Jason Stanley explaining why Critical Race Theory is poisonous.

Jason Stanley writes in the Economist- 

POLITICIANS USE critical race theory (CRT) in much the same way that they use Keynesian economics:

Keynesian 'pump priming' is used to create an artificial boom- higher stock prices, lower unemployment- before an election. CRT can't be used in this way. It has zero impact on the Economy. However, it has the potential to create a majoritarian back-lash. Thus playing up the mischief done by the thing might scare up votes for Right Wing candidates.

 as cudgels in a propaganda campaign to advance their cherished political goals, with little regard for the actual philosophies at issue. 

The vast majority of people can't change their race- i.e. 'pass' for something other than what they are. Thus, Race is an uncorrelated asymmetry. By making the claim that a minority is owed reparation of various sorts and that a 'zero-sum' game is involved, the majority can be scared into closing ranks against something which they believe will harm them.

On the other hand CRT can impose a cost on 'virtue signalers' from the majority by compelling them to put their money where their mouth is- or at least surrender jobs and funds secured on the excuse of fighting Racism. 

CRT, a doctrine more caricatured than understood, rests upon the distinctly unradical claim that American institutions have systematically fallen short of the country’s egalitarian ideals due to practices that perpetuate racial hierarchies.

The claim is foolish. American ideals established and strengthened racial hierarchies- if that is what the majority of White Americans wanted. No doubt, there was political equality- for White men- in the sense that one man had one vote but that is all there was. 

It was always the case that there was economic inequality between White men. Furthermore, some had more power of various sorts than others. However, there was no hereditary caste system within those not disqualified by the 'one drop' rule. Still, there were barriers between Catholics and Protestants and Italians and Anglos and so on and so forth.

 It began in the 1970s as a way to analyse the intersection of American law and race; 

without actually analyzing either. It focused on getting more non-Whites hired. If there's money available for combating Racism, we want our folk to get that money. But, equally, if there's money to be made combating Liberalism, we want our folk to get that money. This is not about the law or philosophy or scholarship, its about who gets the job and how much it can be made to pay. 

its creators were legal scholars such as Derrick Bell and Kimberlé Crenshaw. 

who were really keen on their folk getting the jobs and getting the money though they well knew Liberalism was bullshit. 

It has since expanded its purview to analyse American institutions more broadly.

So as to get the jobs and get the money for our folk, not theirs. 

CRT stems from the need to provide a language for what institutions actually do,

they provide jobs and hence money. We want them for our peeps coz money is sweet like honey.

 rather than how people in those institutions describe themselves.

Conservative, Liberal, Klansman, Marxist- we don't give a shit. Jus' give us the fucking jobs and the fucking money. Have you seen Black Klansman? It's based on a true story. If the Grand Wizard gets a big salary, we should get that job for one of our own coz money is sweet, sweet, like honey. 

 CRT thus seeks to explain the fact of persistent racial injustice

viz our not having certain jobs and the money those jobs pay

 by analysing the practices of American institutions.

except ones where us guys have already got all the jobs and the money.

 Such practices are racist because they 

are being done by guys wot aren't our guys so us guys aint getting that money.

perpetuate racial inequality, not because people within them seek deliberately to oppress individual and specific black people. Mortgage lending, for instance, can function in a racist way, even if the lenders themselves harbour no personal bigotry against non-whites.

Expecting me to repay money I borrowed is not just bigotry, it is FASCISM. Anyone who can repay his debts very easily is constantly being courted by lenders. Yet they run a mile from me. 

CRT holds that such institutional practices are difficult to change and endemic to American institutions, and that they, rather than the malice of individual bigots or the supposed pathologies of black American behaviour, are primarily responsible for racial inequality. 

Which arises out of having less money.

CRT is thus not about people’s individual characters.

It is about money.

 It is rather a claim about the structures, practices, and habits that perpetuate racial inequality.

i.e. us guys having less money.

 Even the most avowed anti-racist can participate in an institution with racist practices.

Even the most avowed anti-racist may be merely virtue signaling. 

Martin Delany, a political philosopher and black abolitionist, writing in the year 1852, noted that even in “Anti-Slavery establishments”, by which he means institutions in Northern cities devoted to the abolition of slavery and “the elevation of the colored man, by facilitating his efforts in attaining to equality with the white man”, black citizens only occupy “a mere secondary, underling position.” 

Delany believed that the future of African Americans lay in Africa. He and two other African Americans had been admitted to Harvard Medical School after a vote by faculty members in 1850. However, the students rebelled saying though they' had "no objection to the education and elevation of blacks' they didn't want them studying with them (or competing with them after they left College!). So the African Americans were expelled. The other two spent time in Liberia as Doctors- one died there- while Delany served as a major in the Army and later played some role in Southern politics.

The truth of the matter is that Delany, at that time, thought Liberia would be a nice place to settle in. It was nothing of the sort. The White Abolitionists who funded the Liberia experiment didn't want Free Blacks even as underlings. They wanted them to fuck off to Africa. A few thousand Free Blacks did go to Liberia. Half died of various tropical diseases. Delany, writing in 1852, was advocating a very foolish policy. He wised up subsequently which is why he is not remembered as a 'political philosopher'- i.e. a cretin like Jason Stanley- but rather as a writer, a Doctor, and a soldier/politician.

Even whites most devoted to the cause of the advancement of racial equality hired black Americans for inferior jobs.

This is a crazy way at looking at things. The fact is, Whites were worried that Free Blacks would help liberate their enslaved brethren. They no more wanted to hire blacks for superior jobs than they wanted to marry off their daughters to them. 

Such whites might have argued for a distinction between political and professional inequality—they might have felt, in other words, that the law should treat everyone equally, but also that American citizens of African descent are best suited for menial work. 

Rather than eligible grooms for their daughters. However, it must be said that people like Emerson thought that Irish and Scandinavian immigrants were doomed to equally back breaking labor. Their graves might make a patch of prairie a tad greener but there was no question of non WASPs (of good families) not continuing to dominate the Republic from generation to generation till the end of Time. 

But this is explicit racism, which no avowed anti-racist could accept. 

In which case, by Stanley's lights, there were no White anti-racists in America at that time. This is why the First Nations were fucked over so thoroughly. 

The professions of anti-racism from these whites, whom Delany called “the truest friends,” might have been sincere, but they coexisted with obviously racist practices.

Like suggesting that Delany fuck off to Liberia and die of some disease there. 

 Delany denounces this faux liberal equality, declaring, “There is no equality of persons, where there is not an equality of attainments.”

Delany says free African Americans should work hard and study and set up enterprises so that their population has the same statistical distribution of attainment as Whites The alternative, which he later supported, was going to Liberia or some such place where there would be 'equality of attainment'- more especially in terms of attaining death through tropical disease- soon enough. 

Delany wrote- 

Society regulates itself, being governed by mind, which like water, finds its own level. “Like seeks like,” is a principle in the laws of matter, as well as of mind. There is such a thing as inferiority of things, and positions; at least society has made them so, and while we continue to live among men, we must agree to all just measures, all those we mean that do not necessarily infringe on the rights of others. By the regulations of society, there is no equality of persons, where there is not an equality of attainments. By this, we do not wish to be understood as advocating the actual equal attainments of every individual; but we mean to say that, if these attainments be necessary for the elevation of the white man, they are necessary for the elevation of the colored man. That some colored men and women, in a like proportion to the whites, should be qualified in all the attainments possessed by them. It is one of the regulations of society the world over, and we shall have to conform to it, or be discarded as unworthy of the association of our fellows...

 ...Until we are determined to change the condition of things, and raise ourselves above the position in which we are now prostrated, we must hang our heads in sorrow, and hide our faces in shame. It is enough to know that these things are so; the causes we care little about and moralising over all our life time. This we are weary of. What we desire to learn now is, how to effect a remedy; this we have endeavored to point out. Our elevation must be the results of self efforts, and work of our own hands. No other human power can accomplish it. If we but determine it shall be so, it will be so. Let each one make the case his own and endeavor to rival his neighbor in honorable competition.

...These are the proper and only means of elevating ourselves and attaining equality in this country or any other, and it is useless, utterly futile, to think about going anywhere, except we are determined to use these as the necessary means of developing our manhood. The means are at hand, within our reach. Are we willing to try them? Are we willing to raise ourselves superior to the condition of slaves, or continue the meanest underlings, subject to the beck and call of every creature, bearing a pale complexion? If we are, we had as well remained in the South, as to have to come to the North in search of more freedom. let us determine to equal the whites among whom we live, not by declarations and unexpressed self opinion, for we have always had enough of that, but by actual prof in acting, doing and carrying out practically the measures of equality. Here is our nativity and here have we the natural right to abide and be elevated through the measures of our own efforts.

Seven years after writing this, Delany sailed for Liberia. He was not a stupid man. He didn't stay there long. 

The fact of the matter is that White emigrants to the US already had higher attainments. Indeed, Whites gained hegemony in that Continent because of those higher attainments. Furthermore, they had higher 'transfer earnings'- i.e. they'd quit and move on if paid too badly. As Billie Holliday sang 'Them that’s got shall get/ Them that’s not shall lose / So the Bible said and it still is news

Almost 170 years later, how has the American polity done on Delany’s measure of equality? 

It put Obama in the White House. Liberia, on the other hand, didn't do so well though, it must be said indigenous Africans did get the vote- in 1904- though there was only one Party they could vote for. African American domination of Liberia ended in 1980 when President Tolbert was killed by Samuel Doe. Interestingly Tolbert spoke an African language- the second Liberian President to do so. He was accused of 'letting the peasants into the kitchen' by other members of the elite. His big mistake was establishing diplomatic ties with Communist powers while severing diplomatic relations with Israel. Worse yet, he started going after American corporations, like Firestone, who were doing well out of cheap Liberian rubber. His murderer, an indigenous African, was supported by the US during the Cold War but Bush pulled the plug on him once a deal had been reached with the Soviets.

George Weah- one of the finest footballers the world has seen- is now President of Liberia. He is of indigenous ancestry. Things are looking up for that part of the world. 

Consider the criminal-justice system, decried in W.E.B. Du Bois’ 1903 book “The Souls of Black Folk”

To be clear, Du Bois was writing about the US, not Liberia. 

 as a “a double system of justice, which erred on the white side by undue leniency and the practical immunity of red-handed criminals, and erred on the black side by undue severity, injustice, and lack of discrimination.”

Tolbert may not have fallen if he had erred more on the black side. 

 As of this writing, the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world. 

Because there is a profitable prison-industrial complex financed by the Tax payer. As America falls in relative wealth this will change. Indeed, China might overtake the US on Xi's watch.

Black Americans are incarcerated in state and federal prisons at five times the rate of white Americans.

Which is why longevity improved for some African American cohorts. The sad truth is that it was perfectly rational for Blacks to vote for three strikes. The evidence is, having a family member in prison is better for the family than having the fellow hang around the house. 

It is true that rates of violent crime among black Americans are higher. But just as higher covid-19 death rates among black Americans are best explained by differences in environmental conditions,-

which involve having closer contact with those who might have had closer contact with carriers of the disease

 higher crime rates are also due to racial disparities,

which involve having closer contact with criminals

 such as harsher policing (a racial disparity not explained by differential crime rates),

Harsher policing may be a symptom of less effective policing which generally reflects lower willingness to fund the thing

 lack of decent job opportunities, 

Criminals should be hired by the State and get regular promotions. Lack of decent jobs in Crime is a Social failure. Research by Levitt & Venkatesh more than 20 years ago showed that most gang bangers are earning less than minimum wage. 

homelessness, and poverty. Thus the longstanding American practice of addressing crime spikes through increased policing rather than, say, more job-training programmes is an example of a practice that perpetuates racist outcomes.

Sadly, being a member of a gang may be necessary to avoid being its victim. Job-training can't really help- more particularly because it tends to be crap designed to create jobs for job-trainers who would otherwise be unemployed- though geographical mobility can dramatically change outcomes.

Inequalities in the justice system are mirrored, unsurprisingly, in inequalities in wealth. In 2016, the median black family had 10% of the wealth of the median white family.

While median Jewish wealth might be five times median Protestant wealth. 

 This is an improvement from 1963, when the median non-white family had only 5% of relative wealth. But it is a far cry from equality of attainment, 170 years after Martin Delany set that down as the standard for racial justice.

Before legging it for Liberia and promptly legging it back from there. 

From sharecropping in the South to predatory lending in the North, white Americans have been materially invested in creating and maintaining racial domination. 

Predatory lending- eh? Shylock...OMG, has Stanley been reading 'The Secret Relationship?'

In addition to these material benefits of racial hierarchy, documented in a justly famous essay of Ta-Nehisi Coates, there is the desire to preserve what Du Bois in 1935 called “the public and psychological wage of whiteness.”

Stanley is white. Shame on him.

Jennifer Richeson 

who did well out of African-American heritage

and Michael Kraus,

who may not be non-White in any way and who is thus stealing the bread out of our mouths

 both psychologists, 

i.e. cretins

along with their co-authors, have documented a delusion among white Americans about the racial-wealth gap. They show that Americans estimate that in 2016 the median black family had 90% of the wealth of the median white family—rather than the true figure of 10%. 

That means they think African Americans are thrifty and smart at investing their money. That's a good thing. Thinking a different ethnic group is perennially in debt no matter how much they earn is evidence of Racism. Why? Wealth is stuff smart peeps strive to acquire.

Suppose Delany were alive today. What would he say to his brethren? I think the gist of it would be

'Wealth building service providers target those who are seen as having a low 'nut'- i.e fixed costs- and high liquidity. This means live cheap and never marry, or have kids with, improvident peeps. First ensure you have sufficient fungible assets- i.e. T-Bills covering 3 months earnings. Then do portfolio choice. True, initially the broker treats you as small fry. But within a year or two, data mining identifies you as worthy of proper wealth-building services. That's when you get a couple of apps on your phone to keep track of markets. Five years in, think about real estate. Ten years in, think about growth stocks. By now you are in a low risk actuarial class and can afford to be over-insured jus' like upper crust white peeps. Then do the Estate planning stuff and so on. Also if you have joint inheritance of agricultural land in the South- don't spend a dime on that shite. You will be shafted.'

African American economists and lawyers know all about how 'self-help' is about changing the statistical description of the class you fall into. Talking bollocks is a waste of time. Everything is statistical, baby. Not click bait junk social science. That's just drive-by regression with invalid instruments. I'm talking about the sort of stuff Amazon uses to make money.

Their research shows a bias towards what Ms Richeson calls a “mythology of racial progress.” 

No. It shows Americans think African Americans are smart and thrifty rather than stupid and likely to blow their wad on bling. 

As Ms Richeson writes in a recent article, “People are willing to assume that things were at least somewhat bad 50 years ago, but they also assume that things have gotten substantially better—and are approaching parity.” 

No. They don't give a shit about 'racial disparities'. They assume that if Blacks are as good as Whites then they'd be like Whites in their saving habits. What is being tested for is bias against Blacks based on stereotypes re. drug use and addiction to bling. These stupid shitheads think ordinary folk care deeply about racial justice and equality of attainment and other such shite. 

This belief that the present has come close to parity is longstanding—in a Gallup poll from March 1963, 46% of white Americans agreed with the statement, “blacks have as good a chance as whites in your community to get any kind of job for which they are qualified.”

What this meant is that white Americans had come to see that blacks were equally skilled and talented and able to manage money. In any case 'qualified', back then, meant something different to what it means now. Why? If your face didn't fit, you couldn't get the fucking qualification in the first place. 

Many Americans believe that we are nearing racial equality after a long progression of positive change.

No. Americans think that people are getting ahead by their own efforts. Sadly the pointy heads keep creating more hoops to jump through for Americans which is why the Chinese are eating their lunch. 

 That means that any attempt to push for structural change to address inequalities will be met by profound disbelief. 

No. It will be met by people telling you to fuck off because you have shit inside your brain. If you like structural change so much, why don't you get married to it and go live in Venezuela? 

Those who argue for such changes get painted as radicals with a devious and destructive hidden agenda.

No. Stupid peeps like Stanley shit the bed. People say 'fuck is this cunt a Professor of?' When they learn it is Philosophy, they shrug their shoulders and say 'well, at least he doesn't masturbate in public or shit into his hands and fling his feces around like most of the other Philosophy Professors I saw at the Zoo.

 This sort of moral panic helps maintain the status quo.

Very true. Moral panic about pedophiles helps maintain the status quo with respect to your teenaged daughter or 5 year old son not being incessantly sodomized by smelly hobos. 

But such panics might not happen if schools made more efforts to teach students

useful stuff- e.g. why studying Philosophy at Collidge is a waste of time and money.

 how American institutions fell short of their ideals. 

Fuck off! WASPs wanted to dominate their portion of the Continent. By 1945, they were dominating half the world while still lynching niggers and deporting wetbacks and keeping out the Hindooos and Chinkies and so forth. That was the fucking ideal which motivated these guys to go West and kill the natives and take their land. 

Hence, in few arenas does the battle over CRT rage as strongly as in education—which fits the historical pattern. 

But if American kids fall behind in STEM subjects then the future belongs to China. Private Schools will teach Mandarin. State Schools will get kids to rite ess-As on how American ideals are so nice that even the Chinese are buying up Mount Rushmore and the Statue of Liberty and the Obama Memorial Library not to mention the 'Who-the-fuck-was-Biden?' souvenir shop outside.

The aim of Du Bois’ 1935 work “Black Reconstruction in America” was to tell the true story of the end of Reconstruction (the brief period of racial progress that followed the end of the civil war), which is one of violent white backlash against emerging black political power. He denounces the teaching of history “for inflating our national ego,” and for years his work was overlooked in favour of an interpretation arguing that Reconstruction failed because black Americans were corrupt and incapable of self-governance.

Reconstruction succeeded. It threw a scare into the Dixiecrats. If the thing could happen once, it could happen again. The South was corrupt but it was capable of self-governance by beating and killing people the way the North had done during the Civil War and the way the US had done to the Indians and the Mexicans and so forth. 

More recently, Nikole Hannah-Jones’s 1619 Project,

which would have been fine with us if she hadn't let in a couple of Whites.

 which seeks to illuminate how the legacy of slavery has shaped American institutions, was met by fury from the right, as well as demands for “patriotic education.” 

apparently the lady spent some time in Cuba. So she's exactly what the Doctor ordered as far as the Republicans are concerned. Just reclassify Hispanics as Whites already. The Asians will see an arbitrage opportunity in going Black. Look at Kamala Harris.

The same cycle again: illumination implying the need for structural change produces a moral panic seeking to reinforce a racist status quo.

Moral panic? This is Trumpian and tactical. Only a Stanley level cretin would believe any morality was involved.

The targets of the Republican attack on CRT reveal that the issue is not CRT, but something much broader. A recent education bill passed in Tennessee bans “promoting division between, or resentment of, a race”—subjective language that could easily bar teachers from discussing how race has shaped American institutions. 

Race shaped American institutions to a point where it became the richest and most powerful country in the world. Teachers discussing race aint going to help America face the Chinese challenge. Getting kids to learn category theory and molecular biology and other stuff which didn't exist when I was in skool is good for America and good for the world. 

In 1935, Du Bois explicitly argues that American history, properly taught, is divisive, as “war and especially civil strife leave terrible wounds.”

Who gives a toss what he argued? Stanley's parents emigrated to a country they knew to be racist. Indeed, Hitler was copying American racial policies. Had he concentrated on developing 'Jewish Sciences', there might be a united Europe whose flag would be the Swastika. Thanks to Hitler's stupidity, black folk everywhere started to rise up. The Soviet threat too played a positive role. Blacks be smart and good at fighting wars.  Suddenly the US Army became a vehicle for Black advancement. White soldiers would rather be led by a smart Bleck rather than get massacred under an incompetent Preppie. 

 White Americans enslaved black Americans, 

No. They bought Africans enslaved by Africans. 

and shortly after the latter achieved their freedom during the brief period of Reconstruction, excluded them by legislation and force from civic and political life until the 1960s. 

Because American ideals were about WASPs fucking over everybody else. Some pedagogues and priests may have pretended otherwise but they were also pretending they weren't fucking little boys or big breasted hookers or whatever. 

American democracy is young.

Biden is old.

 These facts are divisive. The Republican attack on CRT’s aims is thus a broadside against truth and history in education.

Fuck history and the donkey it rode in on. Teach kids STEM stuff while their brains are still growing. Keep 90 percent of them out of College. Apprenticeships and Vocational education is the way to go. Research Degrees should only be given in areas where there are increasing returns to such activity.

CRT urges America to reform practices in virtually all of its institutions, including criminal-justice, education, housing, banking, and hiring.

So it is a 'second order' good- i.e. it clamors for more of a first order good. But such clamoring is useless or counterproductive. Why not simply pay preachers to go around saying 'Sell all you have and give to the poor'? 

 The United States has attempted this before – most notably during Reconstruction, when the federal government poured large resources into empowering a newly free southern black population.

Fuck off! Reconstruction was about military occupation of the South. But it wasn't profitable and after the recession of 1873, there was little appetite for it in the North. 

That period saw formerly enslaved black legislators elected across the South, and free public education offered to children of all races. The response to these drastic changes was moral panic, widespread racist terrorism and rapid reversal of progress.

The military occupation needed Black support and got it but the game was not worth the candle. Still, the memory of that period was enough to quash all future talk of secession. The South rose again but gave up its pretensions to greater gentility. There's an O Henry story of an old slave who wants to meet his former master's heir. The guy shares an office with his Northern cousin. Will Uncle Tom be able to recognize the blue blood of his Masters'? Who gives a fuck? O Henry has another story about a bankrupt Southern Colonel who accepts charity believing it is 'restitution' from an old ex-slave. Actually it is his daughter's boy friend (what? you can't tell me a true Southern belle wouldn't have ridden the fellow ragged) in black face. O Henry is also suitably racist about the Jews and the Irish.

Decades later, in the 1960s, the civil-rights movement fought for major legal changes to end the era of legal segregation. 

Which the State Department was pushing for. The odd thing was this Republican platform was pushed through by a Texan Democrat. But this meant Nixon had a 'Southern Strategy'.  Rockefeller Republicans faded from prominence. 

During this fight, its leaders were denounced as anti-American communist sympathisers. 

Unless they were Jews in which case cruder language was used.

It should come as no surprise now that the same Republican legislators who want to ban CRT are also advancing voter-suppression laws that target black communities.

Who, they believe have been taught to hate white peeps. Anyway, Trump banned the thing for Federal job training while Biden brought it back so it looks as though Democrats have handed this to their rivals on a plate with plenty of trimmings.

Dramatic structural change is hard, and involves missteps. 

Sadly such 'missteps' hurt those at the bottom disproportionately. 

“Diversity” workshops that involve little more than people sharing feelings, or being told their race is the single most important and determinative thing about them, are no doubt examples. 

Stanley is against workshops. Cool. But if CRT can't be workshopped, what good is it? Why not simply say- dudes, teachers lied to you. America is a great country coz great racists came here and fucked over all lesser racists. But fucking over lesser racists involves being better at STEM subjects. So stop looking down on nerdy kids who do well in Math or guys with small hands who studied Accountancy and Finance at Wharton while the cool kids were smoking dope at Berkeley. Imitate Gates and Trump. Get rich. Make America Great Again.

But critics vastly inflate the importance of these missteps, to make such calls, and CRT more broadly, seem outlandish. When such complaints dominate the discussion, they fuel moral panic that is cynically used to halt and reverse progress towards equality.

CRT is a complaint. It is good to stockpile grievances which you can bring up at a later date as needs be. It is bad to cause a nuisance save as a means of asserting countervailing power. What smart African-Americans did was not invent a grievance but find ways of improving mechanism design- through things like consent decrees- in a manner which helps everybody but African-Americans most. Obama warned about toxic wokeness. Stanley didn't get that Obama meant nutters like him.