What is the Critical Race Theory?

[Dill]

(05-28-2021, 11:35 AM)Goalpost Wrote: This is kind of a controversial statement to me so I'll respond to this.  Many of the cities today have heritages that vary.  Cincinnati, for instance, is greatly German.  A lot of heritages bonded with their 'own', when they immigrated.  Along the way, these heritages even slurred each other.  You're a krout, you're a spic, you're a wop, some of the common slurs.  This doesn't suggest they were 'bonding' in whiteness together and learning a group white supremacy against black people.  There was slurring amid themselves.  These slurs were racism of white to white. It falls into a supremacy category but not necessarily a learned to be with way exclusively against black people only.  While I agree there was still racism against black people, I just wanted to point out that racism was active on many levels back then.  At least these terms suggest they were.

Thanks for responding. I'm not clear what is controversial about my points here, though. 

I'll agree that Germans bonding with Germans in Cincinnati were not bonding in "whiteness" and thereby learning white supremacy just on that score, although if they were using terms like "wops" and "spics" to refer to other ethnic groups, it is hard to separate that from "racial science" of the late 19th and early 20th century. And that WAS all about white supremacy, which they had already learned.

My point was rather different. My post refers to "positioning," not bonding. If you are a manufacturer in Cincinnati during the 30s and 40s, your hiring preferences are white if the choice is between white and black. If you need to fire some one, the reverse. So "krauts" may choose not to sit with "wops" in the company cantina, but everyone, management and workers alike, knows who is white and who is not. If you are a worker looking for a job, you learn these basics quickly.  That you are white, or not, matters first, not whether you are white German or white Italian or white Irish. That is how white supremacy presented itself in the workplace at that time, and very consistently in the assignment of tasks and opportunities for training. 

Many white Anglos did indeed think Greeks were racially inferior, but there is no evidence it affected hiring/firing practice across the labor force by the 1930s. And if Romanians and Lithuanians Anglicized their names, would any employer be the wiser? 

If you were a high school teacher in the Northeast or Midwest pre-WW2, one of your jobs was to sort students into tracks which made the most sense for their future jobs. There was some difference between students of Northern European descent, and those from Southern/Eastern Europe, with some of the former having the greater likelihood of going to college. But it wasn't clear to many educators that Black students needed much beyond the 6th grade or junior high. You wouldn't want to waste resources like books and class space on students not expected to succeed. Even if you had an exceptionally bright Black student, you'd be doing him a disservice (so they reasoned) if you elevated his hopes for a kind of work he would never have. If you were a teacher applying for a teaching job, you'd understand that your race mattered much more than whether your ancestry was French or Hungarian. 

Had you had immigrated to the U.S. in 1936 and joined the U.S. military during this period, you'd have quickly found that it didn't matter much if you were Polish or Serbian. But it did matter that you were white. If you were not, you were going to be peeling potatoes and mopping floors your entire military career.  You were not going to be an officer leading White soldiers. 

Even if the North did not have official segregation, you might find your krauts and wops easily seated at restaurants which did not seat Blacks.
We can agree these are the facts, right? And we can agree that I am referring to basic policies and social practices which elevated every white person, "kraut" or "wop," over every black person in virtually all institutions? EVERY white person had an advantage that NO Black did, even if SOME Whites were poor and had bad jobs etc.

Also, all interethnic animosity/conflict is not "racism." if Swedes hate Norwegians, that is not "racism of white to white," as it has nothing to do with "race." These interethnic  conflicts between played only the most minor role in US racial politics. Off hand, I cannot think of any example of state or federal policy barring Swedes from housing or jobs, whereas that's rather easy to do when it comes to race. Have you ever heard Swedes characterized as "last hired, first fired"? 

Going back a couple of generations, when waves of immigrants from southern and Eastern Europe came to the US after the Civil War, there was considerable hostility towards them on the part of the dominant Anglos. The newcomers competed with Blacks for the lowest jobs, and quickly learned to distinguish themselves from Blacks by not living where they lived and not associating with them. They learned to use their "whiteness" to compete in the job market. Some even anglicized their names. That's what I mean by "learning" white supremacy. The children and grandchildren of those "white" immigrants knew the lay of the land--the racial terrain--even better than their parents. 

Nota Bene: The point of the above is to suggest how white supremacy is learned, not at a workshop or in some credal form transmitted in schools or churches or civic organizations, but rather in ordinary social practices, starting young, when white parents taught their pre-school children not to play with black children. Because of its omnipresence and wide diffusion, white supremacy has rarely been "seen" in any other form but its most manifest, like a Klan rally. One goal of CRT is to make it visible in other venues, where it remains effective but unnoticed, like a part of nature.