What is the Critical Race Theory?

[Dill]

(05-19-2021, 11:17 AM)Wes Mantooth Wrote: 1.) Some white people owned slaves.

This is very important.  I see so many people get this wrong (see the first paragraph and me talking about college students/grads). I often hear "Your ancestors..." (black perspectice) or "Our ancestors..." (white perspective)  Saying white people owned slaves is akin to saying Asians bombed Pearl Harbor.  While factually true, not at all detailed and lacking context.

Are students aware when discussing slavery that only a small percentage of white people owned slaves, that some white people fought to free the slaves, and the overwhelming majority of white people immigrated here afterwards?  Do they understand the differences in Italian immigrants, Irish, German, Jewish, Russian, ect?

Are students made aware that white people have been enslaved?  Are they aware that Africans owned slaves?  Are they aware that the African Slave Trade made it's way to a number of different places and America was only a small portion of a much larger scale?

(05-19-2021, 05:20 PM)Wes Mantooth Wrote: I don't think these facts can or should be glossed over.  There's nothing accurate or constructive about assuming a white person's ancestors enslaved anyone simple because of their skin tone. 

2.) Not at all trying to detract from anything.  I just want to make sure people understand the entire picture, and don't engage in bad faith arguments.  i.e. If you're white you're ancestors owned slaves, it ca be assumed all white people have benefited equally or evenly from their privilege, all white people are colonizers, etc.

I've been thinking more about the centrality of slave OWNING in some of your questions and comments about CRT, Wes.  

They've got me wondering

1) have you somehow gotten the impression that teaching CRT is largely about reminding/teaching Americans that white people owned slaves in the US? 

2) Have you encountered personally or seen on tv or read about exchanges in which some (Black) people referred so collectively to the ancestors of white people? Or have you seen reporting claiming that is what CRT is about? 

I ask because I don't see anything "critical" or "theoretical" in such back and forth exchanges. I don't see any CRT-informed pedagogy sanctioning such.

A lot of regular-old garden-variety American history already taught about slavery before the advent of CRT. Even school kids. And without upsetting many people. So one must ask "what's new?" about this CRT perspective.

If "slavery" were the primary focus/issue, then "the whole" would certainly mean teaching the history of slavery from ancient to modern times, a practice found on every continent, in every civilization.  But from a CRT perspective, the focus is on how racial distinction is deployed to create and enforce power differentials. Not all slavery, everywhere, has been race-based. And whites are not situated atop every race-based power differential. (E.g. one thinks of Japanese imperialism up to 1945, and the Koreas today.) And all such power differentials don't simply present as "slavery."

CRT focuses on the racial inflection of law and institutions, and the prevailing but unspoken norms that guide legislation and legal interpretation. So while only a few Whites may have owned slaves in the ante-bellum U.S., CRT interest goes beyond numbers to the legal infrastructure maintained by people who were largely not slave owners (think of the Dredd Scott ruling, which defined escaped slaves as "property" and bound ALL states to return them). And to the economic infrastructure as well--the Northern factories that purchased Southern cotton, the fact that the center of slave-trade shipping (before it was banned) was a Northern state: Rhode Island. It examines the cost of all this today for White as well as Black people.

It examines how all those White immigrants to the U.S. after the Civil War learned to position themselves with the rest of the White majority in a political and economic system which advantaged White people on a number of levels, federal subsidy being not the least of these. If they didn't know about white supremacy before, they learned it when they got here. 

It examines how European powers imposed racial hierarchies everywhere in their subjugation of all the world's continents, during the 19th century, and how in the 20th, the U.S. went to war, with a segregated military, against world powers based upon ideologies of racial supremacy. It examines how, after that great war, efforts to use government to benefit all Americans were bent away from racial minorities, and eventually from whites too, as "big government" enforcement of civil rights threatened racial hierarchy.

So CRT is really not about pointing to those white kids in the back of the classroom and letting everyone know "what their ancestors did to your ancestors." If understanding how race still operates through institutions as a discriminator is the point, then just reminding people only some whites actually owned slaves, or that some arrived on boats after the war and so couldn't have owned any, won't help us understand how, today, achievement/wealth gaps persist and millions of Americans want to wall out brown immigrants and some states are still much less economically developed than others. It won't help us understand how anxiety about race can take political form without mentioning "race."