The Proximate Ideological Origins of Critical Race Theory | James Lindsay

[Applause] good morning everybody you don't have to do the thing don't don't say it back i got asked like 400 times i think since last night you know you're talking fast you covered 13 points what in the world where are the notes can we get these i just want to let everybody know a couple of things about this first of all the video that we're making will be available as soon as we can get it you know cut together so everything that i've said will be available where you can see it for free after this so don't stress if you're not keeping up with your note-taking secondly i thought i announced this last night but i don't remember last night basically so we were here i think uh we i i actually am deriving this when i when i put this idea to do this together i started trying to think about what i wanted to say and how i wanted to organize material and i was like i should just turn this into a book so some of you saw if you follow me on twitter or other social media that i announced a couple of weeks ago i'm writing a new book on critical race theory and i'm going to get that out as quickly as possible like literally i'm just going to self-publish it through new discourses to get it out immediately so hopefully that'll be as early as next month uh or whatever and all of this in far greater depth and uh explanation will be available in that so if you can't keep up with your note-taking if i talk too fast for you you breathe that's a joke for somebody no it'll be okay so today last night we covered what is critical race theory i think we arrived at a definition of critical race here i don't want to spend 90 minutes per talk today i actually feel a little bit shocked at myself that i talked 490 something minutes last night but um we talked about what critical race three is we arrived at a definition you know i've characterized it as a neo-marxist conspiracy theory that forms a belief system predicated on the belief that systemic racism created by white people for their own benefit is the fundamental organizing principle of society and of course we could add that that's bad and has to be overthrown by revolution that's the neo-marxist part um so i think i made a pretty convincing case that that's a fitting definition and i did so not by arguing my case but just by reading theirs and so it's immediately derivable from the things they write about themselves if you have the patience to read six pages to understand something they could have been said in two or one or a paragraph and sometimes they actually confess that sometimes they literally say this is neo-marxism or whatever so today we're going to turn to the ideological roots this morning we're going to turn to the ideological roots of critical race theory like i said last night this stuff didn't come out of the ground when george floyd died this didn't just appear i saw a chart on twitter this morning from i think a pew or a gallop or something pole that said race relations in the united states people perceive them to be much worse and the big turn started in 2013. i don't know if you know what happened in 2013. donald trump did not get elected president in 2013. barack obama did not get elected president in 2013 he did start his second term but the black lives matter movement started in 2013 um and people started to perceive very rapidly that uh race relations are getting worse in the country as i tried to i mentioned briefly last night um critical race theory exists to create polarizing environments we'll talk about this this afternoon to create polarizing environments so that it can scoop up sympathizers to its cause it is intentionally divisive but intentionally divisive in a particular way so that it will radicalize certain people who it says have a critical race consciousness to its cause then raising consciousness in that regard is a marxist or neo-marxist project there's kind of a continuity through all of marxism and neo-marxism about consciousness raising to get past false consciousness or internalized dominance or internalized racism as it might get expressed in critical race theory or you know the willful ignorance of white privilege which is sometimes called white ignorance or in barbara applebaum's phrasing white ignorance or color ignorance to make it like it's very intentional that people who are benefiting from privilege will ignore it um so today the goal is or this this morning this this lecture the goal is to connect neo-marxism to or i think we connected new orleans to explain neo-marxism and what neo-marxism is but also to show you where critical race theory diverges from neo-marxism and its true old-school sense because it incorporates post-modernism now of course cynical theories is available out there most of you have it or have read it many of you have had me sign it so i know many of you have it cynical theories tells the story of the postmodern influence on all of these different identity marxist studies as we might call them identity marxism as an offshoot of cultural marxism it tells the story of critical race theory in chapter five it tells the story of how this happened in the post-modern context through chapters one and two and then picking that story up again in chapter eight and then in each of the chapters between three through seven it goes through like i said race critical race theories chapter five queer theories chapter four post colonial theories chapter three ended those backwards and then gender studies and feminism is chapter six and then disability studies and fat studies chapter seven there are a handful of other studies but the book's already 80 000 words but that book is about telling the story of how post-modernism is relevant to critical race theory and the other uh so-called cynical theories of um these uh identity marxist programs i want to make the case very clearly in that book what we argue is that in in kind of helen's words helen plucker was my co-author in her words the postmodern ideas were simplified and packaged up by activists who were figured out ways to put them into use if you are a fan and there are fans of post-modernism i'm kind of a like very lightly quasi fan in some sense you can understand post-modernism as a descriptive project i don't think that was purely descriptive i think they're pretty cynical nasty people but um as a descriptive project it taps into some very powerful things about the era that we live in especially now that social media has emerged and if you understand post-modernism as a descriptive project these so-called activists picked up those descriptions and said oh this is part of how the world works and then we can manipulate this these are weapons and those activists are left vague in cynical theories we don't talk much about i've kind of forced a footnote or two in there about who these activists are this lecture today is mostly going to be about who those activists are and they are primarily neo-marxists they are the new left that emerged out of the 1960s which emerged out of herbert marcuzza who was a neo-marxist and it's mostly his ideology that we live in today his major books and essays of the 1960s are the world that we currently inhabit post-modernism was the tool that made it possible and so the main thing that i want to convey in this lecture is that if we go back just over the last 100 years i think last night i said making fun of myself slightly the critical race theory is a tip of a 100 year long spear today we're talking about the shaft of the spear which is the neo-marxist and cultural marxist movement and post-modernism post-modernism beginning later in the 1960s neo-marxism and cultural marxism starting in the 1910s so there's your hundred years or thereabouts antonio gramsci one of the leading uh or early cultural marxist wrote most of what he wrote between 1916 and 1926 when he went to prison and then he wrote his mo his largest work in prison from then until 1937 when he died in prison then it was smuggled to moscow nobody's quite sure what happened with it from there until it emerged in the 60s and started showing up in other languages besides italian and it was translated into english in 1970 at notre dame by pete buttigieg's dad joseph buddha judge translated the prison notebooks into english at notre dame so the story today is how did post-modernism and neo-marxism fuse to create these identity studies fields and that requires us to understand a little bit about critical theory which is whether you want to call it cultural marxism or whether you want to call it neo-marxism it's fine got to unpack a little bit of both of those terms they're not quite identical i don't want to get super super deep today because this there's a book coming there are i've done i don't know 4 500 hours of podcasts about these people i've read several of marcus's works directly on the podcast so there's lots of stuff out there i just want to give you guys a taste and so just to kind of like take the lie out of it is critical race theory neo-marxist in origin well if we take out the r word in the middle and we put the two words together what do we get critical theory okay good job detective had to dig deep for that one um critical race theory if we phrased it differently is a critical theory of race it's a critical theory which is a synonym for neo-marxism or it's the tool of i should say neo-marxism is absolutely central to what's going on if you don't believe me kimberly crenshaw i mentioned this last night kimberly crenshaw herself has said repeatedly that they were critical theorists who were interested in race and they were race scholars or race uh racial justice advocates who were interested in critical theory the link is absolutely undeniable this is what's at the heart of what's going on so we have to understand both kind of cultural marxism and we have to understand neo-marxism to understand critical race theory on a deeper level we'll come back to post-modernism and then we'll talk about how they got together that's kimberly kimberly crenshaw's doing and the other black feminists in the 1980s and 90s so that's the overview that's where we're going so critical theories i'll start there rather than with cultural marxism um critical theories have a definition and i just want to lay that out this comes from the stanford encyclopedia of philosophy entry on critical theory so it's probably authoritative the definition of a critical theory is that it must it's a theory a social theory and that's probably a capital t theory that derives from marxian theory they must contain at least three components they all must be present or you don't have a critical theory component number one is it must have an idealized vision for society herbert marcuzza who i've mentioned repeatedly now and will mention many more times said that these are certain historical possibilities that have become regarded as utopian possibilities and if you don't recognize the marxism hidden in that phrase and the utopianism the the marxist utopianism in that phrase that's a direct quote from i think repressive tolerance from 1965 then if you don't see it there you don't know what's going on historical possibilities are referring to marxism to freeing ourselves from capitalism and which is of course what he was targeting so it must have an idealized vision for society it must be able to explain why this is the charitable explanation on the stanford encyclopedia of philosophy it must be able to explain how the existing society does not live up to that ideal vision or is not working to achieve it and three it must inspire social activism on behalf of achieving that perfected world so you can see that what we were talking about last night with critical race theory fits very tightly into that definition a critical theory must have a praxis attached to it that's the social activism part robin deangelo's words lifelong commitment to self-reflection self-critique and social activism that's anti-racism in her words so it's undeniable that critical theory is at the heart of what critical race theory is this is what a critical theory is critical theory emerged the neo-marxist movement emerged out of amilu in which they were looking at western civilization and saying why isn't this going marxist in fact cultural marxism which preceded it emerged out of that situation and they said well it must be that western civilization western culture has something to it which antonio gramsci called cultural hegemony that prevents it from opening itself up to radical cultural change to overthrowing the entire system it must not be just the material conditions as marx had it because they're looking at the failures of marxism uh in one way or another seeing that only in these peasant societies like russia that it's taking root that it failed in hungary that it's not happening in berlin that it's not happening in london that it's not happening in chicago or new york where marx predicted it would happen they're looking at this and looking for an explanation they say well it must be that the the bourgeoisie produces bergeron values and those values produce a culture and that culture is like a force field that prevents marxism from being able to take root people don't want to throw away a life that they think is good for radical change herbert marcus repeatedly says throughout almost all of his works of the 1960s that people are happy and they're content in their liberal democracies or liberal republics because they don't realize their true servitude they don't realize that they are actually miserable so critical theory then steps in and says everybody who accepts the existing status quo which doesn't exist in a liberal society because liberal societies are always moving anybody who accepts the existing status quo has false consciousness about how bad things really are they don't know how relevant it is that these for the neo-marxists and the cultural marxists that these powerful elites in society are the producers of a culture industry that brainwashes people into liking the stuff that they have they get up in the morning they think i'm gonna get up and i'm going to go to work and i'm going to work hard and i'm going to make money and i'm going to come home and i'm going to have a middle class house and i'm going to buy a kind of cool car that i think makes me happy and i'm going to you know have some kind of nice stuff around i'm going to eat pleasant food i'm going to have a nice solid middle class life because i'm going to go work hard and earn that and he says that this is actually the exploiting capitalist elites tricking people into thinking they have a good life against a conspiracy theory so that they'll continue to enact capitalist exploitation upon themselves and they are falsely conscious about how the world works they think they're happy they experience being happy but in fact they're miserable and they are in fact in servitude which is why you often hear people in the past decade or so saying that everybody who has like a service job or whatever or they have whatever kind of job is a wage slave so we still have slavery because it's wage slavery that's a neo-marxist idea that's a neo-marxist idea so it's very relevant to today still we live like i said in her markers world and so critical theory was devised to pick at the existing society i at one point said that it would be really poignant and i don't know that i should actually do it to bring up an american flag and make sure that i doctor it before i get here and make sure there's some loose threads and to literally deconstruct an american flag and watch it fall apart by pulling the loose threads critical theory exists to examine society for the loose thread so that it can pull on them so it can tear apart the fabric of society that's what it exists to do that's what a critical theory is that's why besides this conspiratorial nature it's why a critical theory is never the right way to go even to tear down an unjust power structure there are better ways because this is just nitpicking to tear apart everything critical theories think explicitly in terms of systemic power everything is broken down in terms of systemic power that's still for them the capitalist elite who are now a consumerist capitalist elite who are creating a culture industry and promoting their bourgeois values to keep people trapped in their existence uh those people are still in control of everything and those people are still creating class conflict across a stratification in society and it's how do you awaken people to this but they've abandoned what's come to be known as vulgar marxism at this point and they're much more interested in attacking cultural institutions so that's why it often gets conflated with or called cultural marxism so this is the context in which all of this exists the biggest kind of works with the neo-marxism you know we'll come back to marcus in a minute it really starts although the the the critical theory comes out of what's called the frankfurt school for social research which was founded i believe in 1923 at gertie university in germany in frankfurt germany rapidly by 1933 10 years later it had left and after a brief stop in geneva it matriculated to the united states which foolishly led it in with refugee status we're seeing with cuba what kind of refugees are allowed in and which ones are not uh today similar thing communist welcome anti-communist not welcome and so they came over obviously in 1933 because most of them were jewish and hitler had claimed the chancellorship of germany and the writing was definitely on the wall even by then that jews should get out while they can and so they came over [Music] but its first kind of major salvo and critical theory was written in 1937 this is a essay or book i mean these things are all like 80 pages so take them as you will they call them essays they usually publish them as short books called traditional and critical theories by max horkheimer who had assumed the directorship of the frankfurt school by that time max horkheimer is very unpleasant man the traditional critical theory divides the theoretical world into two domains one of these they call traditional theory and that's concerned with epistemic adequacy as we phrased last night that's concerned with understanding the world as it is remember marx said the point is not to understand the world but to understand it so that you might change it so then you have critical theory which is separate and it has the goal of changing the world so it's going to examine the existing society against a idealized vision for that society and motivate social activism in particular as we saw from delgado and stefan check in critical race during introduction critical race theory contains an activist element unlike most theories it's because it's a critical theory the second dimension of a critical theory is this complaining moralizing push toward an idealized society that inspires social activism and that is the wedding theory to praxis part that gives two dimensions that herbert marcus was complaining about in 1964 when he wrote one dimensional man he says that the capitalist consumer society flattens society down makes everybody one-dimensional but what he means by one-dimensional is lacking critical consciousness and the point of a critical theory picking at those threads of society is to awaken a critical consciousness to make you realize the depth of your servitude in marcus's words to make you realize the fact that you are miserable while you are happy and that second dimension is called critical theory and marcus is very clear as well that marcus is very very clear that what has to be done is awakening a sensibility that's guided by critical theory in order to change the world for what they call liberation so horkheimer writes traditional and critical theories in 1937 in the 1940s he teams up with another neo-marxist named theodore adorno who's probably most famous for his frightening psychology book called the authoritarian personality where he essentially writes a 900 page book explaining how right right-wing equals authoritarian right uh authoritarianism is a full-out author a right-wing trait it is not something that can be present on the left at all as a matter of fact because they're liberatory and people to this day one of the first times i ever spoke to sam harris online he argued with me and said left wingers cannot be authoritarian by definition he didn't know he was repeating adorno a neo-marxist so horkheimer teams up with adorno and they write this book in 1944 just before the end of the world war and then they pick up in 1947 and put out a second edition that book is called the dialectic of enlightenment and everybody's like listening to my podcast they're like hegel yes in fact quick secret the neo-marxists existed to put hegel back into marx more hegel not less they thought that marx had lost his way by the time he wrote capital too focused on material and economic concerns not focused enough on the ideas and culture and culture as a mediator of ideas put the hegel back in add in freud 2 why not what could go wrong in max weber and whatever else so they write this book the dialectic of enlightenment the thesis of the dialectic of enlightenment is that the enlightenment came out to eschew myth to get rid of mythology we're now going to be rational this critique of enlightenment rationalism the deep suspicion of enlightenment rationalism we're now going to eschew myth in the enlightened world we're going to be rational animals we're going to be homo economicus or whatever it is now we're going to be rationally operating in our own self-interest and so on and they say well this has a dialectic to it there are contradictions contained within that and that dialectic is going to work itself out so that the reason itself becomes unreasoned so that the rejection of myth itself becomes mythology and you can kind of see how this presage is the postmodern movement for those of you who are familiar with it who believe that you know knowledge is a construct of power and so on so the dialectical enlightenment has the thesis that western liberal societies by the very nature of the progression of the dialectic almost like a force that's driving history outside of what anybody wants it to do or not is to turn reason into unreason so the enlightenment itself was a mistake we're going to now question enlightenment rationalism we're going to question everything built upon it and uh it's a pretty intense missive it's difficult to read it's very deeply invested in mythological analogy um but this is the it's considered the full clearest statement of what critical theory actually is it's 1944-47 for the first and second editions um it's absolutely and full-throated assault on western liberal democratic republics which they hate the system that it now thinks in has become irrational and has to be torn down so these fellows come up with this stuff and then herbert marcuzza takes over directorship of the frankfurt school and by in 1955 he writes aerosol civilization this is about putting freud into marx you can read it yourself he's constantly talking about how the capitalist society takes the libido and suppresses it and forces you to sublimate it into productive work so all of the fun that you want to have all of the interests that you have all the sex you want to have all of that gets bottled up and turned into productive work instead and so we could just get rid of the capitalist engine and we could free up that libido and live liberated lives so the whole sexual liberation movement has some pretty profound roots connected to erosion civilization this was another project that was very um prominent in the in the neo-marxist tradition this actually dips back to the culture marxist george lucas who in the 1910s was arguing the same thing and tried to use it to destroy hungary and almost succeeded sexual liberation was the key tool so when you see all of the you know very adult themed stripper story hour or whatever transcript or story hour at the schools and let's teach like kids that are seven years old about masturbation and whatever else you can see the history is repeating itself that's a cultural marxist tool queer theory is that but we're talking about critical race theory so we won't linger so marcus picks all this up with aerosol civilization by the 1960s he's fully radicalized and then he writes in 1964 one-dimensional man i've already given you the basic premise of that man has become one-dimensional because he lives in a consumerist society he believes that traditional theory and science and reason and philosophy can solve the problems of the world he's they're so concerned with understanding that they're not reaching to higher levels of reason higher levels of rationality and if they adopted critical theory as a second dimension of theory theoretical thought if in other words they became neo-marxists then because they're two-dimensional they have more to say more to understand a second site almost and you can see how that would give you a certain advantage if you've seen the as a former mathematician if you've seen flatland or if you know the story behind flatland which was a book before it was a film you would understand you have these two-dimensional creatures and one figures out how to get into the third dimension and can do all these magical things well if you have more dimensionality you have more uh freedom of movement you have more parameters in which you can operate so this gives them a certain advantage when people don't realize that it's happening so one-dimensional man mentions also that he wants to cobble together this is what i talked about last night a functional movement made out of the feminists the disgruntled sexual minorities the disgruntled racial minorities the outsiders of society who would be kind of the new left radical activists like the weather and underground that arose in the wake and did the violence of the late 60s and early 70s is just one example of such a group before going underground because people don't like violence and people got arrested and the next thing you know they're all k-12 activists how about that every one of them were like what how can we keep doing this without going to jail i know let's get into the schools but it's not in schools don't worry of course it's not in schools cnn said so marcus in 1965 though writes an essay that is absolutely crucial to understanding the world that we live in that's repressive tolerance people who follow me will have listened to my four-part podcast where i read through repressive tolerance in full and tried to explain it on the new discourses podcast if you haven't done that you should check that out it's a horrifying essay we live in the logic of repressive tolerance the thesis of repressive tolerance this is you know we're talking what i would call the second generation of critical theory the first generation being this very theoretical thing from horkheimer the second generation being markusa's very activist very driven um mentality this the thesis statement of that is that movements from the left must be tolerated extended tolerance even when they are violent movements from the right must not be extended tolerance even to the point of censoring and as he says pre-censoring them so that the thought that might preserve the status quo cannot even enter the mind he even admittedly says this is censorship even pre-censorship to be sure but and then he qualifies it with something like the the existing media and social situation already sensor left-wing thought so it's fine they get to retaliate so this is we must tolerate everything from the left including violence we must not tolerate anything from the right if you can't connect that to the last year of your life i don't know how to help you we had literal riots we suspended a pandemic for riots looting in arson we had the now vice president of the united states publish and promote a bail them out of jail fund we had corrupt district attorneys around the country in our cities refusing to prosecute radical uprisings from the left meanwhile hunter biden's laptop story which was true was completely stricken from social media you don't want them to even be able to form the thought parlor was nuked from orbit because right-wing people happened to be there apparently what happened in january sixth which mostly seemed to involve people walking around and parading indoors inside the capitol after being led in although there was obviously some rioting and violence outside was the worst thing that's happened since the civil war or apparently since like a meteor struck and killed the dinosaurs or something whatever the word of the day happens to be um so you get this impression that there's a little bit of a tilted playing field of course what they're saying is that they're leveling the playing field because they believe themselves the permanent excluded underdog this is core to their theory they believe that left-wing radical thought is viciously suppressed by a society that doesn't want it because we don't and therefore the playing field is not level it's not that they're wrong it's that they're being uh suppressed so we have to level the playing field by suppressing all right wing everything to the point where you're not even allowed to hear the story i got a i got struck down on facebook for sharing um a 20-second clip of anthony fauci one year earlier saying don't wear masks the only commentary i added to that was anthony fauci one year ago but i was spreading misinformation even though i made a factual statement about that clip from like 60 minutes or whatever it was um you get the impression that certain things are being repressed in the name of tolerance whereas other things are being permitted in the name of tolerance and justice we live in repressive tolerance and it's a terrifyingly totalitarian and frightening essay you should really go through the whole podcast 1969 marcus has managed to become crazier i don't know if he discovered lsd or something i mean marcusa worked originally if you don't know this for the oss which preceded cia [Music] when he came over from germany and was given asylum he was put in charge of or put on the on the inside of the organization that was going to become the cia in case you wonder what's going on with that organization where did that come from so by 1969 he's crazier he writes his essay an essay on liberation liberation is the new name for communism we're not doing vulgar marxism anymore communism didn't work khrushchev had spoken khrushchev had told about what stalin had done khrushchev being now at that time in the 50s in charge of russia or the soviet union there was no denying this there was no you know oh this is communist propaganda no he had come out and confessed to stalin's crimes um and there's no denying it the failure in the soviet union of communism the failure in the eastern bloc the failure through other parts of eastern europe were undeniable so marcus in assan liberation begins by praising the revolution in china it's going well that's what he says 1969 is in the middle of the cultural revolution which was 66-76 tens of millions of people were dying under mao's cultural revolution children were being indoctrinated in their schools to attack their teachers and parents and grandparents it was going well is what marcus says right from the beginning the revolution there is going well the revolution in vietnam is going well the revolution in cuba would be going well except that it has too much soviet influence and something went wrong there but we should look to people like castro and shea anyway because they have the right idea liberation movements are happening all around the world and we're gonna there's a sexual liberation movement on there's a black liberation movement on that it started in the 50s and marcus is now taking all this liberation energy and he's trying to co-opt it within the neo-marxist program of course what was the goal of marx was to liberate from capitalism so liberation has always been a communist plan liberation sounds good it isn't it's something it's liberation from the system liberation from capitalism liberation from being happy and so marcus writes this insane essay the first section of which or chapter of which again is one of those things is it a book is that an essay is titled a biological foundation for socialism as a question and his argument is that like this has never been tried before that we must change human nature to make it acceptable to liberation to socialism in fact he defines liberation in that essay as socialism without the bureaucracies because it'll work this time socialism without the bureaucracies and to get there we have to change man by introjecting a new morality into him by creating a new moral paradigm in which he has to live until at the level of his biological needs he needs liberation and socialism from the existing oppressive system in other words we're going to awaken a critical consciousness in him until he can't stand living in the society that he's living in to the point where it's at his level of needs he can't function in other words and i think this is a as good a confession as you can find critical theory exists to induce psychopathologies which are by definition psychological states that make you incapable of dealing with reality as it is to the point where they impact your ability to live your daily life marcus says we have to do this when he says biological he even has a footnote and says by biological i don't mean really biological i don't mean eugenics maybe he doesn't maybe he doesn't i don't know they're tricky with their language but in that first section he says that we have to create a biological foundation for socialism we have to change human nature in order to open up the west for socialism in the second section he writes the title of what is called the new sensibility this is where i mentioned last night when crenshaw puts out the intersectionality as a sensibility and i put these two pieces together something clicked and i realized oh thinking in terms of all of these intersecting power dynamics is the new sensibility thinking in terms of position is social position against the neo-marxist descriptions of various identity-based power dynamics is the new sensibility that marcus was calling for and in that he says that we need a new sensibility the old sensibility and the reason that the revolutions in the soviet union for example ended up failing is that the old sensibility came with people still thought in the old paradigms of oppression and dominance therefore once freed up they became oppressors paolo ferrari is writing literally almost the same thing in brazil in his pedagogy of the oppressed at this time literally almost the same thing that you have to have this new kind of sensibility coming through and his new sensibility he says is going to give way to a new rationality and a new rationality will give way to a new reality and by that he means a liberated socialism the essay continues to call for solidarity solidarity across all axes of oppression in that section he's calling out and saying the energy exists in these various just like in one dimensional man these various um oppressed groups especially he mentioned he has a whole couple of paragraphs dedicated to the so-called ghetto populations to stoke up what was rising within the black liberation black power and black nationalist movements to turn those into energy for the new left and so out of marcusa we have kind of three things to mention and then we'll jump track for a minute out of marcuzzo we have kind of three things to mention we have the emergence of the new left which he's considered kind of the father of the new left is the kind of the radical uh anti-war very frankly neo-marxist left that had abandoned old marxism vulgar marxism and taken a new track they characterized themselves by their vocal opposition to the vietnam war primarily and that was supposed to be what made them new but it was in fact that they had abandoned vulgar marxism for neo-marxism and so the left is now characterized not by being materialist marxists but by being culturally marxist secondly we have the frankfurt school continuing with jurgen habermas taking over and jurgen habermas is irrelevant there's some interesting stuff he softened critical theory as he went by the 80s he's criticizing the stuff that was happening in the 60s but nobody cares he's just a philosopher because herbert marcuzza had brought in people from those radicalized activist groups and incorporated them into his vision in particular as doctoral student angela davis who is still alive and still very much relevant to the prison and police abolition movements at the heart of what's happened over the last year she endorsed joe biden for president by the way on russia today of all things she also in 1977 wrote a letter of support to jim jones in his last year because little do people realize jim jones wasn't a crazy lunatic christian he was a marxist and his movement was fundamentally marxist and so she wrote sorry she didn't write a letter it was actually on the radio she was on the radio and it's been transcribed she radioed in a statement of support for jim jones we're with you where behind you your movement and ours are the same blah blah so don't drink the kool-aid um but that spawns the black feminists is ultimately what the angela davis direction spawns angela davis of course got involved in this prison and police stuff but she also got involved in k-12 education after um getting arrested for seeming to kidnap a i think federal judge with a shotgun or something like that because these are good people as you can tell big fan of cuba big fan of what's going on in china refused to condemn the you know she's for liberation refused to condemn the imprisonment of dissidents and communist regimes etc so liberation means something pretty polarized pretty repressive tolerance style so three things happen at once and you have the frankfurt school falling into philosophical irrelevance under jurgen habermas not to say his philosophy is not interesting i guess it is but it's not relevant to the world today and what's happening because the track went separately into black liberationism and black feminism and a raft of other new left movements and this emergence of the new left which was activist and scholarly infiltrating the university was part of the deal now i'm going to jump backwards a hot minute and then we'll talk about postmodernism this is where cultural marxism becomes relevant because antonio gramsci had his plan that he talked about in the prison notebooks it's not clear what influence he had on certain other characters like mao zedong but the statement that is pretty solid throughout literature on the scholarly literature on this is that mao did what gramsci thought mao maybe would have had access to gramsci graham she was popular in the 40s and early 50s in china but then was banned and didn't re-emerge until the 80s so it's not clear what what mao had read and what mao had not moscow had it by 37 so it's possible um not known but what mao did in his cultural revolution is what people like herbert marcuza and rudy deutschke looked at and saw as something that works this cultural revolution that they then renamed the long march to the institutions and whether or not mao knew what gramsci wrote it's basically the same kind of thing what gram she had said was that we have this cultural hegemony and cultural hegemony can only it's like a force field of values norms expectations behaviors what iran kennedy calls policies it's the system in every bit of its manifestations everything that happens and why it happens and how and this thing is like keeping out communism because it's like a force field okay so he says the only way to beat that is to get inside the key cultural institutions that generate this cultural hegemony create a counter hegemony from within and break them apart this is cultural marxism which he derived from his working very early on in the in the 1910s with george lukach and with max horkheimer and some of the other people who went on to found the frankfurt school and so cultural hegemony he said has to be beaten by infiltrating the major culture institutions and he named five those are religion family education media and law with a special emphasis put on education critical race theory arose out of law that's how it got into law education very rapidly critical race theory got into education paolo ferreira was a gramscian that's not in doubt he was putting it into education that was picked up by people like henry giroux who is a name you probably haven't heard but he's probably one of the most influential people on our society in 1980 he published in 1981 thereabouts he published his first major book what had happened was he had read the pedagogy of the oppressed and then later he had actually met paulo ferrari he seemed to become radicalized he talks about the guy like somebody would talk about a cult leader it's kind of weird and fawning to read how he writes about paulo ferry and his his influence and giroux's books are totally mental like if you want to see the melting pot the mixing pot where all this stuff came together it was in the education theory stuff because all they cared about was the mission all they cared about was operational success so they picked from everything where you have ferrari citing lenin and mao and sorry he doesn't sight now he just praises him citing lenin inciting marx and you know very purely marxist drew's not quite so coarse not so vulgar but he's citing ferrari he's citing marcusa he's citing um horkheimer he's citing adorno the neo-marxist element there is undeniable and even throughout you know recent papers and like i mentioned last night allison bailey's paper from 2017 in hypatia the privilege preserving epistemic pushback she has a whole section about neo-marxism being integral to the critical pedagogy project so that's really how that all mixed into our society so this becomes very uh kind of relevant within that new left milo and cultural marxism though was going to infiltrate those institutions and change them from within and of course we see that we see that in every single one of the ones mentioned it's crept into religion they've been fighting it vigorously in the southern baptist convention i think we have a marxist pope it's certainly within presbyterian church it's certainly within the episcopal church it's certainly within buddhism islam on the liberal side et cetera it's infiltrating into every religion and its goal is to create one kind of giant ecumenical faith that uses the trappings of say catholicism to preach social justice or uses the trappings of evangelicism to preach social justice they're all saying the same thing using different language and that's actually what marcus calls for in the in the san liberation because he says to do this to get this new sensibility we have to create a new language the old saying i mentioned last night is that communists share your vocabulary but they don't share your dictionary they use the same words and they mean something different by them that specialized to their second dimensional thinking their critical theory they have specialized definitions and so it's infiltrated into faith they're obviously trying to destroy childhood innocence in the family they're criticizing the idea of the nuclear family that was explicitly on the black lives matter mission website before they took that down they're like wait people see that destroying the idea of fatherhood explicitly they want to replace the family with the institution everybody says with the state they have an intermediate step it's the institution these people think in terms of institutions institutions are the fundamental unit of society within critical theories and the state is just the largest umbrella institution so your family is going to be replaced by an institution whether that's these weird experiments they did in europe where they put people in orphanages for no reason where they try to get rid of parental involvement where they're trying to you know you know we see the nea the the teachers union talking about how it's the school's jobs to parent and the parents jobs to listen to the teachers union they're trying to just they've filtered into the family and then education we talked about media i think i've mentioned cnn msnbc and joy reid and markham hill like a few times so far it's all throughout the media the media has become a critical theory propaganda arm at least where it's a corporate press alternative press obviously is different but that's throttled because of repressive tolerance and it's in law and that's where critical race theory was particularly poignant because it is originally for the first like four years or something a illegal theory um maybe it's just three years that it was just a legal theory um we could figure out how many years it is not many so it's into all these institutions they're turning the institutions from within the idea i mean some people refer to this as like a cordyceps process that's a if you don't know what cordyceps is it's this fungus that zombifies bugs and it makes them behave in certain ways and then it grows out of their dead body uh into a fungus it's what it does is it infiltrates an institution takes over the institution uh kills it wears its skin as a suit and parades around while draining all of its resources as marxists would do it targets wealthy institutions by the way because this is a disease of the lower upper class who are resentful that they're not the upper upper class and that they are luxurious enough to be able to entertain these luxury beliefs they are the over-produ produced bourgeoisie who don't know how else to find meaning in their life and this kind of social activism can be very tempting it taps into their reservoirs of guilt that they have for their success that they can't otherwise explain gives them meaning and purpose also brings them lots of attention which if they're celebrities they really like so this is the neo-marxist cultural marxist element of critical race theory the post-modern element i just touch on briefly because cynical theories covers it post-modernism arose and out of all of these millers in the 1960s where neo-marxist is like a criticism of marxism in certain ways that retains most of its essential characteristics alf haben we'll talk about that more later post post-modernism is actually post-marxism it's kind of given up on marxism it's cynical and nihilistic it's track is probably more it certainly you know was created by marxists who were becoming disillusioned many of them supported mao and then figured out he was a bad guy too and they came became disillusioned with communism totally and they came up with these entirely new ways to think about society and their nihilism and despair because liberalism can't be right capitalism can't be right but communism can't be right either and religion can't be right either so none of these things are right so there's nothing nothing nothing lebowski or whatever right so there's absolutely nothing for them and they've abandoned marxism but they've retained the dialectical process in a modified form that we call deconstruction deconstruction doesn't seek to take the thesis and hit it with an antithesis and arrive at a synthesis it's what also theodor adorno in 66 called a negative dialectic it takes the thesis and it hits it with its antithesis and leaves it there at the particulars break everything apart and leave it there deconstruct take apart take apart every meaning structure hollow out every meaning structure they're kind of three main characters of course there are more we could talk about richard rorty we could talk about delusion guitar we could talk about all these different people uh frederick jameson et cetera they're all relevant in their own ways they're all important there are many prominent post-monitors i want to touch on three two of whom we talk about rather extensively in cynical theories one of whom we mention and don't talk about extensively and those are michel foucault of course jacques derida which is funny i think his actual given name is jackie derrida his parents were big american fans jackie darida and uh john baudrillard who was later and who understood the media environment because he had read marshall mcluhan where nobody else had who was a bit nuts but understood some things what's that john baudrillard b-a-u-d-r-i-l-l-a-r-d i can't believe i did that in one try and so michelle foucault his basic premise this is what we call the post-modern knowledge principle in cynical theories after i wrestled helen to the ground and said we can't call it the epistemological principle we cannot use that word that many times let's call it knowledge but it's the belief that knowledge is socially constructed and it's socially constructed in the service of power not necessarily intentionally the people who have the power to decide what is knowledge decide what is knowledge in a way that's ultimately self-serving and so knowledge is power foucault called it power knowledge he believed that each culture is a contingent object that's contained within itself it has its own truth regime its own epistem its own set of propositions that are true and for foucault actual objective truth not only is unaccessible it's irrelevant because the the process of political power that allows somebody to authenticate an idea or be authoritative on an idea as true is what's really relevant so for foucault he's his work has been summarized i don't think this is a quote from him directly but i've conflated some things and it's that if a true prop if a truth claim is actually true or is actually false is irrelevant what's important is the power dynamic and being able to determine that somebody gets to say that it is and people will believe it and he thought that this was a cultural product that exists in each culture and that the power dynamics are always self-interested and thus self-sustaining so he has a little bit of critique critical theory built in but he was primarily describing himself as a historian aka historiographer uh digging through history and telling a very biased revisionist history on things like the history of madness the history of the prison the history of the clinic history of sexuality et cetera jacques derrida was the big deconstructionist he comes out of the post-structural line and so i'm going to draw a line backwards for a minute that isn't going to make a lot of sense right now post-structuralism arose out of structuralism structuralism arose out of existentialism existentialism arose out of romanticism romanticism arose out of the precursors to the french revolution with john jack or so so that's a very important line of thought that hits post-modernism that does not come into critical theory specifically not directly anyway they use other parts of russo so jacques dario believed that language can't convey meaning he had this i don't want to get into the depths of it this whole idea of the signified and the signifier languages composed of signs it's put together in webs of words that form a discourse and the discourse is a web of meaning about how words relate to one another and that's where all the meaning is contained each word is a sign it points to something like an idea but he said that the pointing is called a signifier and that the signifier never refers to a signified an actual object in the word in the world it only refers to more words it refers to the words in a sense that it is like if you look up a word in the dictionary you see more words and it refers to the words that it is not so if you look up the word house you have to compare it against the other words that are not there like mansion or hut or dog and all of those webs of meaning are there but but meaning itself is infinitely deferred you can never get to the real through language you could never read a text and say this is what it meant because this is what the author meant roland barthes called that the death of the author jacques derrida took it to like the highest level you could possibly imagine there is absolutely no way to understand this but what he actually also believed is that words tend to exist very frequently in hierarchical binary pairs male and female where you can't understand one word without looking at its other and he analyzed that through a theory called phyllogocentrism which is that words have basically straight male power attached to them we favor the straight male thing and we disfavor the gay or female thing and therefore there's a power dynamic in words like male and female you can only understand them in opposition to one another and a lot of deridian activism therefore a lot of deridium deconstruction is let's preserve that binary and turn the power upside down the future is female jumbotriard is the matrix if you've seen the matrix you know john beaudrier john berger actually watched the matrix and he said that's not me but his most famous book which is simulation in simulacra is actually featured in the matrix when neo's got his little contraband at the beginning and he's hiding it in a book and he tucks it in a drawer before he meets morpheus the book is simulation simulacra or seminar consumer simulation joan balderiard what baudrillard believed is that we live because of the media environment and hyper reality we have replaced we we have almost like a map of the entire universe that's a perfect one-to-one map and we have chosen to live in the map rather than in the actual terrain and we believe that if we change the map then that's all that matters reality bends accordingly he called this hyper reality hyper reality is what is more real than real so you can think of the airbrushed model more real than real you can think of the hyper-flavored smoothie it's more strawberry than strawberry or whatever it is it's a local distance reference for those who know his strawberry thing it's very good he believed that we live in this state and if you don't understand that what he's saying is that because of the environment that we live in we have access to what might be called a second reality and that second reality is largely linguistically constructed and we're kind of swimming in this linguistically constructed world and we believe that if we just change things in the world of abstractions then that's good enough reality will accord um a pseudo-reality as i've also referred to it then everything that that's how people are going to live he was mostly warning about this he had this very famous essay he wrote about the gulf war that he said the gulf war never happened it was basically things happened in the middle east that were warlike and cnn created a war out of it all you know hyper real fake war and that's what people believe the gulf war was and so that's what the gulf war was a very kind of pessimistic analysis and it's because we live in this world that this stuff works you can only you know on you can go on twitter and you can create a new avatar and you can change your picture and you can change your name and you're somebody new and you can start to live that and you can very easily groom yourself or be groomed into new unreal identities but this is mostly queer theory but this also taps into the idea that we're going to focus hyper focus on race we're going to think in terms of these social constructions that are somehow structurally determinate social constructions are linguistic and political constructs that then have material consequences and so it's all still relevant this these post-modern ideas are the meloo in which the people the activists that we talked about cynical theories in the 1980s and 1990s were looking at and saying wow these are weapons let's make people live in hyper reality let's hollow out meaning through deridian deconstruction so that we can mold the world as we will let's criticize everything fairly ruthlessly in terms of how it's just a power dynamic and localized knowledge and there is no access to truth and every claim that you have access to truth is actually an assertion of power from foucault we could also tie in i guess uh john francois leotard here who wrote in the post-modern condition in 1979 a section on legitimation by parology which sounds very complicated legitimation by perology means we go with the consensus we believe consensus is truth he's warning this is not a good idea but this is the nature of the world whatever the consensus is is real and so you can see the attempt to weaponize this in the manufacture of consensus how with repressive tolerance you believe the wrong thing will silence you there's a consensus in the medical community community about racism being a public health threat look every art every third article in the lancet now covers it there's a consensus now about whatever the issue is whether it's climate change racism the virus the pandemic or whatever we're going to create a forced consensus by shutting out all alternative opinions they've weaponized that concept that's post-modernism applied that's why helen and i called it applied post-modernism in cynical theories and it turns out that the people who applied it were the uh neo-marxists so i'm going to read a couple of things to you um one of them is really long so i might not read the whole thing so just to be very clear that we are dealing with in critical race theory and neo-marxist movement i'm going to turn to critical race theory the key writings that form the movement this is from the introduction and who did they say organized critical race theory organized by a collection of neo-marxist intellectuals well there you go former new left activists ex-counter culturalists that's a nice way to put people who blew up the capital and stuff and other varieties of oppositionalists in law schools the con the conference on critical legal studies where critical race theory was developed established itself as a network of openly leftist law teachers students and practitioners committed to exposing and challenging the ways american law served to legitimize an oppressive social order so undoubtedly critical race theory was organized by a collection of neo-marxists how can i prove there's a question last night that this is neo-marxist well read critical race theory uh the key writing is a form of movement at least the introduction of it which is very long it's like 30 something 40 pages something that's actually very long i was going to read it as a podcast was like this can take 10 hours the first half of that sentence organized by a collection of neo-marxist intellectuals categories theory there you go so post-modernism how did that get in here well you know it was in the maloo it was in the water post-modernism was getting picked up by all of kind of the feminist activists in particular they picked it up at yale law at columbia all these kind of ivy schools were picking up post-modernism in the feminism or in the english departments primarily but the feminists were the ones taking it up because it allowed them to deconstruct gender which is what they wanted to do most in the world and so black feminists were very interested in using this to deconstruct other things and kimberly crenshaw had the insight following the other black feminists that there was going to be no way to deconstruct an imposed racial category an imposed system of oppression and so all of a sudden she found the magic sauce to combine neo-marxism and post-modernism because post-modernism like liberalism would slowly deconstruct a socially constructed racial category and it wouldn't mean anything one way or another but kimberly crenshaw said well that wouldn't be very useful for identity politics and i don't mean the civil rights movement identity politics is a term coined in the kambahee river collective in come here river collective was radical new left activists it was black feminists who were offshoots of herbert marcusa it was neo-marxists and so it wouldn't be useful for identity politics but where she goes into the post-modern and liberal criticism and i have a very long quote i don't know if i'll read all of it there's some important stuff here though and i've read this on the podcast it's in the conclusion section of um mapping the margins from 1991 her most influential paper uh she goes into this long discussion of anti-essentialism uh but then she says i'll just skip some of this to save some time but she says one version of the of anti-essentialism this is going to talk about post-modern deconstruction embodying what might be called the vulgarized social construction thesis is that since all categories are socially constructed there is no such thing as say blacks or women pretty wild or no such thing as women and thus it makes no sense to continue reproducing those categories by organizing around them identity politics she says but to say that a category such as race or gender is socially constructed is not to say that that category has no significance on our world on the contrary a large and continuing project for subordinated people and indeed one of the projects for which post-modern theories have been very helpful is thinking about the way power has clustered around certain categories and is exercised against others this project attempts to unveil the processes of subordination and the various ways those processes are experienced by people who are subordinated and people who are privileged by them neo-marxism at the identity politics level that's what she's doing it is then a project that presumes that categories have meaning and consequences this project's most pressing problem in many if not most cases is not the existence of the categories but rather the particular values attached to them in the way that those values foster and create social hierarchies cultural marxism we're going to keep the category she says we're not going to deconstruct the identity categories because the categories are given meaning through naming through the imposition of meaning onto them and so she says this is a very important paragraph in the history of the world this is not to deny the process of categorization is itself an exercise of power but the story is much more complicated and nuanced than that first the process of categorizing or in identity terms naming is not unilateral that's what i was saying people like the white race who created themselves as the archetype of humanity apparently according to their critical race definition have the power to do this it's not unilateral subordinated people can and do participate sometimes even subverting the naming process in empowering ways one need only think about the historical subversion of the category black or the current transformation of queer to understand the categorization is not a one-way street clearly there's unequal power but there's nonetheless some degree of agency that people can and do excerpt in the past and the politics of naming and it is important to note that identity this is where we get really important continues to be a site of resistance for members of different subordinated groups identity politics we can all recognize the distinction between the claims i am black and that i am a person who happens to be black i am black takes the socially imposed identity and empowers it as an anchor of subjectivity i am black becomes not simply a statement of resistance but also a positive discourse of self-identification intimately linked to celebratory statements like the black nationalist black is beautiful i am a person who happens to be black on the other hand achieve self-identification by straining for a certain universality in effect i am first a person i'm not like you i'm black is what she's actually arguing for and for a concomitant dismissal of the imposed category black as contingent circumstantial non-determinant there's truth in both characterizations of course but they function quite differently depending on the political context at this point in history 1991 a strong case can be made that the most critical resistance strategy for disempowered groups is to occupy and defend a politics of social location an intersectional new sensibility rather than to vacate or destroy it what i said about sensibility is not in the original text by the way constructionism thus distorts the possibilities for a meaningful identity politics by conflating at least two separately separate but closely linked manifestations of power one is the power exercise simply through the process of categorization which sometimes is called a violence of categorization because they like to exaggerate that way and their words have special meanings the other the power to cause that categorization to have social and material consequences while the former power facilitates the latter the political implications of challenging one over the other matter greatly so kimberly crenshaw is saying post-modernism is very useful as long as we don't deconstruct identity categories because identity categories are useful for identity politics and in fact our neo-marxism depends on it our identity based now neo-marxism our identity-based cultural marxism depends upon not deconstructing the categories where we can operate our grift that's her argument we're going to get rid of the ideas of liberalism we're of universal humanity of treating people as individuals of content of character we're going to get rid of those and we're going to focus on the category we're going to do identity first identity politics not the civil rights movement i am a man but rather i am black and you are asian and you are queer and you are this and you are that and as a this and as of that positionality must be intentionally engaged this will be a new sensibility she has in a couple places in the paper for the way that we're going to think about things she says it's not meant to be a totalizing theory of identity but it's a new sensibility don't worry so this is the fusion of post-modernism this is where the one ring is forged she says in a footnote in this paper that she sees intersectionality as a provisional concept linking contemporary politics with post-modern theory this is the fusion of neo-marxism and post-modernism being done in this paper you've heard the crucial thing the vulgar construction thesis of post-modernism is too vulgar it doesn't take into account that we have to use racial imposed categories and think in systems of power and we have to start identifying as divisive things and then we see this after it finally breaks loose in the 2010s into society poll that i referenced earlier that race relations are plummeting wonder why i wonder why we see why so this is what critical race theory and intersectionality are all about its neo-marxist roots are actually undeniable um it's fusion to post-modernism is undeniable this is how they fuse these activists these neo-marxist activists saw certain parts of post-modern theory useful in particular foucault's idea that knowledge is just another assertion of power truth is just another assertion of power it's just another thing to apply critical theory to and to put into their frame of power dynamics and all of a sudden reality falls out of the picture the thing that was stopping the neo-marxist was that reality was still important to them they were still modernists post-modernists are not so constrained and they picked up these weapons and they put them into application so that's the fusion that's the creation of uh applied post-modernism or critical constructivism as it were so just a few other relevant movements to mention i mentioned critical pedagogy already so i won't do that you see how that kind of is like the fertilizer in which all of this grew where the melting pot of all these ideas kind of came together because there's a purpose um this the new left spawned a set of movements one of those is the it didn't spawn liberationism it grafted into liberationism liberationism is what we've already talked about as well is the idea that we're now going to be liberated from consumer capitalism and all other systems of power and oppression including identity based ones uh within that black liberationism arises the goal if we read uh lads and billionaires and tate who i mentioned last night gloria leds and billings and william tate in their paper from 1995 toward a critical race theory of education they mentioned that the goal of what they were doing is to make race and an italics the central construct for understanding inequality they wanted to foreground or in their words center race into everything and black liberationism was a very radical movement it emerged in the 1950s got co-opted and picked up by the neo-marxist the ghetto population that marcus is referencing and became very uh neo-marxist and origin and you have the fist which is a communist symbol what a shock black feminism emerges out of this and this is the birthplace of intersectionality black feminism emerges out of this because now you have feminists who are also black liberationists and what they ended up figuring out how to do is to turn their analyses inward on themselves they said well the black liberation movement's not very feminist and it keeps screwing over black women and the feminist movement's too white and it keeps screwing over black women we need a different kind of analysis so black feminism emerges very radical with the intention of creating a new way of thinking that's going to be the seeds of this intersectionality that crenshaw is just talking about and this positional new sensibility so they hold a lot of responsibility for that and i'll read to you uh this mission statement from the kambahee river collective the first paragraph of that to give you a sense of where they're coming from so this was a collective formed in 1974. this statement was put out in either 77 or 78 i'd have to check um preceding crenshaw by a decade at least so they say we are a collective of black feminists who have been meeting together since 1974. during that time we have been involved in the process of defining and clarifying our politics while at the same time doing political work within our own group and in coalition with other progressive organizations and movements the most general statement of our politics at the present time would be that we are actively committing to struggling against racial sexual heterosexual and anti-class or sorry and class oppression and see our particular task the development of an integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking the synthesis h word hegel the synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives as black women we see black feminism as the logical political movement to combat the manifold and simultaneous oppressions that all women of color face so you can also read in this the intersectionality grew out of an attempt to get all of the other under the brain or banner of solidarity all of the other oppressed minority groups to carry water for black feminism as a movement as an ideological movement remember this isn't people it's an ideological movement it's a political position now of course i can't and we'll close here i can't mention the roots of critical race there without mentioning the most proximate route of all which is the critical legal studies movement from which it emerged the critical legal studies movement um was a new left project consistent with antonio gramsci's idea of getting this into the institutions to put new left neo-marxism and marxism into law and it was gaining a lot of steam through the 70s and into the 80s and it's probably just best to again summarize what it is reading from critical race theory the key writings that form the movement they write critical race theory like the critical legal studies movement with which we are often allied rejects the prevailing orthodoxy the scholarship should or could be neutral and objective so that's what it's about the law is not going to be able to be neutral or objective we saw that as a key principle of critical race theory last night we believe that legal scholarship about race in america can never be written from a distance of detachment god's eye view from nowhere i mentioned last night or with an attitude of objectivity to the extent though because of the post-modernism too right because of the post-modernism there's no objectivity because there's no objective standpoint because it's all just culturally contingent to the extent that racial power is exercised legally and ideologically legal scholarship about race is an important site for the construction of that power and thus always a factor if only ideologically in the economy of racial power itself to use a phrase from the existentialist tradition there is no exit no scholarly perch outside of the social dynamics of racial power from which sorry i lost my track uh outside of dynamics racial power from which merely to observe and analyze scholarship the formal production identification and organization of what will be called knowledge is inevitably political you can see the post-modernism there now knowledge is intrinsically political so critical race theory emerges out of the critical legal studies movement the critical legal by putting race into the equation the critical legal studies movement existed to put neo-marxist politics into law and so the chain is connected critical legal studies is something that was designed specifically to nitpick at the law to pull apart the fabric of society illegally to say that the law by is bias toward certain vested interests that are self-perpetuating and so on and so that's the meloo out of which critical race theory emerges and i know i've talked a long time so i'll wrap up here with this these are the ideological roots though it's a fusion of neo-marxism and post-modernism that happened primarily through the 80s and by 1991 and mapping the margins crenshaw codifies it they've picked up the post-modern tools especially the idea especially the idea that knowledge itself is an expression of power of political power and there is no objective standpoint from which you could do law or science or gain knowledge or express knowledge or teach teaching is political research is political everything is political because of this and critical race theory specifically bursts forth as part of the cultural marxist project to insinuate itself into law by as gloria lansdon billings and william tate said making race the central cons construct for understanding inequality to the centering race so this is where critical race theory comes from over the last 100 years this is the 100 year long shaft of the tip of the spear that is critical race theory and critical race theory is the tip of the spear because it works because we're very sensitive about race uh and it's very easy for us to tip into what for example shelby steel called white guilt and to just cave in front of their manipulations so thanks for listening this is the near ideological roots we'll talk about the deeper ones here in a few minutes you

Channel: New Discourses

Views: 87,326

Keywords: New Discourses, james lindsay, video, lecture, workshop, critical race theory, crt, critical race praxis, ideology, race marxism, marxism

Id: OQ7vBukc9gM

Length: 76min 26sec (4586 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 23 2022

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