Posted on 06/03/2021 7:36:08 AM PDT by Kaslin
The arguments made by conservatives skeptical of critical race theory need to be addressed and met on their actual merits.
The Washington Post’s Christine Emba claims conservative opposition to critical race theory has less to do with intellectual concerns and more to do with emotivism and fear. She accuses conservatives of “disguising” their “discomfort with racial reconsideration as an intellectual critique,” asserting conservative skepticism of critical race theory reflects a “psychological defense, not a rational one.” The irony, however, is that Emba’s argument relies on a textbook logical fallacy.
That fallacy is the ad hominem, and more specifically “bulverism,” a term coined by C.S. Lewis. “The modern method is to assume without discussion that he is wrong and then distract his attention from this (the only real issue) by busily explaining how he became so silly,” explains Lewis. To put it another way, it’s a speculative examination of the psychological condition of one’s intellectual sparring partner, rather than a rational consideration of his or her actual position.
This is precisely what we see in Emba’s and many other critiques of those skeptical of critical race theory. Emba writes:
On their face, these [conservative] arguments might sound considered. Concerned. Academic, even. There is plausible deniability — they aren’t about anyone’s personal discomfort with the changes racial reconciliation would take, they’re about preserving the best of the United States and protecting the children from bad ideas. But these are straw man arguments, the use of which highlights the discomfort underlying critics’ obsession with CRT in the first place: their fear of criticism itself, and an anxiety about what actually addressing racial inequality might look like.
According to Emba, conservatives who distrust critical race theory — which argues that racism is systemically embedded in American law and public policy and still shapes outcomes for black Americans and other people of color — not because they have legitimate, logical concerns with this Marxist-informed school of thought, but because they simply don’t like it. Thus she continues: “Objections to CRT are an emotional defense against unwanted change, not an intellectual disagreement.”
Emba’s critique is clearly bulveristic. Apart from a brief assertion that conservatives have misinterpreted and misrepresented it, Emba doesn’t substantively engage with conservative criticisms of critical race theory. Instead, she spends most of her op-ed expanding on its title: “Why conservatives really fear critical race theory.” Hers is an almost exclusively psychological explanation of a so-called conservative error, rather than a logical articulation and attempted refutation of it.
In identifying Emba’s fallacious reasoning, I certainly don’t want to elide the fact that conservatives every day do the same thing regarding leftist arguments. Conservatives constantly impugn the motivations of their left-wing interlocutors, some of which are likely true, and some of which are unfair and inaccurate. Yet that many on both sides of the political aisle are guilty of bulverism does not clear Emba and other liberal pundits. An error is still an error.
Moreover, even Emba’s other argument — that conservatives misinterpret and misrepresent critical race theory — fails. She accuses critical race theory’s critics of “expan[ing] the concept to stand in for anything that reexamines the racial history of the United States, from the New York Times’s 1619 Project to K-12 curriculums that dare to state (accurately) that the Founding Fathers enslaved people.”
That latter comment is a bit disingenuous. Emba, according to her bio, grew up in the Commonwealth of Virginia, as did I. The social studies curriculum I experienced in elementary and high school (and later taught as a history teacher in Charlottesville and Northern Virginia) explicitly discussed how George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Mason, among many others, were slave-owners whose political vision was in explicit tension with their personal lives.
But more saliently, how are the 1619 Project and new activist social studies curricula like that of the “Teaching Hard History” (created by the Southern Poverty Law Center) not a practical application of critical race theory?
1619 Project creator Nikole Hannah-Jones, as well as the project’s many contributors, constantly argue that America’s founding was tainted by racism and that our political and social institutions were, and to many degrees remain, racist, resulting in many racist outcomes. The SPLC’s curriculum declares: “Students lack a basic knowledge of the important role it [slavery] played in shaping the United States and the impact it continues to have on race relations in America.” This all certainly sounds like the thesis of critical race theory.
Whether or not critical race theory is, as former Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought claims, an insidious form of “un-American propaganda,” is of course a much broader question. Yet regardless of the answer, it’s at least reasonable to project that inserting the premises and doctrines of critical race theory into public school curricula and governmental policies will have significant, far-reaching effects on the American people and our many diverse institutions.
That’s certainly the intention of Hannah-Jones, who has explicitly associated the 1619 Project with calls for reparations. No surprise, Emba perceives conservative skepticism of reparations as also, ultimately, grounded in fears of admitting culpability in America’s systemic racism.
I cannot speak for fellow conservatives like Christopher F. Rufo at the Manhattan Institute, who have offered pointed critiques of critical race theory. Perhaps he, and others, are motivated, at least in part, by fear. But to accuse him, or anyone else, of such things, is to argue in bad faith.
Conservatives have offered many sophisticated objections to critical race theory: that in its reductionist focus on race it downplays or ignores other ways to understand American society and its institutions; that it offers an ideologically biased, incomplete, and even erroneous understanding of our history; that it engenders cynicism, civic apathy, and what Lewis calls “chronological snobbery” (believing the present generation to be superior to those previous) among our nation’s youth.
Whatever the psychological motivations of conservatives, to argue in good faith is to evaluate the above critiques, and others, of critical race theory. To do otherwise is to fail one of the most fundamental tasks of good citizenship as understood and articulated by the Framers: practicing intellectually rigorous and morally virtuous civil discourse.
As Jefferson observed: “The whole art of government consists in the art of being honest.” If critical race theory advocates cannot at least do this right, it confirms their opponents’ suspicions that theirs is an intrinsically un-American experiment.
The real challenge will be keeping “conservatives” from accepting the Left’s premise ... Again.
Why do we give a crap what the left says about this? We just need to refuse to comply with it.
Their ‘logic’ is so convoluted it doesn’t matter what argument is used. Their sole purpose is to destroy and control.
F that!
I love it when Lefties refer to Critical Race Theory as having been subject to “peer review”.
Critical race theory and its equally evil and corrosive cousin, critical legal theory are steeped in Marxism.
There was a time in America when the rants of lunatics were simply ignored. Sadly over the last sixty years a significant percentage of the population has devolved into depravity. They embrace habitual drug use over sobriety, neopaganism with earth and celebrity worship, homosexuality with all its vile permutations, chronic dependence, and hedonism. The lunatics now have quite a constituency.
“It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”
It has nothing to do with fear. It has to do with having dollars taken out of my pocket to pay for something I had nothing to do with. When you talk reparations you have completely lost me. No one who was a slave prior to the Civil War is alive, therefore, no one deserves reparations for being a slave. Moreover, no one who enslaved people prior to the Civil War is alive. Ergo, no one who was a pre-Civil War slaver is available to pay reparations. Getting the government to pay is absurd. The government’s money comes from the People, therefore demands that the government pay reparations is idiocy, since you would be penalizing people who had nothing to do with the decision to enslave.
Here it is from a different direction. I have 7 ancestors who were abolitionists and died during the Civil War in an effort to free the slaves, since this is what the war was about to these people. I want reparations\rewards for their efforts to free the slaves. Pay me. I figure in modern terms, the reward for the sacrifice of their lives in this effort is worth about 4 million dollars in lifetime employment earnings for each of those 7 ancestors. These descendants of slaves owe me 28 million dollars.
“The Washington Post’s Christine Emba claims conservative opposition to critical race theory has less to do with intellectual concerns and more to do with emotivism and fear.”
This is just another example of blowing a horn no matter where he music comes from. A social construct, which is what she is referring to, is something that exists not in objective reality, but as a result of human interaction. And the damning part of racial inequality was originally a concept of the south which housed most of the democrats in the country. So, who created the concept? A vast majority of the use of the slaves was in the south, so the trail is obvious.
So why are the democrat journalists trying to blame the republicans? Smoke and mirrors...and lies to cover their keysters.
WY69
You need to care about this because they are going to use it to send you to a concentration camp.
Maybe you misunderstood what I said
What could possibly be more reductionist than the entire Democratic Party platform. Remember Orange Man Bad? It takes just one exception to prove the reductionist CRT wrong.
Because "the Left" currently comprises roughly 48% (and rising) of our voting population.
Moreover, they have also seized control of at least one of our governments three branches (the Executive); have at least parity or better than parity in another (the Legislative); have an overwhelming control of mass media (television and print); are the de facto arbiters of online Free Speech (Google, Facebook, etc.); dominate tertiary education (the universities) and primary and secondary education; and have a powerful ally in many giant corporations ("Woke" American Airlines, Gillette, etc.).
But suit yourself! Go on! Keep "refusing to comply" - right up to the point where they hustle you and yours on to the cattle car.
Regards,
Maybe Fai Mao and I both misunderstood what you said.
Would you care to elaborate on / re-state your standpoint more clearly?
Regards,
That is really well done and painfully true.
https://schnitzelrepublic.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2021-06-02T12:50:00-04:00&max-results=8
So you remember that one billion Euro settlement (for 30 years) that Germany agreed to last week.....for having killed around 75,000 natives out of Namibia around 120 years ago. The payment to go to the Namibian government? The one that the two tribes affected by the killing.....which only number around 12-percent of the population of the country today?
Well....the two tribes are dissatisfied and said over the weekend that the mess is not finished.
The two tribes want 477 billion Euro, over forty years....ONLY for their tribes.
Odds of Germany agreeing to this? Virtually zero.
Odds of a civil war brewing out of this mess? I'd say that we just went from a one-percent chance, to a 30-percent chance.
Blame on the civil war and who started the mess? Well....yeah, it kinda leads back to Germany.
THIS is where the whole *reparations* game will end up.
I once had a disagreement with my (then) wife over a potential purchase. It was, I thought, a trivial matter that she persisted at until it became truly hostile.
The next day she came home from work and declared, “I talked to my friends at work and five out of six agreed that you were wrong”.
My response was, “Since your friends seem so interested in involving themselves in matters that are none of their business perhaps they should pay for your purchase”. Her notion of cobbling up a hackneyed “consensus” just had to be superior to logical considerations.
I learned lessons in both logical fallacies and personal betrayal that day.
Leftist projection - it’s not that you have a well thought out argument based upon facts and logic, it’s how you feel.
To understand “Critical Race Theory”, first understand the “...legitimate, logical concerns with this Marxist-informed school of thought”.
Second, it is useful to understand “Critical Race Theory” without the word “Race”...(i.e. “Critical Theory”). “Critical Theory” means the Western-Marxist philosophy of the Frankfurt School, developed in Germany in the 1930s. (See WikiPedia linked below for a primer).
Third, understand Marxists desire to destroy capitalistic societies globally. How would the current “CRT” differ in its aims if it was, instead, “Critical Monetary Theory”, “Critical Sexuality Theory”, or some other “Critical _____ Theory”?
IMHO...CRT = Poopy and CRT adherents are Poopy-Heads
😜
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