critical race theory

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description: academic movement regarding society, race and culture

40 results

pages: 378 words: 107,957

Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody
by Helen Pluckrose and James A. Lindsay
Published 14 Jul 2020

Consequently, critical race Theory takes an unapologetically activist stance: Unlike some academic disciplines, critical race theory contains an activist dimension. It tries not only to understand our social situation but to change it, setting out not only to ascertain how society organizes itself along racial lines and hierarchies but to transform it for the better.28 As a result, we hear the language of critical race Theory from activists in all walks of life, and one could be easily forgiven—if critical race Theory didn’t consider it racist to forgive this—for thinking that critical race Theory sounds rather racist itself, in ascribing profound failures of morals and character to white people (as consequences of being white in a white-dominant society).

Legal scholar Angela Harris develops this idea further by advocating a multiple-consciousness (standpoint) theory: “It is a premise of this article that we are not born with a ‘self,’ but rather are composed of a welter of partial, sometimes contradictory, or even antithetical ‘selves.’”21 This idea of a multiple consciousness, rooted in identity and positionality, recurs repeatedly in postmodern scholarship on the blending of differing layers of marginalized identity, and has had a huge impact on how knowledge is studied and understood within feminist scholarship and critical race Theory. Despite the apparent complexity of constantly having to consider the impact of one’s social position on being both a speaker and a knower and relating it to the social positions of those around you, critical race Theory is usually exceptionally clear in its exposition. Indeed, the frustratingly obscure and ambiguous postmodern language of postcolonial and queer Theories is conspicuously absent from critical race Theory, probably because of its genesis in legal studies. Critical race Theory maintains a commitment to the role of discourse in constructing social reality and addresses issues of apparently infinite complexity, but it does not usually despair of conveying meaning through clear language.

As it continues to assert itself as the only legitimate way to study or discuss topics of gender, sex, and sexuality, then, it also continues to do harm to the causes it seeks most interestedly to support. 5 CRITICAL RACE THEORY AND INTERSECTIONALITY Ending Racism by Seeing It Everywhere Critical race Theory is, at root, an American phenomenon. So thoroughly is this the case that although its ideas have been used outside the United States for some time, they are often highly flavored by U.S. racial history. Critical race Theory holds that race is a social construct that was created to maintain white privilege and white supremacy. This idea originated long before postmodernism with W.

pages: 314 words: 88,524

American Marxism
by Mark R. Levin
Published 12 Jul 2021

University of Illinois Law Review, February 23, 1995, https://sph.umd.edu/sites/default/files/files/Bell_Whos%20Afraid%20of%20CRT_1995UIllLRev893.pdf (April 8, 2021), 901. 30 Ibid. 31 Steve Klinsky, “The Civil Rights Legend Who Opposed Critical Race Theory,” RealClearPolitics, October 12, 2020, https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/10/12/the_civil_rights_legend_who_opposed_critical_race_theory_144423.html (April 8, 2021). 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid. 35 Delgado and Stefancic, Critical Race Theory, 45, 46. 36 Butcher and Gonzalez, “Critical Race Theory, the New Intolerance, and Its Grip on America.” 37 Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility (Boston: Beacon Press, 2018), 28. 38 Delgado and Stefancic, Critical Race Theory, 29. 39 Chris Demaske, “Critical Race Theory,” First Amendment Encyclopedia, https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/1254/critical-race-theory, (April 9, 2021). 40 Delgado and Stefancic, Critical Race Theory, 125. 41 Ibid., 127, 128. 42 Ibid., 132, 133. 43 Butcher and Gonzalez, “Critical Race Theory, the New Intolerance, and Its Grip on America.” 44 Ozlem Sensoy and Robin DiAngelo, Is Everyone Really Equal?

Board of Education and the Interest-Convergence Dilemma,” Harvard Law Review, January 11, 1980, https://harvardlawreview.org/1980/01/brown-v-board-of-education-and-the-interest-convergence-dilemma/ (April 8, 2021). 29 Derrick A. Bell, “Who’s Afraid of Critical Race Theory?” University of Illinois Law Review, February 23, 1995, https://sph.umd.edu/sites/default/files/files/Bell_Whos%20Afraid%20of%20CRT_1995UIllLRev893.pdf (April 8, 2021), 901. 30 Ibid. 31 Steve Klinsky, “The Civil Rights Legend Who Opposed Critical Race Theory,” RealClearPolitics, October 12, 2020, https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/10/12/the_civil_rights_legend_who_opposed_critical_race_theory_144423.html (April 8, 2021). 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid. 35 Delgado and Stefancic, Critical Race Theory, 45, 46. 36 Butcher and Gonzalez, “Critical Race Theory, the New Intolerance, and Its Grip on America.” 37 Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility (Boston: Beacon Press, 2018), 28. 38 Delgado and Stefancic, Critical Race Theory, 29. 39 Chris Demaske, “Critical Race Theory,” First Amendment Encyclopedia, https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/1254/critical-race-theory, (April 9, 2021). 40 Delgado and Stefancic, Critical Race Theory, 125. 41 Ibid., 127, 128. 42 Ibid., 132, 133. 43 Butcher and Gonzalez, “Critical Race Theory, the New Intolerance, and Its Grip on America.” 44 Ozlem Sensoy and Robin DiAngelo, Is Everyone Really Equal?

Alinsky, Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals (New York: Vintage Books, 1971), xxii, xxiii. 40 Ibid., 130, 131, 133. 41 Chuck Todd, Meet the Press, December 30, 2018, https://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/meet-press-december-30-2018-n951406 (April 11, 2021). 42 “Global Warming,” mrcNewsBusters, https://www.newsbusters.org/issues-events-groups/global-warming (April 11, 2021). 43 Zach Goldberg, “How the Media Led the Great Racial Awakening,” Tablet, August 4, 2020, https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/media-great-racial-awakening (April 11, 2021). 44 Ibid. 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid. 47 Ted Johnson, “CNN Announces Expansion of Team Covering Race Beat,” Deadline, July 13, 2020, https://deadline.com/2020/07/cnn-jeff-zucker-race-beat-1202984234/ (April 11, 2021). 48 Martin Luther King Jr., “I Have a Dream,” 1963, Encyclopaedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/topic/I-Have-A-Dream (April 11, 2021). 49 Robert Henderson, “Tell Only Lies,” City Journal, December 27, 2020, https://www.city-journal.org/self-censorship (April 11, 2021). 50 Ibid. 51 Ibid. 52 Ibid. 53 Eric Kaufmann, “Academic Freedom in Crisis: Punishment, Political Discrimination, and Self-Censorship,” Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, March 1, 2021, https://cspicenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/AcademicFreedom.pdf (April 11, 2021). 54 Kelsey Ann Naughton, “Speaking Freely: What Students Think about Expression at American Colleges,” Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, October 2017, https://d28htnjz2elwuj.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/11091747/survey-2017-speaking-freely.pdf (April 11, 2021). 55 Diane Ravitch, The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn (New York: Vintage, 2003), 3–4. 56 Ibid., 160. 57 Krystina Skurk, “Critical Race Theory in K–12 Education,” RealClearPublicAffairs, https://www.realclearpublicaffairs.com/articles/2020/07/16/critical_race_theory_in_k-12_education_498969.html (April 11, 2021); Max Eden, “Critical Race Theory in American Classrooms,” City Journal, September 18, 2020, https://www.city-journal.org/critical-race-theory-in-american-classrooms (April 11, 2021). 58 Todd Starnes, “Parents furious over school’s plan to teach gender spectrum, fluidity,” Fox News, May 15, 2015, https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/parents-furious-over-schools-plan-to-teach-gender-spectrum-fluidity (April 11, 2021). 59 Charles Fain Lehman, “American High Schools Go Woke,” Washington Free Beacon, November 30, 2020, https://freebeacon.com/campus/american-high-schools-go-woke/ (April 11, 2021). 60 UN Climate Change Learning Platform, https://www.uncclearn.org/ (April 11, 2021). 61 Allison Graham, “Why Should Schools Teach Climate Education?”

The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time
by Yascha Mounk
Published 26 Sep 2023

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT set of postmodern critiques: On the institutional relationship between critical legal studies and the emerging field of critical race theory, as well as the broader influence of postmodernism on the tradition, see Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, “Twenty Years of Critical Race Theory: Looking Back to Move Forward,” Connecticut Law Review 43, no. 5 (July 2011): 1253–352. For critiques of critical legal studies from key scholars within the emerging discipline of critical race theory, see “Part 2: Critical Race Theory and Critical Legal Studies: Contestation and Coalition,” in Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement, ed. Kimberlé Crenshaw et al.

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT PART II: THE VICTORY OF THE IDENTITY SYNTHESIS she sounded pessimistic: Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, “Twenty Years of Critical Race Theory: Looking Back to Move Forward,” Connecticut Law Review 43, no. 5 (July 2011): 1253–352. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “Broad segments of the population”: Crenshaw, “Twenty Years of Critical Race Theory,” 1318. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT close to denying: Crenshaw, “Twenty Years of Critical Race Theory,” 1324. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “at odds with key elements”: Crenshaw, “Twenty Years of Critical Race Theory,” 1324. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “critiques of racism”: Crenshaw, “Twenty Years of Critical Race Theory,” 1333. “As racial justice advocacy comes under increasing pressure from colorblind victories in both the legal and political arenas, lawyers, researchers, and advocates find themselves pushed back into their own end zone” (Crenshaw, “Twenty Years of Critical Race Theory,” 1261–62).

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT more traditional course: Lauren Michele Jackson, “The Void That Critical Race Theory Was Created to Fill,” New Yorker, July 27, 2021, www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-void-that-critical-race-theory-was-created-to-fill. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT found this unacceptable: Jackson, “Void.” GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT those young academics: Jackson, “Void.” GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT organize a summer workshop: Angela Onwuachi-Willig, “Celebrating Critical Race Theory at 20,” Iowa Law Review 94 (2009). GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT A new movement: Isaac Gottesman, The Critical Turn in Education: From Marxist Critique to Poststructuralist Feminism to Critical Theories of Race (New York: Routledge, 2016), 124.

pages: 262 words: 69,328

The Great Wave: The Era of Radical Disruption and the Rise of the Outsider
by Michiko Kakutani
Published 20 Feb 2024

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT critical race theory as a hot-button topic: Theodoric Meyer, Maggie Severns, and Meridith McGraw, “ ‘The Tea Party to the 10th Power’: Trumpworld Bets Big on Critical Race Theory,” Politico, June 23, 2021, politico.com/​news/​2021/​06/​23/​trumpworld-critical-race-theory-495712; Terry Gross, “Uncovering Who Is Driving the Fight Against Critical Race Theory in Schools,” Fresh Air, NPR, June 24, 2021, npr.org/​2021/​06/​24/​1009839021/​uncovering-who-is-driving-the-fight-against-critical-race-theory-in-schools; Sarah Schwartz, “Who’s Really Driving Critical Race Theory Legislation? An Investigation,” Education Week, July 19, 2021, edweek.org/​policy-politics/​whos-really-driving-critical-race-theory-legislation-an-investigation/​2021/​07.

Whereas most efforts to remove a particular book from a school syllabus or library used to originate with individual parents or school board members, book bans are increasingly coordinated by right-wing organizations. Like efforts to ban the teaching of “critical race theory,” they are less real grassroots movements than examples of astroturfing—that is, national campaigns coordinated from above but disguised as local efforts. The former Trump adviser Steve Bannon sees critical race theory as a hot-button topic that Republicans can use to energize the base. Conservative media outlets like Fox News and Breitbart are beating the war drums on the subject, while activists (in some cases with ties to big-money donors like the Koch, Mercer, and DeVos families) are sharing strategies and helping to coordinate efforts on the ground.

He went to war against one of his state’s largest employers, the Walt Disney Company, when it opposed his “Don’t Say Gay” bill. And he’s introduced new educational rules that led to the scrubbing of math and social studies textbooks for references to anything that might be regarded as “woke,” and a crackdown on schools in the state university system that teach “identity politics” or “critical race theory.” In 2023, directives that tried to sanitize some of the most shameful chapters in American history were issued to Florida public schools, mandating that students be taught that some Black people actually benefited from slavery because it helped them develop “highly specialized trades” like blacksmithing, shoemaking, and fishing.

pages: 309 words: 81,243

The Authoritarian Moment: How the Left Weaponized America's Institutions Against Dissent
by Ben Shapiro
Published 26 Jul 2021

While America had abolished slavery and eventually eviscerated Jim Crow—and done so, as former slave Frederick Douglass suggested in 1852, because of the ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution—the argument that America was at root racist and thus unfixable had some plausibility. This was the contention of so-called Critical Race Theory (CRT). CRT transmuted the class-based argument that America is rigged into a race-based one. According to CRT, every institution in America is rooted in white supremacy; every institution is “structurally” or “institutionally” racist. This idea was first put forth by Stokely Carmichael, then the head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, in 1966 (later, Carmichael would become a black separatist and the head of the Black Panther Party).

Expositors Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic set out the basic principles of CRT: first, that “racism is ordinary, not aberrational”; second, that “our system of white-over-color ascendancy serves important purposes, both psychic and material.” The system, in other words, is designed to create racially disparate outcomes; any proof of racially disparate outcomes is evidence of the malignancy of the system.26 Critical Race Theory pioneer Derrick Bell wrote that “the whole liberal worldview of private rights and public sovereignty mediated by the rule of law needed to be exploded . . . a worldview premised upon the public and private spheres is an attractive mirage that masks the reality of economic and political power.”27 According to Bell, even purportedly good outcomes may be evidence of white supremacy implicit within the system—white people are so invested in the system that if they have to do something purportedly racially tolerant to uphold it, they will.

Calls to destroy the system from within were rejected, not merely by the political Right but by the political Left. Identity politics had been roundly defeated. In fact, in 2004, a young Barack Obama confirmed that thesis in his Democratic National Convention speech rejecting the central tenets of identity politics and Critical Race Theory. “I stand here knowing that my story is part of the larger American story, that I owe a debt to all of those who came before me, and that, in no other country on earth, is my story even possible,” Barack Obama stated, to wild cheers. He would go on to chide the myth, pervasive in inner-city neighborhoods, “that says a black youth with a book is acting white.”

pages: 290 words: 73,000

Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism
by Safiya Umoja Noble
Published 8 Jan 2018

I take up the communications scholar Norman Fairclough’s rationale for doing this kind of critique of the discourses that contribute to the meaning-making process as a form of “critical social science.”92 To contextualize my method and its appropriateness to my theoretical approach, I note here that scholars who work in critical race theory and Black feminism often use a qualitative method such as close reading, which provides more than numbers to explain results and which focuses instead on the material conditions on which these results are predicated. Challenging Cybertopias All of this leads to more discussion about ideologies that serve to stabilize and normalize the notion of commercial search, including the still-popular and ever-persistent dominant narratives about the neutrality and objectivity of the Internet itself—beyond Google and beyond utopian visions of computer software and hardware.

Jonathan Furner, a professor of information studies at UCLA, suggests that information institutions and systems, which I argue extend from state-supported organizations such as the Library of Congress to the Internet, are participating in “legitimizing the ideology of dominant groups” to the detriment of people of color.8 His case study of the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) system, for example, underscores the problematic conceptualizations of race and culture and efforts to “deracialize” the library and classification schemes.9 Furner offers several strategies for thinking about how to address these issues, using critical race theory as the guiding theoretical and methodological model. I believe these strategies are of great value to thinking about the information studies issues at hand in this research: • admission on the part of designers that bias in classification schemes exists, and indeed is an inevitable result of the ways in which they are currently structured; • recognition that adherence to a policy of neutrality will contribute little to eradication of that bias and indeed can only extend its life; [and] • construction, collection and analysis of narrative expressions of the feelings, thoughts, and beliefs of classification-scheme users who identify with particular racially-defined populations.10 While the web-indexing process is not the same as classification systems such as DDC, the application of the theoretical model is still valid for thinking about conceptualizing algorithms and indexing models that could actively intervene in the default normativity of racism and sexism in information resources.

Opportunities abound for the interdisciplinarity of LIS to extend more deeply into cultural and feminist studies, because these social science fields provide powerful and important social context for information about people that can help frame how that information is organized and made available. To date, much of the attention to information organization, storage, and retrieval processes has been influenced and, more importantly, funded by scientific research needs stemming from World War II and the Cold War.15 The adoption of critical race theory as a stance in the field would mean examining the beliefs about the neutrality and objectivity of the entire field of LIS and moving toward undoing racist classification and knowledge-management practices. Such a stance would be a major contribution that could have impact on the development of new approaches to organizing and accessing knowledge about marginalized groups.

pages: 226 words: 58,341

The New Snobbery
by David Skelton
Published 28 Jun 2021

The concept of identity politics has long since entrenched itself in many sociology, psychology and anthropology departments across the country. A whole new range of subjects has also grown with an explicit focus on pushing these concepts. In 2020, an angry letter condemning a black government minister for expressing doubts about critical race theory was signed by academics representing a wide range of recently established disciplines, including the near ubiquitous subjects of gender studies and black studies, plus other more niche disciplines such as cultural equity, ableism, inclusive education, race- and practice-based social justice and postcolonial studies.

The dominant ideology is identity-based and designed to emphasise differences and divide rather than unite us. This theory reaches its apotheosis with the concept of white privilege, defined as the inherent privileges possessed by white people in a society marked by prejudice. This is supported by an idea described as critical race theory, which examines society and culture using the lens of race. This argues that special privileges in society are enjoyed by white people, or the ‘white, heteronormative patriarchy’ to use the jargon. The concept of white fragility, developed by a wealthy diversity consultant, self-described in her own book as the ‘new racial-sheriff in town’, argues that white people in Western societies all are inherently privileged and inherently, psychologically racist.

This cannot be done via elite-led symbolism. Instead, it must be done by building a coalition that crosses sexuality, race and gender lines and accepts that the vast majority of people, regardless of identity don’t want to denigrate British history nor divide the country. Notes 1 Jeremy Bohonos, ‘Critical race theory and working-class white men’, Gender, Work and Organization (2020), vol. 28, no. 1. 2 Mason, ‘Corbynism is over’. 3 David Brooks, ‘The problem with wokeness’, Seattle Times, 8 June 2018. 4 Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender and Identity – And Why This Harms Everybody (North Carolina: Pitchstone Publishing, 2020), p. 12. 5 Rory Tingle, ‘Outrage as controversial taxpayer-funded black studies professor who says Britain is “built on racism” claims Churchill was “a white supremacist” in debate’, Daily Mail, 12 February 2020. 6 Dan Falvey, ‘Oxford lecturer doesn’t want UK to find coronavirus vaccine due to political correctness’, Daily Express, 24 April 2021. 7 Edward Said, ‘A window on the world’, The Guardian, 2 August 2003. 8 Trevor Phillips, ‘When you erase a nation’s past, you threaten its future’, The Times, 18 September 2020. 9 Craig Simpson, ‘Churchill college panel claims wartime PM was a white supremacist leading an empire “worse than the Nazis”’, Daily Telegraph, 11 February 2021. 10 ‘Keele manifesto for decolonizing the curriculum’, Pluto Journals (2018), vol. 5, nos 1–2, pp. 97–9. 11 See the ‘Decolonise Education’ section of the NUS website. 12 Gurminder K.

pages: 147 words: 42,682

Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America
by Charles Murray
Published 14 Jun 2021

The term itself fell out of use. The twenty-first century saw the growth of a new ideology that repudiated the American creed altogether. It began in academia as intersectionality and critical race theory conjoined with a bastardized vision of socialism. By 2016, it exerted significant influence within the left wing of the Democratic Party. As I write, the new ideology still goes by several names. “Woke” originated within the African American community. “Critical race theory” and “anti-racism” are the most widely used terms. But there’s one label that covers it all: identity politics. At the heart of identity politics is the truth that “who we are” as individuals is importantly shaped by our race and sex.

Coleman Report college admissions; and IQ distribution College Board Consortium on Financing Higher Education Cotton, Tom Crime in the United States (FBI) crime rates: big-city; and economic activity; index crimes; murder arrests; and policing practice; property crime; reported offenses; shootings; small-city; and social policy; and socioeconomic status criminal justice reform critical race theory Cultural Revolution (China) Dallas, TX Declaration of Independence Democratic Party demographics: big-city; and immigration; misperceptions of; nomenclature; and self-identification; small-town/rural Dick, Philip, ix education: affirmative action in; inequality in; reform of; remedial; school vouchers; see also achievement tests; teachers Education Longitudinal Study Elementary and Secondary Education Act (1965) employment discrimination Equal Educational Opportunity Survey (1965) Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Fayetteville, NC FBI: Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) feminism Floyd, George Forbes Fort Lauderdale, FL g (general intelligence) Gallup Gardner, Howard genetic testing gentrification Goldberg, Jonah Gould, Stephen J.

pages: 450 words: 113,173

The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties
by Christopher Caldwell
Published 21 Jan 2020

The system itself came to be called political correctness. Political correctness Never did a movement seem more assured of history’s derision. Political correctness, or P.C., as it was called by everyone except its adherents, was a grab bag of political stances descended from queer theory, critical race theory, critical legal studies, post-colonial studies, and various other new academic schools of thought. It aimed at the redesign of institutions and philosophies so that they might recognize, accept, vindicate, validate, and console groups deemed disadvantaged: blacks, women, gays, immigrants. The intellectual signature of P.C., wherever it appeared, was an unwillingness to distinguish between institutions (which could be oppressive) and opinions (which could only be misguided).

Brock in Race & Class 2 (January 1960): 76–77. almost unmentioned in print: Robert S. Levine, The Lives of Frederick Douglass (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2016), 11–13. “the greatest racial consciousness-raising”: Derrick A. Bell, Jr., “Brown v. Board of Education and the Interest Convergence Dilemma,” in Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement, edited by Kimberlé Crenshaw, Neil T. Gotanda, Gary Peller, and Kendall Thomas (New York: New Press, 1995), 21. “Naturally the Narrative”: Douglass, Narrative, xxi. had turned against Reconstruction: See Charles Beard, Contemporary American History, 1877–1913 (New York: Macmillan, 1914), 3.

“I can recall distinctly”: Alan David Freeman, “Legitimizing Racial Discrimination Through Antidiscrimination Law,” Minnesota Law Review 62, no. 1049 (1977–78): 1055n. “the same opportunities”: Gallup poll, August 23–28, 1962. 70 percent told pollsters: Gallup poll, May 2–7, 1968. Gallup had gotten almost exactly the same results polling the year before. “What we find most amazing”: Crenshaw et al., eds., Critical Race Theory, xvi. “Does the Senator not agree”: Congressional Record—Senate, April 13, 1964, 7787. “was certainly the objective”: Nathan Glazer, “Individual Rights Against Group Rights” (1978), in Glazer, Ethnic Dilemmas, 1964–1982 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), 269. “For one of the major groups”: Nathan Glazer, “The Peoples of America” (1965), in Glazer, Ethnic Dilemmas, 27.

pages: 308 words: 97,480

The Undertow: Scenes From a Slow Civil War
by Jeff Sharlet
Published 21 Mar 2023

An old White man in cowboy boots and cowboy hat amened in the front row and another, who boasted he was at the Capitol on January 6, patrolled on a Segway, trailing a flapping Old Glory. Most of the crowd huddled back in the shade, propping up flags. A Second Amendment activist ranted against Critical Race Theory. The connection to Ashli was vague. An indicted January 6 insurrectionist, Jorge Riley, said schools are making our kids gay. “Tell it, George!” shouted the old cowboy. Then Antifa arrived. A column of mostly black-clad, black-masked protesters coming around the bend from a rally on the other side of the Capitol, for what should have been the twenty-eighth birthday of Breonna Taylor, a Black woman shot dead in her home by police on March 13, 2020.

We learned how, by signing our birth certificates—government documents—our own mothers unwittingly condemned us to slavery. Yes, slavery. It all went back to the Fourteenth Amendment. You may believe that’s the one that ensured the rights of formerly enslaved people through “equal protection of the laws.” That’s what they want you to think. “It’s not your fault,” Straight said. You got fake news. You got critical race theory. You believed what you were told, which is why you do not know that the Fourteenth Amendment made you—the great White “you”—a slave, no longer free under the natural law of God as breathed into the Constitution but instead dominated by the “laws” bureaucrats make for bankers. What Straight was doing was not so simple as rhetorically waving a Confederate flag, even if it amounted to much the same grievance-switching as perpetrated by the myth of the Lost Cause—White people as the true victims of the structures built for the sake of White power.

We can defend ourselves.” The anger kept twisting. Rob and Peggy and Jerry and James. Abortion and guns and God and Whiteness and women and cities and borders and then guns again. The intersectionality of fascism: all perceived threats, across all time—“Indian wars” and new Cold War and critical race theory—brutally interconnected. ›‹ “Wisconsin Needs Farmers.” Brian Bushman was a farmer, a potato culturist, owner of much land and many trucks that supplied taters to Walmarts far from his little town. A prosperous man. On his porch I spoke first to an old woman who said Trisha raised the Trump flag, and then to Trisha, a handsome if tentative woman in perhaps her late thirties.

pages: 307 words: 93,073

Win Every Argument: The Art of Debating, Persuading, and Public Speaking
by Mehdi Hasan
Published 27 Feb 2023

What if a study suggesting that climate change isn’t as bad as we thought … is funded by fossil fuel companies? That might raise some red flags. And if the “ordinary mom” on Fox railing against critical race theory in school turns out to be … a former Republican Party operative? Surprise! Maybe there’s something less ordinary going on. The critics would say that a circumstantial ad hominem argument is a fallacy because the fossil fuel funding doesn’t automatically mean the study is incorrect. The mom’s political affiliations don’t negate the possibility that there might be a real problem with critical race theory in schools. (There isn’t, but that’s an argument for another book!) The critics, though, are mistaken here—or at least being absolutist.

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pages: 384 words: 105,110

A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life
by Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein
Published 14 Sep 2021

They teach us that our sensory apparatus biases us, and that we are mostly unaware of those biases. They reveal that schools, factories, and prisons are similar in their use of power to control populations (as analyzed by Michel Foucault in his metaphorical extension of Bentham’s Panopticon). And Critical Race Theory has at its foundation the real observation that the American legal system has had a particularly difficult time emerging from its racist past, and that full recovery from that past is not yet on the horizon. These are a few real and valuable contributions that such ideologies have contributed to the world.

Television, disordered eating, and young women in Fiji: Negotiating body image and identity during rapid social change. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, 28(4): 533–559. 4. For two excellent descriptions of how post-modernism, and its intellectual descendants such as post-structuralism and Critical Race Theory, have invaded the academy, see Pluckrose, H., Lindsay, J. and Boghossian, P., 2018. Academic grievance studies and the corruption of scholarship. Areo, February 10, 2018; and Pluckrose, H., and Lindsay, J., 2020. Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody.

K., 47–48 Chesterton’s fence, 47–48 chicken, 83 Chicxulub meteor, 29 childhood, 145–64, 146 antifragile, becoming, 152–55 cultural information passed on during, 147 inanimate and nonresponsive objects, dangers of babysitting by, 157–58 learning during, 145–50 legal drugs and, 158–60 observation and experience, learning from, 148 open-ended play versus restricted play, 148–50 plasticity and, 146, 150–52 play and, 156–57 rules for children, establishing, 154–55 safety and security, instilling sense of, 153–54 social, long-lived species and, 147 sport and, 156–57 suggestions regarding, 162–64 tinkering and, 156–57 transformation during, 160–62 variation in parenting across cultures, 151–52 chimpanzees, 32–33, 34, 79, 85, 93, 141 chloroplasts, 20 clades, 12 clams, 83 close calls, 196–200 clown fish, 107 cod, 65 collective consciousness, 8–9, 211, 236 college education, 176–83 comparative anatomy, 63 complexity, and test of adaptation, 45 conformity, 214–16 conquistadors, 3, 225 consciousness, 7–10, 210–211, 226, 252 in animals, 212–13 being in the zone and, 9 campfires as convergence point of culture and, 209–10 collective, 8–9, 211 corrective suggestions for, 221 culture versus, 9–11, 54, 71, 209–21 defined, 7–8, 210–11 individual, 8 novel or expansionary circumstances and, 54, 211–12 peopling of New World and, 213–14 sacred versus shamanistic, 220–21 secondary compounds and, 96 sociality and, 212–13 theory of mind and, 8–9, 158, 169, 200–203, 201–2 conservatives, 233, 235 consumption, 237, 238 cooking, 52–53, 75, 80–82 cooperative behavior, 8, 36, 131, 136, 201 cooperative breeding, 127 corn, 82–83 Cornucopianism, 50 cost-benefit analysis, 204–5 COVID-19 pandemic, 71, 247–49 cowbirds, 126 cows, 83 craft, 9, 85, 227 craniates, 23 crepuscular, 91–92 Critical Race Theory, 193–94 crocodiles, 107 crows, 8, 34, 131, 147, 202, 212 cuckoos, 126 culture, 7, 9–10, 210–213, 252 adaptive evolution and, 13–14 ancestral wisdom in times of change, relevancy of, 213–14 campfires as convergence point of consciousness and, 209–10 conformity and, 214–16 consciousness versus, 9–11, 209–21 corrective suggestions for, 221 defined, 210 diet and, 76 elder’s passing on of knowledge and wisdom, 138 innovation and, 214 literally false, metaphorically true beliefs, 216–18 as regulator of genome expression, 14–17 religion and, 219 ritual and, 219 sacred versus shamanistic, 220–21 stability, and ancestral traditions, 211, 212 cytoplasm, 108 Darwin, Charles, 42, 80 Dawkins, Richard, 16, 257, 267, 282 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, 10 Delano, Laura, 62 Denisovans, 35 design constraint trade-offs, 49 De Waal, Frans, 140 diaphragm, 28 diarrhea, 46–47 Dickens, Charles, 1 diet.

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New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI
by Frank Pasquale
Published 14 May 2020

A human form of life is fragile, embodied in mortal flesh, time-delimited, and irreproducible in silico.43 Wittgenstein’s insights became a foundation for a series of works demonstrating the “limits of AI,” such as Hubert L. Dreyfus’s prescient What Computers Can’t Do.44 That line of research is now bolstered, enriched, and renewed by a wave of work inspired by feminism and critical race theory, all of which illuminate the limits of abstracting concepts away from their social setting. As Safiya Noble’s Algorithms of Oppression demonstrated, Google’s ostensibly neutral and automatic methods of processing search terms led to alarmingly racist results pages, which needed human intervention to be corrected.

For a discussion of how design inefficiency contradicts this urge of coders, see Clive Thompson, “Coders’ Primal Urge to Kill Inefficiency—Everywhere,” Wired, March 19, 2019, https://www.wired.com/story/coders-efficiency-is-beautiful/?curator=TechREDEF. 9. Arjun Jayadev and Samuel Bowles, “Guard Labor,” Journal of Development Economics 79, no. 2 (2006): 328–348. 10. I. Bennett Capers, “Afrofuturism, Critical Race Theory, and Policing in the Year 2044,” New York University Law Review 94, no. 1 (2019): 1–60. See also William H. Simon, “In Defense of the Panopticon,” Boston Review 39, no. 5 (2014): 58–74. 11. Anthony Funnell, “Internet of Incarceration: How AI Could Put an End to Prisons As We Know Them,” ABC News, August 14, 2017, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-08-14/how-ai-could-put-an-end-to-prisons-as-we-know-them/8794910. 12.

See COVID-19 pandemic; pandemics “cost disease,” 171–172, 186–190, 196, 198, 299n68 COVID-19 pandemic, 100, 166, 191, 194; and data deficiencies, 243n3; and essential workers, 172–173; preparedness for, 159–160, 184–185; and recovery of jobs, 185–186, 195; and universities, 62 Crary, Jonathan, 217 credit and credit scoring, 10, 30, 131–136, 140, 282n83. See also social credit Criado Perez, Caroline, 39 crime / criminality, 18, 40, 143; and facial recognition, 10, 125, 128–130; future, 17, 123; and the right to be forgotten, 106 critical race theory, 212 Crootof, Rebecca, 289n60 cryptocurrency, 194, 205, 206 customer service. See service, jobs in cyberattacks, 10 cyberlibertarianism, 18–19, 99, 105 cybernetics, 145–146 cybersecurity, 158 cyberwarfare, 30, 31 Damiano, Luisa, 215 Darling, Kate, 79–80 data: in art creation, 220; biases in, 30, 38–39, 98–99, 124–126; in education, 62, 72–77, 83, 85; ethics of collecting, and limits on, 16, 18–19, 72–75, 120; etymology of the term, 224; in health care, 35–38, 41–46; misuse of, 101–103, 127, 128, 130, 132, 133, 135, 140, 141, 167; and privacy, 106, 127–128, 201; proper collection, storage, and management of, 15, 33, 57, 107, 174, 192; protection laws, 201, 205; value of, 13, 80, 165, 179, 182 Davies, Will, 24, 142 debt, 30, 131–136; and default, 280–281n71.

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The Great Experiment: Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure
by Yascha Mounk
Published 19 Apr 2022

It is rooted in frustration at the inadequate imagination of those who refuse to accept the changes that are necessary to accommodate all citizens of diverse democracies. And it is energized by righteous anger at those who seek to turn back the clock, trying to recover the hierarchies of yore by the use of unspeakable cruelty. Variously identified as “woke,” as an applied form of “critical race theory,” or as a likely “successor ideology” to liberalism, this movement vows to remake society in a radical manner. To do so, many of its most vocal advocates are willing to rethink fundamental principles, like the focus on individuals over groups, on which liberal democracies have traditionally been built.

See also right-wing ideology consociational democracy, 75–76, 78–79, 308n76 conspiracy theories, 2, 13 constitutions, 76, 131, 136–39 conversion therapy, 114 coordination, 54 corporate taxation, 260 corruption, 83, 159 cosmopolitanism, 129–30, 183 Coulter, Ann, 213 Council on American-Islamic Relations, 120 COVID-19 pandemic, 58, 219, 289 Craig, Maureen A., 251–52 crime, 18, 202, 220–26. See also violence critical race theory, 178, 179n Croatians, 45 Cuban Americans, 244 cultural appropriation, 169, 183–86, 190–91 cultural diversity and conditions fostering cooperation, 93–94 and crime and terrorism trends, 220–21 cultural assimilation in the US, 246–51 cultural autonomy, 159 cultural festivals, 157, 160 and cultural imperialism, 143 cultural norms, 165, 167 cultural solidarity, 187–89 cultural traditions, 42–45 and equal protection in democracies, 11 “melting pot” form of, 151–56 and models for shared identity, 187–93 and patriotism, 130–31, 140–46 and prospects for diverse democracies, 289–90 “public park” form of, 161–64, 192–93 and resistance to cultural change, 175–78 “salad bowl” form of, 156–61, 321n161 and social fragmentation, 11 Curva Furlan, 13 cynicism about diverse democracies, 21–22, 197–99 Cyprus, 77 D The Daily Stormer, 3 Daimond, Larry, 111 Dana, Richard Henry, Jr., 61 Dasht-e-Barchi Hospital, 56 Declaration of Independence, 15–16, 63 Declaration of the Rights of Man, 119 decolonization, 71–72 democracy and democratic institutions and conflict mitigation, 47–48 consociational democracy, 75–76, 78–79 and constraints on state persecution, 117–20 and legacy of social domination, 65 and policies supporting social inclusion, 268–75 and power-sharing arrangements, 73–76 and social fragmentation, 72 and trend toward cultural integration, 149, 207–9, 211 and value of patriotism, 130 See also public policy Democracy in Plural Societies (Lijphart), 76 Democratic Party (US) and demographic trends in US, 232, 240–44, 246, 248, 333n242 and policies supporting mutual respect, 276 and policies supporting social inclusion, 269, 273 and political polarization, 338n270 Democritus, 132 demographic trends and anti-immigrant sentiment, 174 and Asian American identity, 238–40 and cultural assimilation in US, 246–51 and Latino identities, 237–38 “majority minority” trend in US, 230, 231–35, 239, 251, 332n239, 333nn242–43 and minority rule, 306n68 and mixed-race America, 235–37 and political trends in US, 240–46 and resistance to change, 175 socioeconomic and education trends, 218–19 and support for welfare state, 82 and trend toward cultural integration, 209–11 Deneen, Patrick, 312n106 Denmark, 8, 134–35 deportations, 6 “Desaparecido” (song), 290–91 Detroit, Michigan, 218 developed democracies, 83, 94 developmental psychology, 262 dictatorships, 31, 68, 70, 117–18 Dinslaken, Germany, 203 Diogenes, 132 Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Mankind (Rousseau), 258 discrimination, 20, 92, 163, 184, 262 District of Columbia, 272 Doctors Without Borders, 57 domestic violence, 51 Douglass, Frederick, 15 Dutch colonialism, 68–69, 72–73 Dutch Republic, 308n76 Duterte, Rodrigo, 314n111 E early childcare policies, 262 East Asia, 11, 173 Eastern Europe, 338n270 economic conditions and declines in global freedom, 314n111 economic crises, 258 economic growth, 227, 259–60 and legacy of social domination, 282 policies supporting economic prosperity, 256–61 and prospects for diverse democracies, 287 education and Asian Americans, 239 and demographic trends in US, 211–16 gains of immigrant and minority groups, 327n215 and multilingual education, 211n and optimistic view of diverse democracies, 17, 18 and pessimistic view of diverse democracies, 202, 211–16 and policies promoting prosperity, 259 and policies supporting mutual respect, 276 and policies supporting universal solidarity, 262–66 and prospects for diverse democracies, 287 and “salad bowl” diversity, 158–59 and toll of structured anarchy, 58 and trend toward cultural integration, 81, 203–5, 207–8 unequal funding for school districts, 263, 336n263 elections and electoral politics and constraints on state persecution, 116–20 and demographic trends in US, 240–46, 248–49, 250, 333nn242–43, 334n246 electoral reforms, 272 and gerrymandering, 272 and Indian political structures, 309n78 and Italian public opinion, 268–69 and legacy of social domination, 69 and policies supporting mutual respect, 279 and policies supporting social inclusion, 272–73 and political polarization, 338n270 reform proposals in US, 272, 339n272 and value of diverse democracies, 6 Electoral College (US), 244, 333n243 elementary school education, 262 elite power and institutions, 68, 78, 83, 277.

Over the course of American history, millions of people have been excluded from full citizenship in the country on the basis of their sex or ethnic origin. And even countries that are founded upon civic patriotism have often violated the rights of other nations or picked unjustifiable wars. * None of the existing terms to describe this movement are satisfactory. “Woke” is too loaded. “Critical race theory” is overly focused on its academic origins and fails to capture that it is also deeply concerned with related topics like gender or religion. What Wesley Yang has called the “successor ideology” is the most promising: It has the virtue of being morally neutral and calling attention to the ways in which the theory aims to supplant many of the principles that have traditionally governed western democracies.

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Strength in Numbers: How Polls Work and Why We Need Them
by G. Elliott Morris
Published 11 Jul 2022

“We get access to a lot of offices because everyone wants to learn about the numbers.”7 Poll-based public interest groups do not have to be advocacy-focused. They can partner with newspapers to share their findings and still meaningfully improve the political discourse. In the summer of 2021, for example, the Republican Party engaged in a full-throated campaign against critical race theory (CRT), a body of legal scholarship about racism and racial inequalities developed in the late twentieth century. Several Republican-led states, including Texas and Florida, banned coursework that talked about CRT or related subjects (such as the New York Times’s 1619 Project, a series of articles that examines the country’s history from the date when enslaved people first arrived on American soil).

Joseph, 149 Cantril, Hadley, 41, 42 CAPI (computer-assisted personal interviewing), 94 Carolina Observer, 32–33 Carter, Jimmy, 78 Catalist, 140–42 CBS News, 81, 131 Centuriate Assembly, 15 Chicago Sun-Times, 74 Chicago Tribune, 43 Chilcot, John, 85 Chilcot Inquiry, 85, 86 child mortality rate, 82–86, 189 China, 8, 78 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 14–16 Cincinnati Enquirer, 34 Civil Rights Act of 1964, 169 Civiqs, 142–44, 146, 172 Clay, Henry, 31 Cleisthenes, 10–11 Clinton, Bill, 27, 170 Clinton, Hillary, ix, xi–xiii, 112, 114–16, 146, 150–54, 157 CNN, 97–98, 102–4, 113, 145 Cohen, Patricia Cline, 33 Cohn, Nate, 97, 129, 131, 145, 154, 156–57 Colbert Report, The, 95, 113 Collins, Susan, 155 Columbia University, xii, 51, 67, 68, 99, 131, 132, 141 Columbus Dispatch, 33, 34 Comey, James, 116 Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP), 76, 77 computer-assisted personal interviewing (CAPI), 94 computers and computerization, 55–58, 67–68, 124–28, 134, 143 Confessions, The (Rousseau), 17–18 Confucianism, 8 Congress, 6, 169–70 conservative Americans, xiii Constitution, US, 19, 51, 169 Converse, Philip, 22–23, 47, 105 Coolidge, Calvin, 34 Cornell University, 89 Couzin, Iain, 25 COVID-19 pandemic, 129 Crawford, William Harris, 31 CREEP (Committee to Re-Elect the President), 76 critical race theory (CRT), 175–76 Crossley, Archibald, 30, 35, 41, 42, 45, 47, 65, 186 D3 Systems, 89, 92 Daily Iowan, The, 36–37 Daily Kos, 142 Daily Telegraph, The, 149 D’Arcy Advertising Agency, 37 data aggregation, 173–74, 176–77 Data for Progress, 174–75 David, King, 9 debiasing, 110, 128, 136 Declaration of Independence, 17 Defense and Peace Economics, 87 Delli-Carpini, Michael, 21 demes, 11, 183 Demetrius of Phalereus, 9 democracy, v, 2, 10–17, 19–27, 176–78 Democracy for Realists (Achen and Bartels), 21–22 Democracy in America (Tocqueville), 4, 20 “Democratic Campaign Manual, 1964, The,” 58 Democratic National Committee (DNC), xv, 60–62, 68, 124 Democratic-Republican Party, 3, 30–31 Democratic Vistas (Whitman), iii Democrats and Democratic Party, xv, 61–64, 68–70, 111, 115, 129, 153, 155, 157, 158, 170, 175 demos, 10, 14 Dent, Harry, 76 Denver Republican, 34 Derge, David, 75 design-based polls, 145 Des Moines Register, 38 Detroit Free Press, 43 Dewey, John, 20, 22, 26 Dewey, Thomas E., ix, 42–43, 66 Diderot, Denis, 17–18 differential partisan nonresponse, 128–29 Dimock, Michael, 94 DNC, see Democratic National Committee Duke University, 160 Dunkels, Andrejs, xx Economist, The, 99, 102, 119, 120, 155, 176 Edwards-Levy, Ariel, 109 Egypt, ancient, 9 Eisinger, Robert, 62 ekklesía, 10 elections and election forecasting, x–xx; see also midterm elections; presidential election(s); presidential primary(-ies) Electoral College, ix, 31, 34, 99, 112, 169, 174 Elmira Study, 188 Enlightenment, 16–17 Enns, Peter K., 159–60 Enten, Harry, 97–98 Ernst, Morris, 46–47 Evers, Tony, 152 excite.com, 133, 134 Expert Political Judgment (Tetlock), 117 Facebook, 109–10 Farley, James, 61–64 Farm Journal, 33 Fawzi, Mary Smith, 82–84, 86 Federal Bureau of Investigation, 116, 133 Federalist No. 10 (1787), 2 Federalist Party, 30 Field, Harry, 41, 42 Field Guide to Lies, A (Levitin), 101 Finland, 65 First Amendment, 24 First Step Act (2018), 170 fish, schools of, 25 FiveThirtyEight, 97, 112, 113, 118, 119–22, 155 Florida, 112, 115, 119, 129, 150, 155, 157, 176 Founding Fathers, 2, 17, 19 480, The (Burdick), 55–59 “foxes,” 117 Fox News, 97–98, 99, 113 Franklin, Charles, 104–7, 110, 114, 151–54 Freedom of Information Act, 89 Funk, Wilfred, 40, 43–44 Gallup, George, Jr., 40 Gallup, George, Sr., ix–xi, 35–42, 45, 47–52, 58, 59, 62, 64–67, 77, 80, 123, 131, 166–68 Gallup Institute, xv, 40, 42, 186 Gelman, Andrew, 99, 141 Ghitza, Yair, 139–42, 147 Ginsburg, Ruth Bader, xv Gooding, Richard, 96 Google, 133, 136–37 Graham, David, 155 Greece, ancient, 9–15, 21 Greenfield, Ed, 67, 68 Green New Deal, 175 Grim, Ryan, 150 Haldeman, H.

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Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters
by Steven Pinker
Published 14 Oct 2021

Yet 9/11 led to the creation of a new federal department, massive surveillance of citizens and hardening of public facilities, and two wars which killed more than twice as many Americans as the number who died in 2001, together with hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans.24 To take another low-death/high-fear hazard, rampage killings in American schools claim around 35 victims a year, compared with about 16,000 routine police-blotter homicides.25 Yet American schools have implemented billions of dollars of dubious safety measures, like installing bulletproof whiteboards and arming teachers with pepperball guns, while traumatizing children with terrifying active-shooter drills. In 2020 the brutal murder of George Floyd, an unarmed African American man, by a white police officer led to massive protests and the sudden adoption of a radical academic doctrine, Critical Race Theory, by universities, newspapers, and corporations. These upheavals were driven by the impression that African Americans are at serious risk of being killed by the police. Yet as with terrorism and school shootings, the numbers are surprising. A total of 65 unarmed Americans of all races are killed by the police in an average year, of which 23 are African American, which is around three tenths of one percent of the 7,500 African American homicide victims.26 It would be psychologically obtuse to explain the outsize reaction to publicized killings solely by availability-inflated fear.

You may need to scroll forward from that location to find the corresponding reference on your e-reader. Abelson, Robert, 299 abortion, 79, 100–101, 295, 311 academia academic freedom in, 41 ad hominem fallacy and, 91 argument from authority and, 90 confidence in, sinking, 313–14 critical race theory, 123 informal fallacies and intellectual life of, 92–93 left-wing monoculture, 297, 313–14 suppression of opinions in, 43, 313–14 viewpoint diversity, lack of, 313–14 See also education; universities accidental deaths, 120–22, 139–40, 199 Achilles, 38 Active Open-Mindedness, 310–11, 324 See also openness to evidence ad hominem fallacy, 19–20, 90–91, 92–93, 291 adversarial collaboration, 29 Aeneid, 302 affective fallacy, 92–93, 291 affirming the antecedent, 80 affirming the consequent, 83, 85, 139 Afghanistan, US invasion of, 122, 124 African Americans Black Lives Matter, 26, 124–25 as percentage of population, 120 police killings of, 123, 124–25, 141 See also racism; slavery AI.

See left and right (political) consistency, 82 conspiracy theories adherents of, equivocal, 298–99 beliefs in, not based on truth of, 302 COVID-19, 283–84 as entertainment, 303, 308 and evolution of ideas, 308–9 openness to evidence vs., 311 police, reporting to, 299, 308 popularity of, 286 as predating social media, 287 real conspiracies and, 307–8 reflective vs. intuitive, 299 rumor and, 308 signal detection and, 307–8 consumers extended warranties, 197–98 as money pumps, 176, 180, 185, 187–88 contradiction, anything follows from, 81–82 conventions and standards, 234–35 conversation, rules of, 10, 21, 28, 30, 78–80, 87–88, 308, 343n43 cooperation in the Prisoner’s Dilemma, 239–42 in Public Goods games, 242–44 coordination games, 233–35 correlation causation not implied by, 245–47, 251–52, 312, 321, 323–24, 329–30 coefficient (r), 250–51 cross-lagged panel correlation, 269–70 definition, 247 definition of “prediction,” 247 illusory, 245–46, 251–52, 321 San people and, 4 scatterplots, 247–52, 270–71 See also causation; regression Cosmides, L., 169 counterfactuals, 64, 257, 259, 264 heretical, 64–65 COVID-19, 2, 193–94, 242, 283 exponential growth bias and, 11–12 media fear mongering, 126–27 misinformation, 245, 283–84, 296, 316 Coyne, Jerry, 302 creationism, 173, 295, 305, 311 credit card debt, 11, 320–21 crib death, 129–30 Crick, Francis, 158 crime availability bias and perceptions of, 126 confirmation bias and, 13–14 Great American Crime Decline, 126 gun control and rates of, 292–93 and punishment, 332–33 rational ignorance and, 58 regression to the mean and, 255–56 signal detection and, 202, 216–21, 352n17 statistical independence and, 129 See also homicide; judicial system critical race theory, 123 critical theory, 35–36 critical thinking, 34, 36, 40, 87, 287, 314, 320 definition, 74 San people and, 3–4 stereotypes and failures of, 19–20, 27 teaching, 82, 87, 314–15 The Crown (TV series), 303 CSI (TV show), 216 Cuban Missile Crisis, 236 d, 214–16, 218–21, 352n17 Darwin, Charles, 173 data, vs. anecdotes, xiv, 119–22, 125, 167, 300, 312, 314 data snooping, 145–46, 160 Dawes, Robyn, 175 Dawkins, Richard, 302, 308 Dean, James.

pages: 595 words: 143,394

Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections
by Mollie Hemingway
Published 11 Oct 2021

“So would I,” Biden replied.33 Earlier in September, Trump had drafted an executive order directing federal agencies to halt any diversity training that included controversial topics such as “white fragility” and “critical race theory,” which have their origins in Marxism.34 According to these new “anti-racist” ideologies, virtually every institution and norm in American life was now defined as racist, and if you disagreed, proponents of critical race theory insisted your denial was proof of your own racism. This radicalism had gained currency in liberal institutions in recent years. Yet, at the debate, Wallace pointedly asked Trump why he was against “racial sensitivity training,” a question framed using Democratic talking points.

By the time George Floyd was killed, identity politics had become the dominant prism through which the media and all other elite institutions—but not ordinary Americans—had come to understand the world. And perhaps the most extreme version of identity politics, what Marxist academics would label critical race theory, had gained purchase in the national conversation. Robin DiAngelo, for example, the white female author of White Fragility, a book that explicitly dismisses Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream Speech” as wrongheaded, had become a celebrity author.20 Unlike the previous American belief that all people are created equal and endowed with inalienable rights, identity politics teaches people to look at themselves through the lens of race, sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity.

pages: 420 words: 100,811

We Are Data: Algorithms and the Making of Our Digital Selves
by John Cheney-Lippold
Published 1 May 2017

This infinite halving of halves means you cannot achieve the whole. In simple algebraic script, x = 1–n. The impossibility of x = 1, or the whole, ultimately represents the grand argument against modernity, as well as the theoretical foundation for much of what defines poststructural theory, queer theory, feminist theory, critical race theory, and social constructionism at large. Structures of power are always trying to locate us within named, prescribed boxes whose enduring error is unreasonably consistent. Institutions like the NSA reify these boxed assumptions, and this is how we encounter the else online. It is in our interaction with these assumptions that the else demonstrates how jus algoritmi will never map onto jus sanguinis or jus soli or that Google Translate, regardless of its data set, will never be a native speaker.

See also segmentation; Values and Lifestyles (VALS) Puar, Jasbir, 42, 77, 79 Quantcast, 92, 147–48, 240–41; identity construction, 6, 22, 66, 76, 109–10, 114–15, 132–38, 141–44, 226, 229–30, 253, 257 Quantified Self community (QS), 118–20 queer theory, 25, 42, 60, 196, 220 race, xiii, 42, 52, 54, 67, 163, 177–79, 184, 191, 209, 215, 257, 272n49, 272n52, 278n60, 292n73; algorithms producing, 29, 30, 33–34, 80, 84–85, 135, 138–39, 237, 242–43, 252; critical race theory, 196; digital epidermalization, 12, 15–16; facial recognition and, 15–19, 33, 71–72, 265; intersectionality and, 84, 86–87, 141, 220; as macrostate, 27; marketing and, 76; postracial optimism, 17, 72; as social construction, 45, 77, 242; tech industry statistics, 18. See also blackness; Jim Crow; racism; whiteness; white supremacy racism, 23, 34, 67, 72, 176, 178–79, 209, 272n49, 272n52; “HP Computers Are Racist,” 15–18, 16, 72.

pages: 279 words: 100,877

Merchants of the Right: Gun Sellers and the Crisis of American Democracy
by Jennifer Carlson
Published 2 May 2023

Trump referred to the push to recognize the racist underpinnings of the United States—past and present—as “toxic propaganda” and “a twisted web of lies,” wagering that “left-wing mobs have torn down statues of our founders, desecrated our memorials and carried out a campaign of violence and anarchy.”56 Trump’s denouncement of Black protest as a left-wing plot to destroy America was far from novel; rather, it recycled the Civil Rights–era belief among many whites that the Civil Rights movement was a communist conspiracy, a belief that “allowed whites to more easily justify their opposition” to efforts at integration.57 Likewise, Trump denounced the 1619 Project, an initiative spearheaded by the New York Times Magazine to recenter slavery and its consequences in American history,58 and wrote an executive order to ban critical race theory in federally funded programming, which has subsequently spurred a flurry of state-level book bans and other restrictions on free speech.59 Following Trump, conservative news media and Republican supporters propagated conspiracist thinking that crowded out recognition of the systematic injustice that drove the mass protests.

See also conservative political culture coronavirus pandemic: concerns about gun confiscations associated with, 211n21; conspiracy theories and skepticism about, 1–2, 74–75, 82–88, 136–37, 143–44, 147; gun sales boosted by, 1, 41–42, 50–54, 60; lockdowns connected with, 30, 33, 37, 39, 40, 43–54, 67–68, 156; mask-wearing during, 124–27, 133, 137, 154; media coverage of, 91; partisanship and, 74–75, 100, 123–24; political and cultural chaos sparked by, 24; Trump and, 74–75, 133, 136, 154 Covfefe Coffee and Gifts, 105 Cramer, Katherine, 110 Crick, Bernard, 131 critical infrastructure, 44, 67, 211n22 critical race theory, 89 DeBrabander, Firmin, 168 Deep State, 26, 72, 75, 78 Defund the Police, 54, 90, 145 dehumanization, 8, 18, 34, 105, 107–10, 127 DellaPosta, Daniel, 105 democracy: competing US visions of, 135–36, 140, 159–61; conservative political culture and, 9, 12, 27–28, 147–48; conspiracism linked to, 76–77; cultural components of, 21; gun politics and, 16–17, 19, 34, 40–41, 66–69; guns and, 168–69; historical opinions on, 130–31; illiberalism and, 26–28, 153, 166–67; liberal, 26, 206n66; partisanship as characteristic of, 103–4; political tensions in, 20–22, 28, 33–34, 41, 66, 68–69, 99, 128–29, 135, 169–70, 173, 180; recommendations for reviving, 171–81; threats to, 34–35, 76, 131–32; Trump’s threat to, 3, 26, 131; varieties of, 130; workings of, 23 democratic imagination, 21–28, 35, 57–58, 135, 158, 167 Democratic Party: accused of stealing 2020 election, 4; antipathy toward, 4, 27, 147–49, 166; and CDC, 134; and coronavirus pandemic, 74–75; liberals identified with, 18; perception of Republicans, 100, 107–9; and voting, 131–32 Dickey Amendment, 134 Disaster Recovery Personal Protection Act, 211n18 disbelief.

pages: 446 words: 109,157

The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth
by Jonathan Rauch
Published 21 Jun 2021

Juan Prieto, “Violence Helped Ensure Safety of Students,” Daily Californian, February 7, 2017. 37. Olga R. Rodriguez, “Four Injured in Campus Riot over Milo Yiannopoulos Speech Sue Berkeley, UC Berkeley,” NBC Bay Area, January 16, 2018. 38. Mari J. Matsuda, Charles R. Lawrence III, Richard Delgado, and Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Words That Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, and the First Amendment (Westview, 1993). 39. For a full treatment of the fallacy that suppressing so-called hate speech reduces hatred, see Nadine Strossen’s excellent Hate: Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship (Oxford University Press, 2018). 40.

Shields, “The Disappearing Conservative Professor,” National Affairs, Fall 2018. 74. Christopher Dummitt, “Confessions of a Social Constructionist,” Quillette, September 17, 2019. 75. This and related ideologies have been called political correctness, wokeness, the successor ideology, critical race theory, and intersectionalism, among other terms. In general, the variants have in common a neo-Marxist structure in which the axes of oppression and revolution are translated from the realm of economic class to the realm of group identity, with persons of color playing the role of the proletariat, white cisgendered non-queer people playing the role of the bourgeoisie, and anti-racist and anticolonialist activists playing the role of the revolutionary vanguard. 76.

pages: 344 words: 104,522

Woke, Inc: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam
by Vivek Ramaswamy
Published 16 Aug 2021

When wokeness struck down the president of Harvard, it raised its flag triumphantly over all of academia. Race and gender studies had been laying down roots for decades, but they really started flourishing around that time. So-called “critical” theories sprouted like weeds. Racism was redefined—the critical race theory experts had discovered that it was definitionally impossible to be racist toward white people. Their students dutifully spread that epiphany to the rest of society. “Intersectionality” became the word of the day, and then the decade, even though no one understood exactly what it meant—an ideal feature for any concept to evade falsifiability.

This new movement aims to more effectively achieve three essential objectives: (1) define what types of diversity of thought are important to an organization, (2) measure diversity of thought in an organization, and (3) select for diversity of thought when hiring leaders to scale an organization. I call this “critical diversity theory” (or CDT) to reflect its critical perspective on the prevailing narrative of racial and gender diversity, in response to intellectual movements such as critical race theory and critical feminist theory, which spawned this narrow conception of diversity. Critical theory refers to an approach to inquiry that reveals and challenges power structures. CDT should follow this tradition by challenging the new power structure created by critical race and gender theory itself—one that has weaponized a narrow conception of diversity to implement a monolithic social agenda that is increasingly intolerant of dissent and agnostic to the institutional purpose of an organization.

pages: 361 words: 110,233

The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide
by Steven W. Thrasher
Published 1 Aug 2022

Why, given this very uncontroversial medical reality, was the 1988 Missouri law still on the books? It is because laws embody our society’s values, and our society values not only consigning certain people to the viral underclass, but also punishing them there, needlessly and viciously. If critical race theory can help us understand how racial disparities are produced by the law, a theory of the viral underclass can help us see how the law itself produces perverse inequalities because of pathogens. The 1988 Missouri AIDS law might have been outdated and unscientific. Still, it was valuable in letting prosecutors like Groenweghe (and his elected boss, Timothy Lohmar) come across as tough on crime.

Butler, Judith BuzzFeed News Cabell-Huntington Health Department Cacho, Lisa Marie “CAFOs” California Callous Disregard (Wakefield) Canada cancer capitalism Capra, Frank carfentanil Census Bureau Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) cesarean sections Chauvin, Derek Chicago Chicago Tribune chicken pox chimpanzees China Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) Chinese immigrants Chios chlamydia Choctaw, Mississippi band cholera Chomsky, Noam citizenship civil rights movement Civil War climate change Clinton, Bill Clinton, Hillary Rodham CNN cocaine colonialism Combahee River Collective Communist Manifesto (Marx and Engels) Community Health Network condoms Coney Island Hospital Conference on Retroviral and Opportunistic Infections (CROI) Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act (COBRA, 1985) Contract with America Cook County jail corporations Cotts, Cynthia COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2) bats and Black people and deaths from Democrats and disabled and homelessness and hospitals and immigrants and incarceration and intimacy and LGBTQ and meat industry and media and mutual aid and Native Americans and numbers infected by nursing homes and parties and prophylaxis and Queens and shame and shortages and South Korea testing and Trump and West Virginia and white immunity and work and COVID-19 laws COVID-19 transition task force COVID-19 vaccines COVID Tracking Project crash of 2008 criminal justice system. See also incarceration #CripTheVote (hashtag) critical race theory Cuba Cukovic, Filip Cunningham, Jon Cuomo, Andrew Current Opinion in Infectious Disease cytomegalovirus (CMV) Darwin, Charles Dawkins, Richard DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane) de Blasio, Bill debt Deer, Brian Defense Production Act (DPA) Democratic Leadership Coalition Democratic Party Democratic Republic of the Congo dengue fever Depo-Provera deportation depression deregulation Detroit diabetes Dinkins, David Dionysus disability Disability Visibility Project Dockrey, Deloris Dodero, Camille Doll, Jen domestic violence Donovan, Heather Douglass, Frederick Dracula (Stoker) Dromm, Daniel drug arrests drug tests drug treatment drug use.

pages: 691 words: 203,236

Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities
by Eric Kaufmann
Published 24 Oct 2018

Funded by the progressive Runnymede Trust, its remit was ‘to analyse the current state of multi-ethnic Britain and propose ways of countering racial discrimination and disadvantage, making Britain a confident and vibrant multicultural society at ease with its rich diversity’. The much awaited report championed a multicultural, post-national vision of Britain deploying academic terms such as ‘community of communities’ and ‘recognition’, rooted in the work of multicultural political theorists like Charles Taylor and Will Kymlicka. Steeped in the language of critical race theory and multicultural political theory, it spoke of Britishness having ‘racial connotations’ and urged a root-and-branch reworking of Britain’s national story. It urged the government to declare itself officially multicultural, as was true in Canada and, to a lesser extent, Australia. Parekh himself is no radical, but rather a thoughtful mainstream political theorist.

Equality of outcome is a discredited concept, failing on both logical and historical grounds, as anyone knows who has studied the misery of the 20th century. It wouldn’t have withstood 20 minutes of reasoned discussion. This presented traditional independent academic minds with a choice: Accept the plan and let the intellectual descendants of Critical Race Theory dictate the bounds of permissible thought to the sciences and the rest of the college, or insist on discussing the plan’s shortcomings and be branded as racists. Most of my colleagues chose the former, and the protesters are in the process of articulating the terms. I dissented and ended up teaching in the park.9 The next day, around 180 students, some armed with baseball bats, protested against institutional racism on campus, taking over buildings, barricading themselves in a library and occupying the president’s office for several hours.

Matters have clearly gone too far when opposing affirmative action and questioning the continued pervasiveness of racism is operationalized by social psychologists as ‘symbolic racism’.57 Social scientists have also developed measures like ‘racial resentment’, which recently have been shown simply to tap resentment of laziness among those of all races.58 Arguments based on critical race theory, history or income differences do not constitute rigorous evidence of a structure of white privilege. Too often proponents make unfalsifiable claims which intimate that white privilege is engraved into the soul of society. Without contemporary evidence, such arguments cannot be distinguished from, for example, the view that Protestant discrimination against Catholics, which runs through most of American history, is an ineradicable feature of American life.

pages: 497 words: 123,778

The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It
by Yascha Mounk
Published 15 Feb 2018

Johnson, “What’s Wrong with Cultural Appropriation? These 9 Answers Reveal Its Harm,” Everyday Feminism, June 14, 2015, http://everydayfeminism.com/2015/06/cultural-appropriation-wrong/. On microaggressions see Miguel Ceja and Tara Yosso, “Critical Race Theory, Racial Microaggressions and Campus Racial Climate: The Experiences of African American College Students,” Journal of Negro Education 69 (2000): 60–73; Daniel Solórzano, “Critical Race Theory, Race, and Gender Microaggressions, and the Experience of Chicana and Chicano Scholars,” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 11 (1998): 121–136; and Kevin L. Nadal, That’s So Gay!

pages: 482 words: 150,822

Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968
by Thomas E. Ricks
Published 3 Oct 2022

Well to the left of that stands the view that there has been almost no real progress since the 1960s because America is a white supremacist country through and through, with a race structure reinforced by grinding capitalism. Related to this is the academic criticism that pursuing integration rather than voting rights and political power destroyed Black businesses and undercut Black professionals, especially teachers. In this context, it is worth noting that critical race theory—the real school of thought, not the symbol attacked by the right—first evolved as a critique of mainstream Movement thinking on the value of integration. Amid these contending visions, a strong if embattled civil rights movement still exists, just in different forms. Its exponents are focused on a range of causes, including reparations for slavery and segregation and the ending of mass incarceration.

Black members of House of Representatives Senate Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) Freedom Rides and in Freedom Summer campaign; see also Freedom Summer restaurant desegregation and Connor, Theophilus Eugene “Bull” Birmingham campaign and Freedom Rides and Pritchett and Constitution, U.S. First Amendment to Cook, Eugene Cooper, Annie Lee CORE, see Congress of Racial Equality Cotton, Dorothy Cotz, Christian Cowan, Paul Cox, Harold Crisis critical race theory Cronkite, Walter Crosby, Emilye Cross, John, Jr. Crusade for Citizenship Cuba Cuban Missile Crisis Current, Gloster Curry, Constance Daley, Richard Dalton, Dennis Davis, Ossie D-Day and Allied landings Deacons for Defense Declaration of Independence de Gaulle, Charles Delhi Pact D’Emilio, John democracy Democratic National Convention of 1948 of 1964 of 2020 Democratic Party Dennis, Dave Moses and Detroit, Mich.

pages: 693 words: 169,849

The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World
by Adrian Wooldridge
Published 2 Jun 2021

Its prime target is brutality, particularly police brutality towards African-Americans – it was ignited by the killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012 by a member of the neighbourhood watch and then re-ignited, on an even larger scale, by the killing of George Floyd by a police officer, in 2020. But it has also popularized critical race theory, an ideology that was incubated on American campuses from the late 1960s onwards, and which provides the intellectual underpinnings of a succession of successful books, such as Reni Eddo-Lodge, Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People about Race (2017), Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility (2018) and Ibram X.

R. 340 Cobbett, William 147 Cobden, Richard 163 Cohen, Nick 342 Coke, Sir Edward 31 Colbert, Jean-Baptiste 125, 126 Cold War, and education of women 274 Coleman, James, Report (1966 US) 302 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, on China 84 Colet, John, St Paul’s School 104 College of Fort William, India 82 Communism China 357–60 rejection of Plato 70 see also Left, political communitarianism 21, 294–7 competition 112 and aristocracy of talent 156 and Cambridge University examinations 150–51 in education 158–9 open 398 for civil service 157–8, 160–61 for schools 166–7 for universities 158–9 women and 257–8 and prizes 150, 151 risks of 375 see also examinations Comte, Auguste 134 Conant, James 223–7 ‘Education for a Classless Society’ (1940) 225 and Jeffersonian ‘natural aristocracy 225–7 ‘Public Education and the Structure of American Society’ (1945) 225–6 condescension 341–4, 375 Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de 120 Condorcet, Marquis de 119, 130 ‘Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind’ 122 Confucianism and Chinese examination system 81 and Christianity 72 criticism of 84–5 and hard work 366 revival in China 359–60 Singapore 351–2 tradition of 70, 71 Confucius Analects 37, 76 and Chinese examination system 76–7 theory of meritocracy 76–7 Connolly, Cyril 231 conservatism social 229–32, 324 view of meritocracy as threat 15 consultancy educational 314–15 management 253, 322, 352 consumption, conspicuous 33, 146 Contagious Diseases Act (1864) 259 Cook, Peter 236 Cook, Tim 14 Cooper, Yvette 312 Corbyn, Jeremy 337, 339 Corn Laws 147 corporations American 197, 253–5 see also business corruption aristocracy as curb on 184 China 361–2, 393 Old Corruption system 54, 56, 148–9, 391 for school and college admission 315–17 see also political corruption Cotton, Calvin 191 Coulson, Andy 338 Covid-19 crisis 343, 384 Trump and 345 Cox, Catharine Morris 222 Cox, Hayward 159 Coyer, Abbé, La Noblesse commerçante 126 craniometry 228–9 Crawfurd, Helen 173 creativity 96, 141–2 Singapore’s lack of 354 Crèvecoeur, J. Hector St John de 176, 178 Crimean War 157, 160 critical race theory 5–6, 8 Croly, Herbert 202 The Promise of American Life 201, 328 Cromwell, Oliver 144 Cromwell, Thomas 54, 104 Crosland, Anthony and abolition of grammar schools 299 The Future of Socialism 289, 292, 299 Crossman, Richard 288 on grammar schools 237 Plato Today 70 cultural capital 293 cultural divisions 324 Cummings, Dominic 331, 334 Cuomo, Andrew 319 Curzon family, motto 31 Curzon, Lord 69 Daily Telegraph 270 Daily Worker 228 Dannie Heineman prizes 86 Dante Alighieri, ‘Banquet’ 107 Darwin, Charles On the Origin of Species 210, 293 The Descent of Man 261 Darwin family 152 dating services, for graduates 311, 351 Davout, Louis-Nicolas 131 Dawkins, Richard 342 deBoer, Freddie 382 Debré, Michel, and ENA 243–4 Defoe, Daniel, The Complete English Tradesman (1726) 32 democracy and democratic divide 330 direct 384 and elitism 136–7 and franchise 164–5, 351 and freedom 64 and leaders 42 liberalism and 164–5 limits on 383–5 and meritocracy 226, 323, 383–5 problems of (Plato) 63–4, 65 and prosperity 367–8 Democratic Party (US), intellectual appeal 331–2 Dent & Co., classic texts 172 Departmental Committee on Scholarships and Free Places (1920) 167 Descartes, René 113 DiAngelo, Robin, White Fragility 5 Dickens, Charles Hard Times 379–80 Little Dorrit 157 Diderot, Denis 121 and Catherine the Great 123–4 difference principle (Rawls) 291 differentiation in education 394–6 selection for 382–3 Dion, chief minister of Syracuse 67 Dionysius I of Syracuse 67 Dionysius II of Syracuse 67 direct-grant schools 236–7 Disraeli, Benjamin 92, 96 divorce 259, 324–5 domesticity, cult of 267, 272–3 Dominic, St 101 Douglas, J.

pages: 258 words: 69,706

Undoing Border Imperialism
by Harsha Walia
Published 12 Nov 2013

Together these forms help us to understand systemic injustice from different angles, and empower us to take action against authoritarian and oppressive systems. This book is primarily embedded in movement theory, which stems from the praxis of organizing, and experiential theory, which is based in lived realities and resistances. The first chapter, “What Is Border Imperialism?” relies on academic theory. Drawing on critical race theory, feminist studies, Marxist analysis, and poststructuralism, this chapter theorizes and evaluates border imperialism from within intersectional pedagogy. I argue that the violence of border imperialism is a direct result of the violence of colonial displacements, capital circulations, labor stratifications in the global economy, and structural hierarchies of race, class, gender, ability, and citizenship status.

pages: 304 words: 86,028

Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves From the American Dream
by Alissa Quart
Published 14 Mar 2023

the American Sociological Association’s Journal of Health and Social Behavior: Vikram Patel et al., “Income Inequality and Depression: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of the Association and a Scoping Review of Mechanisms,” World Psychiatry 17, no. 1 (February 2018): 76–89, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5775138/. Chapter 15: Volunteering Ourselves our volunteerism also has a dark side: Nina Eliasoph, Making Volunteers: Civic Life at Welfare’s End (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011). Celina Su surveyed twenty-five thousand PB participants: Celina Su: “Beyond Inclusion: Critical Race Theory and Participatory Budgeting,” New Political Science 39, no. 1 (2017) 126–42, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07393148.2017.1278858. according to Alexander Kolokotronis, a young scholar: Alexander Kolokotronis, “What to Do Once We’ve Defunded the Police,” Current Affairs, July 9, 2020, https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/07/what-to-do-once-weve-defunded-the-police.

pages: 296 words: 98,018

Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World
by Anand Giridharadas
Published 27 Aug 2018

Sometimes even the most risk-averse politicians now casually voiced concepts coined at universities: “micro-aggressions” (Chester Pierce, psychiatry, Harvard, 1970); “white privilege” (Peggy McIntosh, women’s studies, Wellesley, 1988); “gender identity” (Johns Hopkins School of Medicine); “intersectionality” (Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, critical race theory, University of California at Los Angeles, 1989). Nonetheless, Cuddy believed that in her field, the real need was for serious scholars, equipped with serious money, to work on solutions and the implementation of what had already been learned. “I actually think we need to start now doing really deep science on interventions that work, and they are not going to be easy,” she said.

pages: 405 words: 103,723

The Government of No One: The Theory and Practice of Anarchism
by Ruth Kinna
Published 31 Jul 2019

Paul Sharkey (Edinburgh and Oakland: AK Press, 2002). Black Bloc Francis Dupuis-Déri, Who’s Afraid of the Black Blocs? Anarchy in Action around the World, trans. Lazer Lederhendler (Oakland: PM Press, 2014) Intersectionality Kimberlé Crenshaw, Instructors’ Guide: Free Resources on Intersectionality, Critical Race Theory Across Disciplines, online at http://www.racialequitytools.org/resourcefiles/Kimberle-Crenshaw-Instructors_-Guide-1.pdf Francis Dupuis-Déri, ‘Is the State Part of the Matrix of Domination and Intersectionality? An Anarchist Inquiry’, Anarchist Studies, 24 (1), 2016, online at https://www.lwbooks.co.uk/anarchist-studies/24-1/is-the-state-part-of-the-matrix-of-domination-and-intersectionality-anarchist Dysophia 4, Anarchist Debates on Privilege (2013), online at http://dysophia.org.uk/dysophia/ Davita Silfen Glasberg, Abbey S.

pages: 467 words: 116,902

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
by Michelle Alexander
Published 24 Nov 2011

Gilliam and Shanto Iyengar, “Prime Suspects: The Influence of Local Television News on the Viewing Public,” American Journal of Political Science 44 (2000): 560-73. 34 See, e.g., Nilanjana Dasgupta, “Implicit Ingroup Favoritism, Outgroup Favoritism, and Their Behavioral Manifestations,” Social Justice Research 17 (2004): 143. For a review of the social science literature on this point and its relevance to critical race theory and antidiscrimination law, see Jerry Kang, “Trojan Horses of Race,” Harvard Law Review 118 (2005): 1489. 35 There is some dispute whether Nietzsche actually said this. He did use the term “immaculate perception” in Thus Spoke Zarathustra to disparage traditional views of knowledge, but apparently did not say the precise quote attributed to him.

The Class Ceiling: Why It Pays to Be Privileged
by Sam Friedman and Daniel Laurison
Published 28 Jan 2019

The standard approach in the UK is to use the abbreviation BME, for Black and Minority Ethnic, so we use this as well; we also occasionally use ‘people of colour’, which is common in the US but may be unfamiliar to those in the UK. Similarly, we use phrases like ‘women and racial-ethnic minorities’ when we mean ‘women of all racial-ethnic groups and racial-ethnic minorities of all genders’. Throughout, we follow contemporary scholars of race and ethnicity (e.g. Kehal, n.d.), critical race theory (Crenshaw, 1988; Harris, 1991) and their predecessors (e.g. DuBois, 1971), and capitalise ‘Black’ and other minoritised racial-ethnic group names, while using the lower case for ‘white’. Fundamentally, this is a book about class. But there is also widespread disagreement – even among scholars who study xiii The Class Ceiling class!

pages: 389 words: 111,372

Raising Lazarus: Hope, Justice, and the Future of America’s Overdose Crisis
by Beth Macy
Published 15 Aug 2022

That death-rate disparity was bigger now than the death disparity between Black people and White people, which academics pinned not just to deaths of despair but also to poor nutrition, lack of exercise, smoking, and uneven access to quality medical care. Whether they meant to or not, people were literally killing themselves as the hyper-polarized government they hated stood by, and politicians who professed to lead them were engulfed in culture wars about transgender bathroom rights, Stonewall Jackson statues, and critical race theory. “People are making a virtue of going it alone and not depending on anyone, almost as a kind of self-protection,” Silva told me. Or as Nikki put it: “Rigid thinking is what it is, and that’s a trauma response.” Methamphetamine use amped up the paranoia among her patients who were already conspiracy-prone, making rigid thinking patterns even harder to shake.

pages: 386 words: 112,064

Rich White Men: What It Takes to Uproot the Old Boys' Club and Transform America
by Garrett Neiman
Published 19 Jun 2023

Born on Third Base: A One Percenter Makes the Case for Tackling Inequality, Bringing Wealth Home, and Committing to the Common Good. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2016. Crass, Chris. Towards Collective Liberation: Anti-Racist Organizing, Feminist Praxis, and Movement Building Strategy. Oakland: PM Press, 2013. Crenshaw, Kimberle. Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement. New York: The New Press, 1995. Criado Perez, Caroline. Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men. New York: Abrams, 2019. Darity, Sandy and Kirsten A. Mullen. From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century.

pages: 444 words: 117,770

The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century's Greatest Dilemma
by Mustafa Suleyman
Published 4 Sep 2023

Imagine a future where small groups—whether in failing states like Lebanon or in off-grid nomad camps in New Mexico—provide AI-empowered services like credit unions, schools, and health care, services at the heart of the community often reliant on scale or the state. Where the chance to set the terms of society at a micro level becomes irresistible: come to our boutique school and avoid critical race theory forever, or boycott the evil financial system and use our DeFi product. Where any grouping of any kind—ideological, religious, cultural, racial—can self-organize a viable society. Think about setting up your own school. Or hospital or army. It’s such a complex, vast, and difficult project, even the thought of it is tiring.

pages: 414 words: 121,243

What's Left?: How Liberals Lost Their Way
by Nick Cohen
Published 15 Jul 2015

Jargon-mongers certainly stuffed the business schools and used convoluted language to make banalities appear profound. However, no academics could come close to matching the obfuscation and murkiness of post-modern specialists in ‘theory’ – feminist theory, postcolonial theory, ‘other’ theory, critical race theory, queer theory, communicative action theory, structuration theory, neo-Marxian theory … any kind of theory, every kind of theory. In 1996 ‘theory’ was the victim of the Sokal hoax, the academic sting of the decade. Naftulin and his team had shown that a plausible conman could convince an educated audience to believe rubbish if they weren’t experts in the field.

Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World
by Naomi Klein
Published 11 Sep 2023

The argument is now a ubiquitous one from the Covid era: I would rather have a virus that, despite its potential lethality to many, I have determined is nothing more than a bad cold for me and my healthy family. There is a reason that the measles and Covid arguments sound so similar: one was the prototype for the other. Long before Warrior Moms were going on Bannon’s show to rail against Covid vaccines and critical race theory, McCarthy was out there on all the big shows, hawking her book Mother Warriors: A Nation of Parents Healing Autism Against All Odds. Eric Garcia, author of We’re Not Broken: Changing the Autism Conversation, recognized these connections early. He explains that “the world we live in has been shaped by years of autism fearmongering,” adding that “many of the people who now question everything from the efficacy of Covid-19 [vaccines] to the integrity of U.S. elections cut their teeth promoting conspiracy theories and outright falsehoods about autism.”

pages: 574 words: 148,233

Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth
by Elizabeth Williamson
Published 8 Mar 2022

“Our youth will be taught to love America,” he said on September 17, 2020. He pledged to end what he said was liberal educators’ portrayal of America as “a wicked and racist nation,” and create a new panel, the 1776 Commission, charged with “restoring patriotic education in our schools.” “I’m gonna go listen to what Trump has to say about them teaching critical race theory,” Watt said. “I’m so glad I have all that stuff in my attic. I might need that!” Two months later, Jim’s body was found in his storage-shed home. He had died of natural causes, likely related to his alcoholism. His children took up a GoFundMe collection to cremate him. The state would have paid for it but would have kept and disposed of his ashes.

pages: 541 words: 173,676

Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents—and What They Mean for America's Future
by Jean M. Twenge
Published 25 Apr 2023

Democrats and Republicans became polarized around racial issues beginning around 2014, culminating in the summer 2020 protests after the death of George Floyd. Although the protests began as a movement against police brutality, they came to symbolize issues around anti-Black racism more generally. By 2021 and 2022, political candidates were debating whether critical race theory should be taught in schools and whether certain books should be banned. Beginning around 2016, online misinformation spread bizarre conspiracy theories on the far right, like the “Pizzagate” belief that Democrats were running child-trafficking rings out of a pizza joint in Washington, D.C.; a man entered the establishment and fired a gun into a wall and table in the restaurant in December 2016, saying he was trying to help the children.

pages: 743 words: 201,651

Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World
by Timothy Garton Ash
Published 23 May 2016

What is clear is that there is no correlation between the presence of extensive hate speech laws on the statute books and lower levels of abusively expressed prejudice about human difference. If, as Errera argues, the main purpose of such laws is to enforce civility, they have not succeeded. Interestingly, even two of the most outspoken American critics of racist hate speech, from the perspective of what they call ‘critical race theory’, Jean Stefancic and Richard Delgado, found the efficacy of such laws to be ‘an open question’.49 The application of good laws is clear, predictable and proportionate. That of hate speech laws has been unpredictable and often disproportionate. In Canada, the uncertainty has been even greater because findings on hate speech have in part been delegated to Human Rights Commissions in each individual province.