In 1937, the German philosopher Max Horkheimer, recently relocated from Germany to the United States, published an essay titled “Traditional and Critical Theory”. As much as any event in 20th Century history, this marked the end of the expansion of academia’s embrace of the Enlightenment program of rationality, objectivity, tolerance, and individuality, and a return by our supposed scholars to superstition, fable, hatred, and group stereotyping. It does not seem, from reading the text, that he wished it to be so. But as I will argue here, these are, unfortunately, the ultimate fruits of his labor, and the labor of his colleagues at the Frankfurt School.
Critical Race Theory (CRT) — the real CRT, not the Christopher Rufo boogeyman to scare the right wing (and any centrists who could be swayed) into line — is just as possessed of Critical Theory’s faults as Critical Theory was itself.
Critical Race Theory has given us some really important insights, but despite, not thanks to, the direct influence of Critical Theory and the broader influence of postmodern-style thought. The insights need to be rescued from their in-practice-regressive intellectual environment so they can be developed, expanded, and deployed productively rather than used to stoke factionalism, engender witch hunts and purity tests, and protect bad ideas.
The rest of this article justifies the above statements, explaining in brief the key flaws of Critical Theory, how the flaws have been adopted and expanded by Critical Race Theory, and how we can keep and expand all the insights while dropping all the irrational and cognitively pernicious baggage.
Part One: the Flaws of Critical Theory
“If, however, the theoretician and his specific object are seen as forming a dynamic unity with the oppressed class, so that his expression of societal contradictions is not merely an expression of the concrete historical situation but also a force within it to stimulate change, then his real function emerges.” (Horkheimer, Traditional and Critical Theory (p. 215 in link at top of article).)
Hidden within this deceptively admirable-seeming statement lies one of Critical Theory’s biggest practical flaws. (Note: in context, the “specific object” is “the proletariat”, which in this context constitutes “the oppressed class”.)
Can you see the flaw, enormous but hidden? If you can’t, you’re in good company: Horkheimer was no intellectual weakling, and neither he nor his highly intelligent compatriots saw it, at least at first.
Within philosophy, the topic of epistemology covers how we come to know things — not just feel things, believe things, but know things. This both includes the idea of the distinction between knowledge and some other sort of belief (e.g. because knowledge exhibits a manner of cognitive success which belief does not), and the methods by which we can come to know rather than merely believe. (This is in contrast to ontology, which covers what really is — never mind how we manage to figure out what really is.)
The most successful epistemology by far, bar none, is the scientific method. My favorite expression of this is that given by Carl Sagan in The Varieties of Scientific Experience (Penguin Press, 2006; p. 217): “In a complex universe, in a society undergoing unprecedented change, how can we find the truth if we are not willing to question everything and to give a fair hearing to everything?” Part of the willingness to question includes the willingness to accept doubt. As Richard Feynman said, “We have found it of paramount importance that in order to progress we must recognize the ignorance and leave room for doubt.” Or, if you’re more hard-nosed about it, you could read Karl Popper on falsification and the scientific method.
Of course, to doubt you need to leave yourself adequate psychological safety to be able to doubt. What if you can’t? Carl Sagan again (p. 216–217): “We kill each other, or threaten to kill each other, in part, I think, because we are afraid we might not ourselves know the truth, that someone else with a different doctrine might have a closer approximation to the truth. […] If I can’t convince you, I must kill you. […] You are a threat to my version of the truth, especially the truth about who I am and what my nature is. […] The thought that I might have dedicated my life to a lie […] is a very painful realization.” (Sagan clarifies that he is personifying the attitude so as not to sound like he’s accusing his audience, but this “I” is a hypothetical “I” only (maybe the science-averse Anti-Sagan?).)
Can you see, now, the diabolical flaw in Horkheimer’s vision of a Critical Theorist?
The social practice of science is intensely devoted to opening up enough space between the correctness of ideas from the value of a scientist so that the scientist can bring themselves to deeply question their own ideas rather than viewing everything as a threat. Critical Theory does the exact opposite, encouraging people to deeply enmesh their self-worth and their belief in their work.
If you want to induce cognitive bias in people, threatening something fundamental to their being is a spectacularly effective strategy. Some particularly stark examples are given by Jonathan Haidt in The Righteous Mind (Vintage Books, 2012; pp. 61–63). Upon subconsciously provoking a moral judgment about innocuous actions, he observes that the test subjects “made up absurd reasons to justify judgments that they had made on the basis of gut feelings — feelings Thalia had implanted with hypnosis”. He then goes on to call out himself for doing exactly this while in the middle of doing an experiment showing that this thing happens.
On February 3, 2007, shortly before lunch, I discovered that I was a chronic liar. … My wife, Jayne…asked me not to leave dirty dishes on the counter where she prepared our baby’s food. Her request was polite, but its tone added a postscript: “As I have asked you a hundred times before.” My mouth started moving before hers had stopped. […] something about the baby having woken up at the same time as the elderly dog barked to ask for a walk and I’m sorry but I just put my breakfast dishes down wherever I could. [… (later) …] [I was] writing about how people automatically fabricate justifications of their gut feelings, when suddenly I realized I had just done the same thing with my wife. […] It’s true that I’d eaten breakfast, given Max his first bottle, and let Andy out for his first walk, but these events had all happened at separate times. Only when my wife criticized me did I merge them into a composite image of a harried father with too few hands, and I created this fabrication by the time she had completed her one-sentence criticism. … I then lied so quickly and convincingly that my wife and I both believed me.
Here we have a scholar, a scientist, rigorously trained, devising careful experiments, trying to remember to keep doubt in mind, still fabricating subconsciously all kinds of fanciful and counterfactual explanations in response to a mild implicit criticism, and doing so so deftly that it almost escaped his notice!
What chance, then, does the Critical Theorist stand whose loyalty is not first to truth, not first to understanding the complexities of the universe and our society within it as it undergoes unprecedented change, but to dynamic unity with the oppressed. Without this, the Critical Theorist loses their real function.
If the alarm bells are not now going off full-blast in your head, they should be. Could you really, truly, embed yourself so passionately into an area that you believe to be a critical part of oppression, bind up your entire identity with solving it and unifying with those oppressed, and yet manage to accurately perceive reality? Or might you exaggerate every threat, fabricate every excuse to conform to whatever prejudices and biases might be expressed by the oppressed group you’ve decided to conform to?
Now, we should be tentative in our conclusions — maybe in practice it’s actually not a problem. Maybe critical theory is just a different angle on Sagan’s exhortation to question everything, and it all works out fine.
Maybe you won’t excuse your own failures in advance. (Horkheimer, p. 220: “Knowledge in [the] traditional sense, including every type of experience, is preserved in critical theory and in practice. But in regard to the essential kind of change at which the critical theory aims, there can be no concrete perception of it until it actually comes about.” Note — later critical theory’s embrace of postmodern ideas then dropped the pretense of preserving knowledge in the traditional sense.)
Maybe you will embrace testability, with clear ways to determine whether the project is succeeding or failing. (Horkheimer, p. 242: “There are no general criteria for judging the critical theory as a whole, for it is always based on the recurrence of events and thus on a self-reproducing totality. Nor is there a social class by whose acceptance of the theory one could be guided. It is possible for the consciousness of every social stratum today to be limited and corrupted by ideology.”)
Or maybe Critical Theory, for all its good intentions, is an absolute disaster of pragmatic epistemology.
And this is just early Horkheimer, who was still moderately enamored of the scientific method and of rational thought!
Habermas (in Knowledge and Human Interests): “The methodological framework that determines the meaning of the validity of critical propositions of this category is established by the concept of self-reflection. The latter releases the subject from dependence on hypostatized powers. Self-reflection is determined by an emancipatory cognitive interest.”
So, you decide you want to be free (emancipated cognitively, at least, or maybe you’re part of or thinking about the oppressed class). You self-reflect, which means you don’t have to listen to any existing wisdom or pay any attention to inconvenient realities (dismissed as “hypostatized powers” — which means models of reality being confused with actual reality). And you end up not rationalizing and fabricating everything because…??
And then there’s the small detail that basically everything that critical theorists predicted was impossible without critical theory (but was good) ended up either coming true or making huge leaps forward using standard Enlightenment-era approaches and proper scientific methodology, save for the radical societal transformation through revolution. Marcuse apparently longed for radical societal transformation so much that he literally invented “radical subjectivity” as a most desirable state to induce in people, where people would find the existing society intolerable and would revolt against it.
Our hypothesis, then, shouldn’t be that critical theory generates rubbish that is transparently so. Rather, we should suspect that it will be used with rationalizations and fabrications to support an unreasonably extreme and revolutionary perspective that isn’t truly grounded in reality, but at most inspired by it. Transparent rubbish is easy to handle: you see that it is rubbish, and you throw it in the bin. But strongly-motivated rationalization is dangerous. Haidt didn’t just fool himself; he fooled his wife, too.
Critical theory is not the kind of thing you should let near anything important. Used as a spice or garnish, to remind you to look at the big picture, ask if things are fair, ask if you are making assumptions that are wrong but convenient for the powers that be, it perhaps still has some merit. But there are far better alternatives (as we’ll see later), so the safer bet is to discard it entirely.
Part Two: the Flaws of Critical Race Theory
Critical Race Theory did not begin its life as a Critical Theory. Derrick Bell, the father of Critical Race Theory if any single person was, wrote in his seminal paper Racial Realism (Connecticut Law Review, 1992; reproduced in Critical Race Theory: the Key Writings that Formed the Movement, Crenshaw, Gotanda, Peller and Thomas; The New Press, 1995 (hereafter CRT:KeyWritings)) about the legal Realists after whom Race Realism is named and modeled: “More than their classical counterparts, they had been influenced by the rapid spread of the scientific outlook and the growth of the social sciences. Such influence predisposed them to accept a critical and empirical attitude towards the law.” This could go either way — veer more towards the self-reflection, savior-complex, and associated psychological defensiveness that is the natural consequence of Critical Theory, or veer instead towards empiricism where ideas are tested repeatedly by checking them against reality.
Indeed, Bell’s early (1970s) papers — you can find two in CRT:KeyWritings — (examining how, for instance, international moral outrage about segregation in the U.S. provided an additional impetus on whites for an end to segregation, so called “interest convergence”) were not clearly associated with any philosophical or legal movement — he simply made an astute observation that internal moral scruples had been insufficient to obtain desegregation and went looking for additional explanatory power. “These points may seem insufficient proof of self-interest leverage to produce a decision as important as Brown. They are cited, however, to help assess — and not to diminish — the Supreme Court’s most important statement on the principle of racial equality. Here, as in the abolition movement, there were whites for whom recognition of the racial equality principle was sufficient motivation. As with abolition, though, the number who would act on morality alone was insufficient to bring about the desired racial reform.” Careful, thoughtful legal analysis, steeped in evidence and argumentation. Critical theorists, too, can provide evidence and arguments. The question is: how do you respond when your conclusions are challenged? Are you open? Do you debate? Or do you, at the furthest extreme, demonize and kill? With his extensive experience in law as background, and his keen grasp of argument and persuasion, it is not entirely a surprise that Bell debated.
The ideas expressed by Bell and others were not gathered into an explicitly-identified critical framework until 1989, though some of the key people had identified as part of Critical Legal Studies (absolutely a critical theory, and something of a reaction to Legal Realism by doing the usual crit thing of dialing down the empiricism and dialing up the activism and search for oppressed groups) until they got fed up with its insufficient attention to race. In 1989, Kimberle Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, and Stephanie Phillips organized a workshop that gathered like-minded legal scholars and titled the area of interest “Critical Race Theory”.
Racism is a powerful force for harm throughout the world and throughout the United States especially. We can blame present-day current racism directly (not the consequences historical racism transmitted via race-blind mechanisms) because there are multiple studies that show exactly this.
As Derrick Bell dourly notes in Race Realism, “There is little reason to be shocked at my prediction that blacks will not be accepted as equals, a status that has eluded us as a group for more than three hundred years. The current condition of most blacks provides support for this position.”
So we have a formerly and presently oppressed group. We observe large disparities. Critical Theory to the rescue? Or Critical Theory to layer an epistemologically bankrupt veneer of counterevidence-denying rationalization over a mixed collection of good and bad ideas that are no longer open to question?
In Critical Race Theory: An Introduction (3rd ed; Delgado and Stefancic; NYU Press, 2017), the authors express what they view as the central tenets of CRT, while acknowledging that they are a diverse group with many different perspectives. The Wikipedia article on CRT, for example, has a longer and slightly different list.
Delgado and Stefancic list the following tenets (pp. 8–11):
- Ordinaryness: racism is “ordinary science” (i.e. “ordinary”), not exceptional; part of how society does business; and provides important material and psychic benefits for the dominant racial group.
- Interest convergence: if you see an advance in the rights of other races, it is actually because it benefited the dominant race to make the change, not for the good of the non-dominant race(s).
- Social construction: race is a social construct with no biological (genetic) basis.
- Differential racialization: racism is not one-size-fits-all for different non-dominant races, but rather each gets painted with their own set of stereotypes.
- Intersectionality: people simultaneously are members of different identity groups, and what they experience and how people treat them may not just be the sum of how they would treat each identity group separately.
- Presumed competence: when it comes to race and racism, members of non-dominant racial groups know what they’re talking about, while whites don’t.
These are all good points. The key figures behind Critical Race Theory think deeply, express themselves eloquently, and make a good case for why their perspectives should be considered. We should not disparage them as fools, nor dismiss the ideas as transparently nonsensical. The question, though, is: do we scrutinize and explore each idea, asking how good of a model of reality it is, and successively refining our understanding (or abandoning one or more precepts in favor of more accurate ones)? Or do we wield the ideas as weapons that will protect our reason for existence and align with an oppressed class, irrespective of whether it’s actually justified?
Delgado and Stefancic are not terribly encouraging in this regard (p. 3): “Critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.”
Yes, it’s good to question everything. But this isn’t everything. This is a very specific set of things that have the only proven track record for cutting through the nonsense and getting to the heart of matters.
It’s not terribly hard to see how the six principles above, plus free reign to even dismiss rationality as the final arbiter of reality if you need to, can be used to deflect pretty much any criticism.
For instance, if you don’t like my criticism of CRT, here are various things you can do: (1) “Your entire perspective is racist; that’s really why you disagree with this.” I can say nothing, because racism infuses everything — how could I even know myself that this wasn’t my ulterior motive? (2) “So, CRT wouldn’t benefit you, would it?” Well…I mean…even selfishly, I benefit indirectly from living in a more productive and just society, so…if CRT actually worked to generate a more productive and just society, I would probably benefit a bit? (6) “You have no idea of what your talking about and no right to comment.” Depending on how deep presumed competence/incompetence is supposed to run, I’m not allowed to say anything here, either.
And if this isn’t enough, the topper: “All these ‘arguments’ are just the tools of Enlightenment imperialist oppression.” I…wait…I’m not allowed to make an argument now, am I?
The bag of tricks is large enough to shut down anyone if they get troublesome. Sure, if someone actually says something stupid (e.g. “my company hires black people, so it’s not racist”), you can just answer normally (e.g. “but not any Arabs, or black women, and the black men are paid less despite being more experienced” (ordinary-racism + differential racialization + intersectionality), assuming this is true). But if you get into any trouble, never fear.
It helps, somewhat, if the critique is from someone who is black. That cuts off some (but only some!) of the shielding. But you never really have to consider: “what if I’m wrong?” But at least you don’t have to kill anyone to protect your views. You just say something and the problems go away.
The major tenets contain many but not all of the the problematic aspects of CRT. Delgado and Stefancic appear very proud of the emphasis on narrative (pp. 45–46): “Although some writers criticize CRT for excessive negativity and failure to develop a positive program, legal storytelling and narrative analysis are clear-cut advances that the movement can claim.”
They then proceed to give an example of why it’s a complete disaster epistemologically and socially. They contrast two narratives: the narrative of the U.S. as the land of rights and freedom (told by whites), and the narrative of the U.S. as the land of gory brutality and injustice (told by blacks, Latinos, and Middle-Easterners). Page 48:
How can there be such divergent stories? Why do they not reconcile? To the first question, critical race theory answers, “experience”. People of different races have radically different experiences as they go through life. […] To the second, it answers that empathy is in short supply. […] Literary and narrative theory holds that we each occupy a normative universe or “nomos” (or perhaps many of them), from which we are not easily dislodged.
Um…and…recognizing these problems, do we want to try to build anything important on top of it? Of course a story can help humanize an otherwise dry description of people, but from this, the take-home message should be of the danger of narrative, both established and alternative. The take-home message shouldn’t be “they didn’t reconcile” but real things actually happened, and because real things can be objectively determined, we can gain agreement despite initially different perspectives if we focus on objective reality rather than narration. Narration was the problem.
Nonetheless, CRT draws, from this, that we should tell narratives to sway the legal process, and Delgado and Stefancic revel in its effectiveness. This is only slightly less sensible than the idea that taking the One Ring and using it against the Enemy only to preserve Gondor and the Free Peoples is a good idea or will even work. How could this have come out so backwards? (If you guess “maybe Critical Theory?”, I would be inclined to agree.)
Delgado and Stefancic, to their credit (from the perspective of Enlightenment rationality, though, which we are to take as suspect) admit there is criticism and…just…well, read for yourself:
Criticism also comes from leftist scholars, like Mark Tushnet, who consider that the genre is an ineffective and analytically unsound form of discourse, and from self-professed liberals, like Daniel Farber and Suzanna Sherry, whose critiques are discussed in Chapter 6. [p. 54 — this is the end of this chapter]
Farber and Sherry accused critical race theorists of hiding behind personal stories and narratives to advance their points of view, as well as lacking respect for traditional notions of truth and merit. Citing the examples of Jews and Asians — two minority groups that have achieved high levels of success by conventional standards — they argued against the idea that the game is rigged against minorities. […] Did [Jews and Asians] cheat or take unfair advantage? […] Therefore, CRT’s critique of merit is implicitly anti-Semitic and anti-Asian. […] The crits’ responses were not long in coming. […] If Asians and Jews succeeded despite an unfair system, this is all to their credit. But why should pointing out unfairness in universal merit standards, like the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), bespeak a negative attitude towards members of these groups? As the crits saw it, Farber and Sherry confused criticism of a standard with criticism of individuals who performed well under that standard. [pp. 103–104]
Tushnet is completely unanswered. Farber and Sherry’s structural complaint is also completely unanswered. Even the specific reply escapes the CRT framework into Enlightenment individuality to avoid having to grapple with the racial identity of the groups in question. And Delgado and Stefancic seem completely unconcerned. “Despite […] criticisms, law has slowly been moving in the direction of recognizing the legitimacy and power of narrative.” (p. 53). The practice of law has changed, okay….but is it good, or is it bad?
One could go further into the toxic and likely intentional divisiveness of Whiteness Studies, which Delgado and Stefancic, at least, claim for CRT, but we needn’t explore every unsound corner of CRT to understand its flaws.
As per Horkheimer, you cannot evaluate a Critical Theory until it succeeds and creates the transformation it was seeking. Delgado and Stefancic offer some speculation on what this might look like (pp. 157–160; headings are theirs despite not being quoted):
- CRT becomes the new civil rights orthodoxy. “The critique of color-blindness may, one day, persuade the U.S. Supreme Court to accept race-conscious measures in employment and education, leveling the playing field for those who have long been excluded from society’s bounty.” and “Its percepts may become commonplace, part of the conventional wisdom. […] Consider in how many disciplines, scholars, teachers, and courses profess, almost incidentally, to embrace critical race theory.”
- Critical Race Theory marginalized and ignored. “[Officials] could go back to seeking counsel from the voices of incrementalism and color blindness, perhaps out of a desire to engage in denial or ‘keep the lid on’ as long as possible.”
- Critical Race Theory analyzed but rejected. “The movement has already drawn its share of detractors who see it as overly radical, inconsistent with Enlightenment philosophy, and a bad example to minority communities. More could be persuaded to this point of view, especially if right-wing talk radio and websites continue to proliferate and gain popularity….”
- Partial incorporation. “[Perhaps] some aspects of critical race theory will be accepted by society’s mainstream and halls of power, while other parts of it will continue to meet resistance.” (Narrative/storytelling, critique of merit, intersectionality, and status-quo-is-inherently-racist are all mentioned as likely to be incorporated.)
So, either CRT wins, or people engage in denial, or right-wing talk radio shifts people’s views, or CRT wins but less big.
There is another option, you know. The one Horkheimer ruled out by declaration. The awful, terrible option that Carl Sagan mentioned.
Critical Race Theory analyzed but rejected because it is an epistemological disaster (you cannot build reliable knowledge), because it is a social disaster (by factionalizing and setting groups at odds with each other), and because it is ineffective (because the previous two problems, but the first more than the second, leave it mired in incorrect belief and opinion that do not show the way towards actually fixing the actual problems).
We can rescue the insights of value, from among those that CRT has popularized, by recasting the effort not as a critical theory but as the most rigorous possible social science in the classical meaning of science.
We may not have much time. If current trends continue — and they may well not, as complex social systems often have a self-correcting mechanism as individuals resist extremes — the legacy of CRT, along with that of postmodernism, Captialism, religiousity, human nature, and a whole heap of intolerance, lack of empathy, and embrace of opinion over fact may turn out to be not elevation of the oppressed class but collapse of society.
If we do have much time, there’s little hope that history will be much kinder to CRT. Stranger things have happened, but when you give yourself so many ways to become divorced from reality, reality tends to come back and bite you, and your descendants say, “Wow, what did they think was going to happen, picking a fight with reality like that?”
It’s time to move beyond Critical Race Theory.
Part Three: Beyond Critical Race Theory with Race Systems Analysis
Humans have a superpower. We can fly. We can swim to the deepest ocean. We can unbridle the fury of the sun. We have telepathy. We are practically immune to pathogens.
Humans have a superpower. We can think.
We can fly because we understand fluid mechanics and combustion and heat transfer. We can swim to the deepest ocean because we understand metallurgy and pressure and the metabolic requirement for oxygen. We can unbridle the fury of the sun because we understand the difference in rest mass between nuclei of different elements and how nuclear decay can be accelerated by neutron capture. We have telepathy because we understand the electromagnetic spectrum and the semiconducting properties of silicon and how to encode voice with mathematics and mathematics with logic and logic with bits of silicon. We are practically immune to pathogens because we understood optics and genetics and cellular biology and identified the mechanisms of disease. (We don’t feel like we’re almost immune, especially in the era of Covid, because we are so used to the status quo. Compared to history, however, childhood mortality especially is vanishingly low.)
We understand so much because we have discerned that — as it appears superficially — there is an objective reality. We are not all lost inside our own minds; with a few exceptions (mental illness), we agree that a woman is a woman and a hat is a hat, and they have very different properties. Nobody argues “Well, in some cultures, hats and women are treated as interchangeable; when a baby loses its mother, it may be adopted by a breastfeeding woman, or it may be adopted by a hat.” Not only does no such culture exist, it’s difficult to conceive that such a culture could exist. It’s patently absurd.
Because objectivity really is a universal experience of how reality works and everyone has been able to find it in part, peoples throughout the world found bits and pieces of the scientific method: in Egypt, in Greece, and China, and during the Islamic Golden Age. The objective perceptiveness of other cultures back deep into history is evidenced by, for instance, structures built to align with celestial phenomena.
But it was not until the Enlightenment — though his methodology was not ultimately adopted, Francis Bacon played a larger role than anyone (Descartes deserves honorable mention), and the Royal Society played a larger role than any other group — that we really started to hit on how to use our powers of observation and thought to extend our objective reach from things like the distinction between women and hats to the entire cosmos.
Now we have the almost unfathomable privilege of complaining that we have to sit, kind of cramped, for half a day to be transported with virtual certainty to the opposite side of the world, whereas our ancient ancestors who even knew there was an opposite side of the world could not have reached it at all, or if they had, would have been celebrated throughout history forever after.
The reason why objectivity is so important is twofold. First, any time we’re confused, we can just go back and ask reality, “Hey, um, did we get this right?” And, if we manage to ask carefully enough, reality will go, “Yeah, okay, not bad,” or maybe “What garbage is this even?!?!?” But secondly, and just as important, it means we can work together without fighting over who has dominance. Everyone who accepts objectivity can play the same game: learn what is known and add to it. Add, and add, and add, standing on the shoulders of giants until Zeus himself could not approach even a minuscule fraction of the destructive power wielded (but hopefully never again applied) of, for example, the President of the United States.
This is our superpower.
Any time we can make a problem look like one we can solve with this superpower, we are in so much better shape than when we’re not.
Critical Theory, and Critical Race Theory in kind, throws this away — just discards it casually on the side of the road without a second thought. CRT: An Introduction is wonderfully thoughtful, reflective, evidential, and reasoned in places — admirably so. This makes the book better. It gives the conclusions a better chance of capturing important parts of what is objectively the case as opposed to being a collection of scholars’ unconstrained opinions. These are fruits of the tree of Enlightenment, and yet they’re poised to cut down the tree, or simply knock it over by accident. Despite all its power, it’s remarkably fragile. Science is at once deeply intuitive — young children are constantly improving their models of reality by testing them — and deeply unintuitive: you mean I have to doubt my own ideas? Find the most damaging ways to attack them?! Constantly and forever?!?! What madness is this!
Narration is so much easier.
And yet there is a reason we don’t have a narrative approach to microprocessor design: it doesn’t work.
The problem, of course, is that the scientific method is incredibly difficult to apply to social situations. But all hope is not lost — just because it’s difficult doesn’t mean that we can’t strive for as much objectivity as we can get in every area we can. Even small gains bring benefits as long as we remember to doubt. We’re not sure of something because we did a well-meaning but necessarily somewhat inconclusive scientifically-minded study. But we have a better chance of being more right.
In most of science, progress is made through reductionism. You take a system apart, figure out how the pieces work. Too hard? Take the piece apart, figure out how that works. Too hard? Okay, take that apart. Repeat until you get something you can understand; then start reassembling.
If we took that approach, though, the insights (and delusions) of Critical Race Theory about the level of the whole society would never intersect with our attempts at objectivity. But here, too, science is showing the way.
Systems biology takes a different approach than the standard reductionistic one. It says: let’s put the pieces together, even the top level ones, even if we don’t totally understand how it works. Let’s model the whole system. Yes, we won’t have all the details right, we must retain even more doubt about the conclusions, or the conclusions may be less specific than in reductionistic affairs. But because we know a lot about the pieces, we can learn about the whole by studying it.
Social psychology takes a slightly different tack by — when done carefully, which admittedly is really hard, and it’s not hard to find egregious messups — accepting the embedding within society and trying to find sufficiently independent pieces of how society works that you can take a quasi-reductive approach to study, that then reveals insights that are relevant to society. If social psychology missteps at times, at least it (so far, mostly) doesn’t do so in the epistemologically bankrupt way that Critical Theory does.
So what we need is a reinvisioning of the study of race and society, something that we might call Race Systems Analysis (RSA).
RSA would wholeheartedly embrace the advances of the Enlightenment and the methods of science — including, absolutely, yes, the exhortation of Sagan to doubt everything, even those things it is built upon. Doubt does not mean we discard it; it means we constantly keep an open mind and ask, “What if this is wrong? What if it is incomplete?” As Neil deGrasse Tyson summarizes it, we must do whatever it takes to avoid fooling ourselves.
RSA could capture every worthwhile insight from CRT while providing a framework to make the conclusions — the correct ones — increasingly hard to deny.
Instead of the concept of the “ordinaryness” of racism used in a casual ill-constrained way (i.e. as a club with which to beat your opponents until they cry uncle), you would quantify the types of and the magnitude of the effects of racism. You’d ask things like does perceived race matter in hiring? And when the answer comes back yes, you’d remember not just “yes”, but “yes, by about 50%”. And this is just from changing names to suggest race! This isn’t simply cause for despair. It’s also data. It shows us how big the problem is. It gives us a yardstick by which to measure progress. So when you run the experiment again a couple decades later and the answer comes back yes again, you pay attention and see it’s now 10%. The take-home message shouldn’t just be “OMG, still, racism!” although this is also true. It should also be: we’re actually doing it, we’re actually getting past racial bias that has been unfairly hampering people’s opportunities! (CRT’s natural stance towards stuff like this is to dismiss it as “incrementalism”.) Then you ask — wait, is this really true? Was the methodology good enough for the difference between ~50% and ~10% to be meaningful? The 10% study is HUGE and really well done; we can be pretty confident in that result. But the 50% wasn’t, so…we keep our certainty in check, but tentatively accept that hiring seems to have gotten a lot better in the past couple decades.
And you can go on and ask, “What factor prompts the residual racial discrimination in hiring? Is it race per-se, or is it negative impressions of a particular racial and cultural group?” And you find that it is specifically American Black culture not blackness per se that has the biggest effect (as least inasmuch as you can probe such things by suggesting them with names). Whether this is encouraging or discouraging is hard to know, but if we don’t understand this how will we know how to make things better? If we don’t quantify this, how will we know how important it is to make this better?
Instead of the fuzzy qualitative concept of interest convergence, you can ask: what degree of self-interest are people willing to forego in order to achieve a moral good? Can we engineer things intentionally to not exceed that level of cost to self-interest? Win-win solutions are always better anyway if we can find them.
Instead of simply declaring with social construction that racial differences have no genetic basis, we let ourselves doubt, and we let ourselves ask: do they? Mightn’t it be important to know? But…we’ve already done this, and we do know that genetic differences — at least for major racial groups — are either tiny or nonexistent. (So we should only be impressed and delighted, not be increduluous, that the Harlem Children’s Zone works.) Better yet — as part of learning, we also know which areas are most important to address to try to lower the very real gap in capability given the environment. We shouldn’t declare that reality must be a certain way — we should understand it so that we can respond accordingly.
The idea of differential racialization can be kept, but, again, made quantitative. What is the effect size? How much does this matter? What factors are important in whether or not it matters? Do people hire Juan and Gabriella?
The clumsy qualitative idea of intersectionality can be replaced by the much older and more powerful quantitative idea of statistical covariates for understanding how different subgroups might be unfairly targeted, while stressing our individual diversity and common humanity as reasons for understanding and empathy. (Guess why we know that genetics doesn’t have much impact on cognitive outcome? Is it because we intersected everyone into tiny groups and…um…something? Or is it because we analyzed continuous and categorical covariates? You can go back up to the link in the social construction paragraph if you want to check.)
Instead of presumed competence we can ask for demonstrated competence. If you know what you’re talking about, you ought to be able to show it. If you know what you’re talking about but our educational system has failed you so badly (or you’re so beholden to the idea that you can “speak your own truth” without any regard for whether you’re objectively correct or anyone else can determine your veracity), we should help show you how. If people of color actually know more about issues of racism — it seems almost unfathomable that this isn’t true on average — then there’s no harm in being asked to show it, because they’ll show it. (But we have to listen.)
Instead of idolizing narrative, we’ll recognize that we already understand how to use individual accounts to open our minds to possibilities we weren’t adequately considering, but in a way that won’t cause our minds to fall out (if we’re careful): the case study.
And we can add, taking insights from systems biology and the like, that when we propose some societal change, we need evaluate as best we can the likely range of impacts on society as a whole, keeping in mind as many of the dynamic processes as we can.
As always with a scientific or science-inspired approach, leaving room for doubt must be central. A key part of this is avoiding orthodoxy: the idea that there is one right answer and that to consider anything else is inherently blasphemous. You don’t just throw up your hands and declare harebrained ideas to be good as well-supported ones. You don’t accept that very very thoroughly debunked ideas repeatedly and loudly promoted are as good as reasonably well-tested ideas. But when someone raises nonsense to compete with a decent well-founded model, it should be a teachable moment in most cases, not a time for excommunication and banishment (and punching in the face — they’re probably a Nazi, after all). We need that psychological safety around speaking a contrary view (when the view is shared in good faith with as much support from reason or evidence as can be managed). We need not orthodoxy but heterodoxy.
In particular, we cannot assume that there is an oppressed class, that we must achieve dynamic unity with the oppressed class or we have no function, that racism is ordinary and everywhere, and so on. We mustn’t assume; we must ask. We have to ask: are we right? Are we wrong? To what extent? How do we know? What manipulations cause what kind of effect? How does it interact with the whole? Can we measure that?
As Richard Feynman said, “If it disagrees with experiment it is wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science.”. If we can capture that insight, our prospects for understanding what is the case, and then using that understanding to improve things, are greatly improved.
Critical Race Theory is not the framework we need. Anti-racism is a mess, and CRT only points deeper in.
We have all the tools we need to do better. We can invent a new field like “Race Systems Analysis”.
It’s high time. Let’s get to work.