statistics in that way is because they think this is an invocation of (white!) objectivity to silence and devalue Black voices and Black subjective experience, and is thus problematic. It's entirely consistent with the worldview and is a fantastic example of the mind-rot that critical theory cultivates in the minds of its believers.
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