Perhaps even worse, it risks obscuring the actual ways in which the shameful racial history of the US set in motion the present day observed racial disparities and prevents us from formulating the policies that might best address such disparities in the present. Both free inquiry and unbiased research and the ability to help groups disproportionately impacted by our history are going to become increasingly difficult if CRT continues to be the only way of thinking about systemic racism.
CRT approaches, then, rest on two claims, the second of which is believed to flow from the first.
Claim One: Systemic Racism
The first claim is that blacks suffered not only two hundred and fifty years of slavery, resulting in a direct and massive group-level difference in wealth, but another subsequent one hundred years of official subjugation and segregation and denial of the public goods that underwrite flourishing. This has led to group-level disparities in human capital development, resulting in, among other things, disparate outcomes. This is an inescapable fact. The modern racial landscape is not caused by something fundamentally wrong with black people—as true a white supremacist or racist would claim.
For example, the higher crime and victimisation rates among black communities could, as James Foreman Jr. has argued, be the product of an honour culture put in motion by Jim Crow-era underpolicing of any crime that did not disrupt the then racial and economic hierarchy. Higher poverty rates can be traced in large part to the economic legacy of slavery, as well as to various racist policies that prevented the acquisition of wealth.
Rerun the same multifaceted group immiseration experiment with any group, and you will get largely the same results. If blacks had immigrated to the US and been treated like, say, Norwegian immigrants, these massive developmental disparities would probably be largely absent. Although immigrants can certainly arrive with different cultural and economic averages that can manifest in some group-level differences, given the particular traits needed to succeed under different cultural circumstances, the massive differences in flourishing between black and white Americans are certainly impacted by our history around race.
In the US, discrimination against blacks has historically been orders of magnitude more profound than discrimination against other ethnic groups. Even without the racist post-hoc justifications of the practice, slavery would have had group-level ramifications on its own, given the near total lack of wealth held by blacks in 1865. Add a century of segregation and racism and you have a situation unmatched in its capacity to reproduce group-level generational misery.
This empirical claim about upstream group-level causation does not necessarily imply specific downstream personal or policy solutions. In fact, we need to consider a wider range of possibilities for reducing group-level suffering.
Where CRT runs into serious conceptual trouble, though, is in its second central claim.
Claim Two: All Disparities Are the Result of Continuing Racism
The second claim is that, because these disparities were set in motion by America’s reprehensible racial history, each of them is literally caused by this history in both the group and individual instance. Every disparity observed today stems from racism and white supremacy. Those who fail to seek a forced repair of the disparity are guilty of racism and perpetuating white supremacy. Any judgement, system or policy that perpetuates a disparity that can be traced to a racist past is itself white supremacist and racist. Since racism is the underlying cause of all disparities, large and small, insufficient alarm and concern at these disparities is also racist.
This second claim allows anti-racist ideology to be weaponised by both moralists and authoritarians.
This presents a dilemma: if racist policies have resulted in disparate flourishing metrics, why not address these disparities in every arena in which they exist?
The error here is imagining that group disparities continue to be neatly tied to the racism that set them in motion. This leads to a strange obsession with the disparities themselves and not their upstream, proximate causes, which at the individual level are not racially unique.
Conservative economist Glenn Loury has convincingly argued that present disparities are the result of developmental challenges that may have arisen as a consequence of racism, but no longer depend on it. Leftist political scientist Adolph Reed Jr. has reached a similar conclusion, from a Marxist perspective: the developmental problems of the black community are simply the result of greater exposure to a destructive political economy that can handicap anyone’s flourishing. While this greater exposure owes its origins to racism, Reed argues that the political economy itself, not black identity, should be the focus of policy efforts, since that same political economy can be the source of misery for anyone.
Despite their ideological differences, Loury and Reed have hit on an important point: disparities, rather than being independent variables that prove racism, are the result of experiences that can cause anyone suffering. The fact that blacks suffer more from them originated in racism but no longer tied to it.
Imagine a university that sincerely wants to reflect American demographics by having 14% of its faculty and students be the descendants of slaves. What do we do with the fact that being a successful student or faculty member requires human capital that our racial history has distributed unequally? How do you address a disparity in flourishing when there is a disparity in the human capital required for flourishing? Do we simply nullify those requirements and denounce them as racist, as CRT advocates do? Or do we give up entirely and say it’s all in the past and there’s nothing we can do, and focus solely on individual merit, as staunchly colour-blind meritocrats and opportunistic racists do?
A Better Definition of Systemic Racism
The unique history of blacks in the United States has left them more exposed to political, economic and developmental problems that can immiserate anyone. The best way to address this is to concentrate on the economic and developmental problems more broadly, and in so doing address the racial disparity without overtly racializing either problems or solutions.
by Brian Erb, Areo | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. See also: Creating an Inhabitable World for Humans Means Dismantling Rigid Forms of Individuality (Time).]
