The Trojan Horse Ep. 3: Critical Race Theory | James Lindsay, Michael O'Fallon

[Music] [Music] New York City I think more so than almost any other city in in the United States is been known traditionally because of Ellis Allen Island so many immigrants coming into the United States from Europe and as well just the explosion of Chinatown in other areas is really being one of the largest multi-ethnic cities anywhere in the world at least traditionally that's how it started we're now hearing phraseology and in different terms that are being used that really are confusing to people because within that melting pot that we had years and years and years ago within a lot of different tensions that have come up as we this experiment known as America has developed and grown and strengthened we have a term that a lot of people I think misunderstand to a great extent which is critical race theory oh yeah first of all woodard what led up to that term critical race thing I don't want to just ask what it is and what it means but what are the the pillars by which that theory is actually built on so you can go way back if you want to do that I mean easily the first person that wouldn't call him a critical race theory but the first person who is writing in kind of the anti-slavery kind of way because the Atlantic slave trade is really where critical race Theory came out of criticisms of that many many of which were justified completely so so you could even look all the way back to Frederick Douglass for example for many of the earlier roots all the way back to you know he was he was a freed slave or escaped slave I don't remember the history on that precisely so all the way back to Frederick Douglass you already have this kind of writing speaking about the race issue in America and obviously the race issue in America with the Atlantic slave trade was a humongous thing you also have this kind of parallel issue of the the colonial the European colonialism thing where it went to different cultures and in many respects subjugated the people that were there whether it's the aboriginals of Australia or you know whatever you have depending on where it is the indigenous people of the US and Canada certainly would fall into that and so you have this kind of idea that's not altogether wrong that places like the United States in particular we're built upon a legacy of racism and of course our founding fathers wrestled with us Jefferson wrestled with us very famously you can't read a biography of Jefferson you can't read any of his own writing and not find him wrestling with the issue of slavery and therefore race ultimately what was going on is that with the rise of naturalism in Europe as the sciences were being born as maybe the best not maybe definitely the best knowledge producing system that we have you had a notion of race that was common you know in different places of this race is superior to that race for this reason or that but for the first time you had that explicitly linked to heritability and you explicitly had scientific discourses that were trying to rationalize why it was justifiable to do colonialism why it was justifiable to engage in the Atlantic slave trade and so you had people like Douglas who were starting to react against those very justifiably later you'd say kind of a big pillar would have been and much later would be W EB Dubois he was writing a lot about the same topics the racial contract and all of this that the United States was built on so you had this kind of theme of criticism running all the way back through American history in particular but also in European history where these ideas that the social construct of race that had kind of been brought up with these which are inaccurate these are you know lump everybody with a certain degree of dark-skinned or certain Antonis ancestry into black or lump everybody you know into Hispanic or brown or whatever the the categories categories happened to be there's a lot of inaccuracy to that and they really are social constructions that carried a lot of assumption scientists don't talk about it that way at all now they talk about populations they come from different regions and had different evolutionary histories and things like that so you started to see a lot of criticism of that idea of racy socially constructed ideas of race grounded in sometimes totally reasonable liberal rational perspectives often as he saw through the civil rights movement especially in the u.s. appeals to the deal that was supposed to have been made at the beginning the founding of the United States was all men are created equal it wasn't really and even going back to Jefferson you see it wasn't really supposed to be all men are created equal except people that look like this the the deal was supposed to be hey everybody's created equal let's make good on that and so you saw a lot of criticism of ways that that had failed a lot of legitimacy there but there's also a great deal of resentment well-deserved resentment I would say in a lot of these cases coming up in those those critiques then you started to have with the fall of colonialism in particular and as the civil rights movements kicked off in the u.s. much more focused criticism you still had a lot of liberal activism particularly on the ground but you also started to see in parallel a rising up of a different perspective so we're way back before these social constructions of race came along people actually thought that environmental factors created skin tone hair texture and so on and they didn't know how biology worked they did no idea that it was heritable so then all of a sudden you had this idea race was created as a biological construction that was then tied to you know various personality traits also being positive as being biological constructions to justify superiority versus inferiority so that's really what was being criticized you saw this dissolve under the liberal approach the liberal approach said okay we were wrong about that people are people who happen to be whatever if we're gonna use the word race race that they are what a population group they happen to belong to whatever characteristics that carries you started to see the liberal thing start to dissolve that but then in the kind of the 50s but mostly going into the 60s late 60s and 70s you have this emergence of a new kind of race theory that wouldn't have been totally critical race theory yet that was coming out of the postmodern thinkers and also just the far left social activists that were blowing up all over the place at the time where they wanted to start looking at race as a social construction that's something that's not real so it kind of fit with that liberal agenda but to really dig into and make problems out of how that was was creating racial dynamics that created oppression for people of certain races and not yet named but privileges for for people of other races that were considered to be down especially white race and the construction of whiteness that would justify that so those are the deeper roots what happened eventually was you had as far as critical race theory itself goes you had one particular scholar at Harvard Derek Bell yeah Derek Bell was a legal scholar he was very interested in both race theory and in critical legal theory which is to pick in legal theory picket holes and try to expose where there are weaknesses or problematics or something like that ideally so they can be adjusted and he fused the two and he created critical race theory now Derek Bell was not really post modernist in his orientation so he wasn't taking up with Foucault he was a materialist he was very interested in in the actual legal theory but in some sense he was almost a social conspiracy theorist because he's maybe most famous for his idea other than critical race theory of interest convergence theory have if you've heard of this I don't know but it's the the idea that that powerful groups in society say white people only will give marginalized people rights status opportunity et cetera when it's also in their interest when the interests converge only when it's in the interest of the white people are the more powerful group to grant those things so for example you wouldn't have the getting rid of Jim Crow laws in the south in particular unless it was to the whites advantage to make themselves look more progressive to say a European market or something like that or to make themselves more palatable to people in some other place the north or Europe in particular so that you could have trade going on you don't see the abolishment of slavery because there was a moral victory one you see it because white people realize that it would not be in their economic interests with international trade to maintain it and so that there had to be some interest convergence where the white people aren't really doing any morale any morally motivated progress they're only doing things that advance their own interests so they give the minimum amount they can possibly give in order to satisfy their own interests Derrick Bell well this this is kind of a conspiracy theory because you can't disprove or approve what anybody's interests or motivations were and he had a student who's much more famous that students name is Kimberly Crenshaw in kimberlé crenshaw was much more interested in postmodern thinking writing the late 1980s maybe 1989 I think she wrote a paper that outlined this idea called intersectionality and she was developing Derek Bell's critical race theory she went on to spell out the idea of intersectionality and legal theory again critical legal theory finding a loophole a lot of legitimacy to what she was doing originally speaking in terms of finding corporations that could possibly discriminate say specifically against black women by claiming to hire enough black men and claiming to hire enough white women so that they satisfied racial and gender discrimination law but could openly discriminate it or maybe not openly but could easily discriminate against black women by saying well we have lots of black people we have lots of women no problem except there is actually this intersected group that's in both categories at once that still is being discriminated against and so she wanted to advance that idea and in a paper that's literally changed the world written in 1991 called mapping the margins she wrote a long exposition on why intersectionality is necessary and why rather than taking the liberal liberal approach because she was open which she was openly hostile to she was not having a little liberal approach he said the liberal approach was something that benefited only people who are in the dominant groups this is being now taking a very very strong page out of fucose book about how power works it only benefits people who are in dominant groups are already have power to take a liberal approach it doesn't forward the interests of people who have minority or marginalized identities and so she wanted to effect a shift so if you go way back in time you had the the origin of racism as a as a discourse if you will recognizing that there is a meaningful difference between you or a person who happens to have black skin because of environmental factors in Africa or wherever happens to be and you are a black person as it that's an identity category that means something so that was the beginning of racism and then the liberal approach was like no no no no that was a mistake we were wrong let's let's not do that and let's say instead you are a person who happens to be black and forward common humanity first kimberlé crenshaw explicitly near the end of mapping the margin says the liberals are wrong we are now not going to take a liberal approach to this a classic liberal approach to this where everybody is on equal footing first we are now going to say that there is something meaningful and important in black identity versus white identity versus other identities any particular identity status I am black means something different and more important than I am a person who happens to be black and we should own that whether she took that idea from herself or whether she borrowed it from bell hooks another black feminist who was working and saying similar things she had a very famous essay anti a woman saying exactly the same thing claiming that black women weren't really considered regular or full status women because there are black women a different kind so anti a woman which harken back to an earlier essay of I think the same name so whether she came with that idea on her own or whether she's borrowing from bell hooks or whether they're just working in in a kind of convergent fashion not sure but she forwarded the idea and openly said so that the purpose of claiming racial identity is to do identity politics and the method to do so is through postmodern deconstruction however up to a limit so she saw people like Foucault Jacques Derrida these guys the original post modernists who advocated deconstructive methods as white burgeois privileged people who could afford to deconstruct everything including racial identity and that that doesn't advance the the agenda or the needs of the the the problems of people with oppressed identities so she said we're going to use those deconstructive methods to break down the social constructions of race we're going to see it in a socially constructed way we're going to accept that I am black means something more and more important than I am a person who happens to be black and we're going to tear at this using postmodern deconstructed methods try to make it just pull it apart at its roots for the purpose of advancing identity politics and the one thing we're not going to deconstruct therefore is identity and oppression based on identity will be construct everything right up to that point but identity and oppression based on identity are real and they're if you take the postmodern line the only things that are real and they are modulated as the post modernist would have a through language the way we speak about things and representation and things like that so we need to institute a political project to change language change the way we speak about things change the way we think about things which may change the way people are allowed to talk about things and think about things and change representation in order to as they would say remediate the problems of racism which she had just reified after decades of liberal work had tried to undermine that reification of race and say that was there was something erroneous so that's the roots of critical race theory as far as kind of its historical development where it kind of came from who the thinkers were originally where it became when I said that Derrick Bell is a materialist that means he's actually it's like a softened version of Marxist but it's not quite the same as Marx it's very interested in material features but especially in capitalist material features and how they screw certain people over and then his student kimberlé crenshaw comes up with this idea of intersectionality to advance identity politics to start getting people to identify with their races and to pick apart powerful races and problematize them so as to be able to advance the notions of advance the the agendas of marginalized or oppressed races well you said problematize what do you mean by problematize now problematizing is the tool of critical theory in general reaching probably back to the frankfurt school and Horkheimer and all of these guys but more specifically it got picked up in the term the the context that we would use it now it got picked up by the postmodern thinkers and modified to postmodern ants the problematize is to engage in a close look to find problematics to find problems that are indicative of some kind of a systemic problem so you know if we were to have say where everybody who works in an office understands the printer and you know you put the wrong ink cartridge in and it jams or the wrong kind of paper any jams you say this kind of paper is problematic for the printer we all have that kind of use of the word but that's not what's meant here well it's men here is that there's like as a whole systemic problem throughout all of society in this case with critical race theory that problem is either or both of racism or white supremacy they are systemic meaning everybody's participating in them they participate in them in the way that they talk about things and the ideas that they have the way that they think the way that we do representation they manifest every time there's an instance of racism anywhere whether it's big or small it's just a station of this kind of disease that's under the surface like if you had a virus and you're sick and it causes boils to come up and every now and then a boil comes up you can't analyze the boil in and of itself to understand the disease you have to realize that the whole body is sick and the boil was incidental to that so they have this idea that's called imminence that that this idea that that racism or white supremacy is imminent throughout society it's a system we all participate in whites automatically benefit from it and can't help but benefit from it they call that privilege and instances of racism are just manifestations of that systemic everywhere always problem coming up to the surface so problematizing is a tool by which you might examine things very very closely like to read things into other thing to read racism into something for example a text a TV show the construction of the table it so it's a means of looking to find ways to discover racism hidden within everything because the assumption is that racism is hidden within everything and then when you find such problematic switch inevitably crop up because nobody's perfect you then point to that as proof that there is a systemic problem if you can't see the circular reasoning there it I'll draw a circle for ya it's right there well I've heard you say in the past that in in in essence that critical race theory in some ways resemble Scientology yeah it's I would just ecology yeah it's it's the the imminence here is kind of like a pervasive force I kind of thought of it as like racism working like the thetans that they have you know there's these alien spirits that latch onto your soul and cause you all kinds of problems and what you have to do in Scientology as you go and you hook up to the e-meter they have some method they interview you or whatever they call it and they discover that you have these systemic spiritual problems inside of you but with critical race theory would they do the same thing they analyze to the finest level of detail possible your speech your actions your dress anything that they can do anything that you've chosen to read watch or the way that was produced to find instances where racism is inside the system they just aren't hooking you up to an e meter they're looking for racism anywhere they can find it and then bringing it out and then giving you this process that you have to go through there rather than taking your money they expect you to go atone and put put black voices forward to you know make more representation to give blacks give more acting roles or whatever happens to be to black people to give them more advancement in their careers to make them more visible and prominent in society but also to encourage introspection within you to look inside yourself and try to figure out how racism is is operating within you and how you participate in that system that's what they mean by racism is that you're participating in the system that they believe is totally pervasive everywhere always and they want to find that bring it out and cause you to look inside yourself feel guilty they say they don't want you to feel guilty but they want you to feel guilty about that and then try to change yourself for the better which sounds good until you realize that it's not possible to change yourself for the better because you still participate in the system and you still you still have the systemic problem as a part of you that you benefit from no matter what you do so no matter how you decide to amend yourself as a result of this process that can also be problematized meaning finding ways that weren't adequate so for example you could decide well the black community needs the help of more privileged white individuals to come in and speak on their behalf and you know maybe they you know the City Council won't listen to black people so we'll get a white person to go down and speak for him but now you're speaking on behalf of a community that you can't possibly understand because you don't participate in it they've problematized your action or you've positioned yourself as an ally which seems like the thing they want you to do and hope that you'll do but that's problematic as well because by positioning yourself as an ally you make yourself into a good white you give yourself additional social status you allow yourself to speak for people whose whose experience you can't possibly had and you insulate yourself from or try to insulate yourself from the criticism so they see this all in a very cynical way kind of like interest convergence theory there's only as possibly a cynical explanation for why the civil rights movement where the civil rights movement succeeded there's it has to be some cynical thing that led to that here if some white person gets very very concerned about some issue that's relevant to the black community and they go speak it out to try to change it well now they're positioning themselves as a good white versus the other whites who are less good because they're just trying to raise their status so that they appear less problematic and gain status for themselves with the communities that care about those things and they're therefore not really working in the interest of the black community that they claim to be working for they're interoperating in their own interests so again you have interest convergence theory coming into play and so you can kind of see how there's there's you can't win it's a game that's cooked so that you can't win and that's only going up to like critical race theory mm you know where 20 years past that and and they've cooked the books a bit further since so what do you what's happened since 2000 I mean I know we had of course what peggy mcintosh developed in her white privilege and so forth what has really developed since 2000 so now since 2000 more and more people started to take those things for granted that changed in the 80s and 90s so you had people like peggy mcintosh white privilege that was 1986 7 8 6 something in there and then you had unpacking the invisible knapsack she loved it and then you had kimberlé crenshaw to landmark papers which were 1989 and 1991 you had Patricia Hill Collins and other prominent black feminists who developed the matrix of domination to explain how intersectionality works that was again early 1990s 1990 is I think when her book came out her big book on that but it may have been 1991 somewhere right in there and so by all of this got taken up by education Theory very quickly there's a strong movement to push critical race theory into critical race education that was particularly probably initiated by bell hooks again black feminist scholar with a book called teaching to transgress which was in 1994 this guy advanced in 1999 by a scholar named Megan bowler who wrote about the pedagogy of discomfort which is claiming that you the goal of education should be to overcome privilege or a major goal of Education be to be overcome privilege and you can only possibly do that by making a privileged person very uncomfortable and leaving them to sit in that discomfort to initiate the change the anti-racism work that they would do so really what was born out of all of this not only through the education system was a people believing that this is just a matter of fact rather than a politically motivated social theory that wasn't even coming out of the social sciences is coming into the theoretical humanities and be you had this idea of anti racism as they call it coming up which is a it's a set of practices and work that you're supposed to continually do if you participate which everybody does especially white people in a racist or white supremacist system and you have to do your this this idea of anti-racism work that you have to do really started to influence how people think and so the next crop of scholars who started writing really if really influential things would have been coming out around 2010 so you have Robyn D'Angelo as the most famous she came out with white fragility she wrote originally as a paper in 2011 she had a book in 2018 there was New York Times bestseller for some absurd amount of time world tour talks about it everywhere she's just exploded white fragility is one concept among about a dozen that's kind of we can think of it like a point of the spear that now kind of characterize what critical race Theory does both in education and in broader society which is to cook the books completely so that it's an impossible game to win what white fragility says is okay you participate in white supremacy you participate in this racist system and you're going to be now by people advocating anti-racism work going to be confronted with that if that makes you uncomfortable if you push back if you disagree if you stay silent if you go away if you ignore if you do anything except agree with it and I'm not exaggerating Robyn D'Angelo literally wrote that right then you are exhibiting fragility that proves that your white privilege is so influential on your life that you can't handle anti-racism work what she called you haven't developed a racial stamina to do the work necessary to overcome the racism that she knows you must be participating in as she says racism is a system everybody participates in it she claims so no one is bad but no one is neutral it disproportionately benefits whites and white people cannot escape this fact and so anti racism work can never end and you have to keep doing it and if you don't agree to this you're just proved the whole idea of white fragility is if you don't agree with these accusations and you're proving that it that you're you're guilty of the problem if you use reason to argue back you're participating in a system that was created by white men in order to exclude women and racial minorities from being able to argue on their own terms if you in any way get upset then you're just exhibiting your dominance and so on and so forth it's exhibiting white supremacy so it's all cooked so that you can't possibly win and like I said this is just one out of a maybe a half a dozen or a dozen different concepts at all function the same way I can start listing them off Alison Bailey had privilege preserving epistemic pushback you want to preserve your privilege if you have it so you push back in terms of knowledge production you resist the having your mind changed in push back that's her idea all came out around the same time that would have been 2017 she had a huge paper about tracking it in classrooms so she had the idea beforehand pernicious ignorant that would be Christy Dotson willful ignorance it's to Ana and Sullivan 2007 you have Alison Bailey talking about white ignoring and color talk which are ways to not agree the Barbara Applebaum as a matter of fact really goes far into this and says that it's not possible to disagree honestly with these concepts the only way that's legitimate disagreement is to ask questions for more clarification until you understand and agree so they've cooked and agree and agree and so they've cooked the system so that the only possible thing you can do is agree or you're proving your participation in a racist and white supremacist system that disproportionately benefits you or if you happen to a racial minority that you're trying to cash in on as say some kind of a sellout with phrases we won't utter here or that you have false consciousness or any number of other those are the two big ones any other of other reasons that you might that are all cynical or blaming you for for wanting to participate in the system so there's there's a problem here which is that this is not being forward and it forwarded in a way we're discussion debate disagreement possibly finding even middle ground is possible looking for middle ground would be seeking a compromise which is therefore in participating in the system to try to ignore the anti-racism work that they know you must do therefore if form of exhibiting your white fragility willful ignorance active ignorance pernicious ignorance privilege preserving episome ik push back white fragility third order epistemic oppression the the entire social justice literature and I say social justice specifically because at this point intersectionality has started to blend as a different you know critical race theory queer theory the different roots critical gender theory and so on it's kind of blended all of these things together into kind of one morass of theory Helen pluck Rose refers to that as as she usually calls I mean she's very very careful to she goes a social justice scholarship unless you had another home we'd clasp oh oh yeah somebody wrote for Aereo magazine the the this is all falls under what would be called the poem oide cluster things that are shaped like post-modernism but aren't necessarily exactly that right I think it's clear that it's an evolution of postmodern principles and beliefs and themes through the ages where like I said in the 80s and 90s you had this moment where all of a sudden they have postmodern deconstruction art everything forward group identity over the individual focus and says like wholly on the power of language cultural relativism these postmodern themes the belief that knowledge is objective knowledge is impossible to obtain everything is a cultural construct and therefore is just culturally local and that there are power dynamics that are intrinsically problematic so you saw Foucault saying very pessimistically well it doesn't matter because once one power dynamic gets overthrown another power dynamics gonna replace it then you have kimberlé crenshaw and Judith Butler in the 1990s stepping in and saying nope identity is sacred marginalized identity is a sacred place we don't deconstruct we're going to proceed upon group identity we're going to push identity politics with this and we're gonna make use of and apply those postmodern methods but we're not going to do like those privileged boos wah French post modernists who had the the high social status to be able to ignore issues of race or ironically enough you know marginalized sexuality or whatever else now these things are sacred and so it all kind of goes out of that and is built these postmodern looking things that aren't pure post-modernism anymore but they take the same principles the same themes the same idea is the same deconstructed methods to tear apart everything that could be a meaning making structure for society and they've all they've preserved all of that and just made race sexuality sex identity gender and so on those statuses ability status fad status they've made these things into sacred identities that carry special access to unique knowledge that other people can't have and it's gone on to make new theories shaped off of those principles that ratified identity what does that do in terms of the danger to what society is now and how far we've actually progressed so there are a number of dangers one is anytime you start to devalue the individual and start looking in terms of groups you start to undermine the concept of responsibility individualism comes with individual responsibility is you know if you want to be a free individual you have to have individual responsibility it's there's always that two sides of that coin right freedom and responsibility are two sides of the same coin right otherwise it's irresponsible and you have problems so they've they've undermined the view of the individual and therefore tried to collective eyes responsibility so now that's a danger because now all white people are complicit and any racial or sexual minority who doesn't share the right view who doesn't subscribe to theory is some kind of a sellout and they're problematic too so you start to tear apart that aspect of society and it's true they don't intersectionality doesn't look at individual people as individuals it looks at a part this is a little complicated it looks at people as all of their identity groups kind of at once and so it always is going to analyze whatever is going on in terms of a person's group identity and that because it's post-modernism and nothing has to make sense that can vary according to need so you know you can be say a white gay man and you're going on about you know gay issues bla bla bla on the second you step out of line boom you're a white man right Bart just fell out David Rubin would be a yeah the second you step off the off off message they can pick the the parts of your identity that carry privilege and discredit what you're saying that's right because they try to blur the boundaries between categories you start to have major problems even within like legal standards for example this is a really interesting thing that I think about quite a lot I think that one of the projects that that this theoretical approach and social justice takes is to undermine the very concept of the reasonable person there is no reasonable person because a reasonable person has to have some status of objectivity so when you have something in a court of law that bends to the reasonable person standard as its called what would a reasonable person think in this situation the answer is there is no reasonable person everybody's just loaded up with their biases that are cooked in because of their group identities so there's no reasonable person so all of a sudden you can start to do things like claim that when a store owner calls the cops on a racial minority who's shoplifting that the shoplifting minority shouldn't be held to account or punished or nothing should happen to them because a reasonable person might there is no reasonable person to say yeah that what happened there was out of line yeah so you can see how this becomes pretty pretty detrimental so in essence like the laws that we then have that keep our society together that that that guard both personal responsibility as well as as you know in terms of individual liberty that if we begin to erode away at those laws that we've created by then basically allowing someone to to have more privilege to be able to assault those laws or to not be held accountable for those laws seems like you're identifying the irony here the the these this view which relentlessly attacks privilege that it attaches to white male straight any normative if you will or powerful identity because they relentlessly attack in this one direction by group identity they give themselves actually enormous privilege right they give themselves immunity to certain laws they give themselves immunity to criticism for example they could work in some and I've had people email me about this happening in their workplaces they can work in some industry and then if their white boss criticizes their work because it was done wrong that was a act of racism against them because they can read racism into that situation and so you constantly have people looking for reasons to be offended and yelling about it on the one hand and other people constantly afraid that they're going to offend people with no possible way to navigate the situation and so you'd have a total breakdown of any relationship across any two people who don't have exactly the same identity factors because it has to find a power dynamic in all of them and so that's you know within legal within the business world within how society is gonna function within how people are gonna get together say even just to have a party at their house all of a sudden you know the the identity salience whether you're paying attention to oh there's a black person here so have to be really careful and can't speak and and I don't want to offend anybody and everybody gets bound up and of course me even saying that that would be a concern is proving my own participation in the system whereas if I don't acknowledge it that would also be proving my participation in the system the books are cooked against you it makes society hard to have especially in a place like this in New York we have so many different ethnicities and you know immigrant statuses so many different people coming together from so many different backgrounds all at the same time it makes it hard to find that common identity like the power went out here yesterday and it was all over the news how this is a point of pride for New York it makes me sometimes wish I was from New York is that when stuff like that happens New York comes out and is New York doesn't matter who you are where you came from your New Yorkers we're gonna get New York through this it was big after 9/11 it was I went out last night for whatever reason and for what half of Midtown or whatever and people are out directing traffic in the streets helping the police and you said New York came together as New York that's what psychologists call a superordinate identity intersectionality carves superordinate identities apart anything that universe Eliza's people is not okay because it erases that special group identity status that's necessary to advance the agenda of identity politics which was according to Kimberly Crenshaw not exaggerating this explicitly the goal of introducing this aspect of theory in the first place and we haven't even talked about knowledge production where all of a sudden you can't the knowledge production through science and reason is problematized as being invented by white and men for white men who'd therefore cooked their biases into it this was a very Foucault daeun idea Foucault was very convinced that the sciences he called it bio power by the way the science is cooked in this idea of the predominant Malou whatever it was in that case would be white colonialist male straight etc they cooked in their biases into science as a knowledge producing system so that the knowledge it produces is intrinsically going to admit white male straight so on perspectives while excluding other ways of approaching knowledge which according to the cultural relativism that these radical views took on is that all cultures approaches can't be judged from any other cultures place and therefore in some sense we just have to punt the football and say they're all equal so now you have people saying well we're going to introduce indigenous philosophy into the Academy and the deal is because it's indigenous they're going to advance their ideas in the philosophy department and you can't argue against them you cannot criticize them because that would be a colonialist mindset taking over indigenous ideas they can't be challenged you can see that the bigotry of low expectations in this like oh like the natives or the black or the Hispanic or whatever more journalize group it is can't handle their ideas being challenged and that they won't survive scrutiny you can also see the idea that they're giving themselves massive amounts of privilege and you can also see how are we going to produce rigorous knowledge if it can't be subjected to some kind of a critical process that that tries to identify what's wrong with it and let what's right within it survive so you have this undermining of our ability to produce reliable knowledge the undermining of the ability to produce a coherent society the difference between a pluralistic society for instance that's filled with many different people of different origins who try to come together under a superordinate identity versus a multicultural in which everybody fragments into their own little cultural zones and they don't get along because everybody's got cultural barriers between them and then inflame those cultural barriers so that people can't even participate in them or enjoy them they call it cultural appropriation or they call it exploitation of some kind or exotic they call it exotic eyeing you know oh I really love Indian food well you just love it because it's exotic and you're you're making your appropriate or using their culture to your own advantage white man and so you inflame all of the sectors of society knowledge production law education even down to like clubs like knitting groups and and I have people reach out to me all the time from like hiking clubs that are turning into these identity politics Wars even just the basics of society everywhere and it's happening everywhere yeah be it so you're in everything you're looking at from a governmental perspective you're from an education perspective you're looking at things in arts and entertainment you're looking at things actually in faith in in the major faiths in life yeah of Protestant Christianity in Roman Catholicism and even in Islam now even in Islam and so within all of these there is that a press oppressor narrative that has to be forwarded that there is the intersectional framework that is that is being laid upon nearly everything yes for the purposes of division for the purposes of advancing identity politics which in the modern parlance means division they try to claim that the civil rights movements for identity politics because they are focused on a particular identity but there's a difference right there's a core difference the civil rights movement used the liberal method of now everybody will point you know you had Martin Luther King as a good cop and you had Malcolm X as a bad cop and he was definitely doing something different Black Panthers were definitely pushing black nationalism and black identity and so on but overall the success of the civil rights movements second wave feminism the black civil rights movement even the earlier phases of gay pride you all had this appeal to common humanity and making good on the promise that was laid down for example in the United States Constitution that everybody's equal before the law everybody's equal before if you will a creator and that we're gonna start there it was let's make good on that promise let's do the liberal thing let's try to you know understand each other for who we are what was Martin Luther King's famous thing of course judged by the content of their character not by the color of their skin which was problematized for not being sufficiently inclusive to sexual minorities by the way in Oregon a couple of years ago at the University of Oregon so probably Bataille is a statement well yeah they found a problem in it didn't talk when Luther King said great things about race but he didn't say anything about trans people probably because he was transphobic problematic cancel him take they wanted to take down a bust of Martin Luther King with that quote and have it removed because it was insufficiently inclusive to to sexual minorities because he wasn't talking about those he have this very liberal approach that was pushing at that time versus this kind that says let's reify race instead of let's try to be and you're not even allowed to say this anymore a colorblind let's say that character matters more than skin color that these social constructions of race need to be made irrelevant that was a civil rights movement the social constructions around homosexuality need to be made irrelevant they're just people let's start there they have different things let's work on work on it from there that was liberal civil rights identity politics is wholly different it reifies identity it says no being I am black means something more important than I am a person who happens to be black and that needs to be advanced on purpose so that's the agenda and that does create division not least I mean there are a number of mechanisms not least because it increases identity salience it makes who somebody somebody's racial or gender or sex or whatever characteristics jump out to people become relevant and become points of friction which by the way in the literature is called by Jose Medina epistemic friction which is considered necessary to affect meaningful change in social justice education this is all thoroughly theorized and this is exactly how they see the world that race identity is whether it's sexual racial etc all has to be made of central importance above all other factors and always considered in everything but considered perfectly which is impossible or else there's a problem and because you don't have their experience which comes from what's called standpoint epistemology this is well theorized to who you are in society meaning what racial and sexual groups you belong to gives you special access to knowledge as an oppressed person that other people can't possibly have because of that you know things that other people don't and so if you are privileged you have to shut up and listen and take for granted whatever the people say and agree with it mmm so I think we can state that there is the Europe identified the issue of the problem cooked books and conspiracy theories that's the problem cooked books what do you mean by that they've made it so it's a it's a game they I mean if I was the president I'd be saying the game is rigged you can't interact with any person who's a minority in any way who's taking up intersectionality and win you can't come out of this unscathed you can only agree them and have to be sorry that you agreed with them in the wrong way and too slowly the books are cooked you can't win the game is rigged against you if you can be found to be privileged in any way and privilege is relational so everybody is privileged in some way the books are cooked so that whatever the person who can claim more oppression has to say has to be accepted and believed on its own terms without question because to question it is to participate in the system that's holding them down you racist so essentially there is no win for anyone that is not participating in the intersectional game right so I would I would qualify that a little bit there is no winning for anybody who can be problematized which is everybody eventually if they've taken up the intersectional game if they buy in if they put that chip in on intersectionality and say yeah this is a tool there is kimberlé crenshaw calls it a practice that i'm going to engage in the second you accept the intersectional approach as valid your privilege makes you loose you cannot win the next big question that we'll deal with i think in the next couple days and talking through this is why okay why the other thing was conspiracy theories by the way ah so conspiracy theories what do you mean so I mean the conspiracy conspiracy theories here run all the way to the bottom we talked about Derek Bell's interest convergence theory we talk about white fragility any of these ideas that racism is this systemic force for example this is gonna go into white fragility is a systemic force that everybody participates in through the way we speak about things through the way we value representation through the routine interactions of the day and I say conspiracy theory and I actually mean a conspiracy theory with no conspirators everybody's participating but to not participate so this is kind of cookbook soup to not participate in the game that they want you to play is proof of your complicity so for example white P can't possibly disagree this is why fragility without exhibiting white fertility you could generalize this as we've talked about before in some of the papers we've written to you know a man can't possibly disagree with a woman because he's exhibiting male fragility if he does what you hear in phrases like cry white man tears or you know whatever right white women tears is a really big one that black feminists lob at white feminists so the it's kind of this mind-reading conspiracy we all play play participate in the conspiracy through the way we speak about things and how knowledge is produced and legitimized and there's this mind-reading that comes up that says Oh anytime you don't agree with us you're participating in the system yep Oh interest convergence theory of Derrick Bell white people or privileged groups will only give access or rights or opportunities to some minority status group when it's also in their interests to do so so there's no pure motive possible if you read all the way back to Foucault I mean he didn't get explicit about this but everything he looked at the history of madness the history of sexuality even in discipline and punish you look back at his writing it was essentially him describing progress that had made either scientific or social or whatever and then saying that well it's not really progress because it was just a new means for society to exert control over everybody so he talks in discipline and punish which is considered his best work about how there used to be public torture but what was public torture was it to torture somebody and you know get them to do what no it was a public display to prove that the sovereign had power and then that came down a notch and eventually you know his he had this whole series that goes down to the prison and it just kept coming down a notch where it's like okay now we're going to imprison people to reform them but again the reason that we want to do this is because we want to impose our power and will over them and make them be something different than they naturally would be so it's only because it's in our to do this they're actually it's all the way through this kind of conspiratorial mindset that the system was set up by the winners to keep themselves in power privilege always begets privilege you've probably you know everybody's heard you know power corrupts absolute power brothers absolutely or whatever well this is the idea you just take that that's it really and then take the idea of privilege the idea with in these critical postmodern theories is that power always works in mysterious ways no less through the systemic forces and discourse as we speak with that nobody can quite identify except in close read power always works to legitimize itself perpetuate itself maintain itself and exert itself over those it oppresses it always works in its own interests and you see that throughout all of this kind of whether it's postmodern Foucault theatre Larry cetera fee if it's not postmodern like pure Berdoo and these other guys that's the underlying theory hmm we have a lot to talk about there's a lot going on here in to actually unwind this for there's us in the same amount of the understand this is is really a task that I want to appreciate both you Peter Bogosian Helen pluck Rose how you guys have entered you have undertaken a massive but necessary project because we have to get back to thinking in a certain way that is is not always leading to our own self victimization right and exactly us to be able to program progress not only civilization as a whole but individually as human beings right it's gonna be necessary to think through things these things and go back to what are the root causes of what some of these issues are right we're gonna undertake to do that here in the next couple days [Music]

Channel: Sovereign Nations

Views: 77,442

Keywords: Sovereign, Nations, Sovereign Nations, New Discourses, James Lindsay, Michael O'Fallon, Trojan Horse, Video, interview, new york, nyc, new york city, rooftop, philosophy, postmodernism, deconstructionism, politics, intersectionality, critical theory, critical race theory, racism, crt

Id: IKpU6lyZKws

Length: 55min 36sec (3336 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 11 2019