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Originally Posted by Luckbox Inc
I'm going to guess that saying "socially significant" was a poor choice of words. If racial categories are anything, then they are socially significant. But racial categories-- i.e., how a society divides up its "races" aren't the same as "racial identity"-- which is going to be an individual psychological phenomenon that is only correlated with societal definitions of race. And it's that individual identity that itshot is saying is harmful-- although society dividing people up based on race can be harmful too of course.
I sort of alluded to this in my initial response to you as well, but part of the problem I have with this response to CRT is that it is insufficiently attentive to the distinction between normative and descriptive claims (a problem I also have with CRT).
Our desire for race to not be socially significant does not mean that it in fact is not significant. Similarly, our hope that America can someday overcome racism does not mean that it can do so.
Accepting as a matter of faith that race shouldn't be significant and that racism can be overcome is a shaky foundation. Maybe it can, but it seems pretty reasonable to me for people who will suffer the worst effects of these hopes failing to reject that faith.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Luckbox Inc
Also probably fair to assume that slavery and Jim Crow would be the placing of importance on racial identity that Itshot would object to.
Obviously it is a good thing that society no longer places the kind of significance on race that it did during slavery and Jim Crow. But that doesn't mean that race no longer has any social significance. Part of the hope of the Civil Rights era was that non-discrimination and colorblind laws would lead to black people having similar outcomes as the rest of society, which didn't really happen.
This led to the disillusionment with liberalism and the legalist attempt to achieve racial equality that manifests in CRT. But I'm skeptical that CRT as an academic discipline was a significant cause of the cultural wokeism that has people like Lindsay and McWhorter upset. Instead, I view that more as a result of the
collapse of racial liberalism that happened on both the left and the right during the Obama presidency, both because he represented an unsatisfying apotheosis of that vision of racial equality and because of a general loss of ideological control by elites.