logicp_writings/crt/CRT_Quotes.md

Alison Bailey

Bailey, Alison. “Tracking Privilege-Preserving Epistemic Pushback in Feminist and Critical Race Philosophy Classes,” Hypatia

"The Critical Thinking tradition is concerned primarily with epistemic adequacy. To be critical is to show good judgment and recognizing when arguments are faulty. Assertions like evidence, truth claims, appeal to unreliable sources, or concepts are sloppily crafted and applied. For critical thinkers, the problem is that people fail to examine the assumptions, commitments and logic of daily life. The basic problem is irrational, illogical and unexamined living."

"Critical pedagogy begins from a different set of assumptions, rooted in the Neo-Marxian literature on Critical Theory commonly associated with the Frankfurt School."

Audrey Lords

"The tools of the critical thinking tradition, for example, validity, soundness, conceptual clarity, cannot dismantle the master's house, they can temporarily beat the master at his own game, but they can never bring about any enduring structural change"

Richard Delgado / Jean Stefancic

"Crits [Critical Race Theorists] are highly suspicious of another liberal mainstay, namely rights." -Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, first edition, p. 23.

“Unlike traditional civil rights, which embraces incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.” From Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, first edition, p. 3.

"Political scientists ponder voting strategies coined by critical race theorists. Ethnic studies courses often include a unit on critical race theory, and American studies departments teach material on critical white studies developed by CRT writers. Unlike some academic disciplines, critical race theory contains an activist dimension. It not only tries to understand our social situation, but to change it" From Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, first edition, p. 3.

Robin DiAngelo

(Critical Whiteness Studies) "This work merges in the North American context of the 1960s with antiwar, feminist, gay rights, Black power, Indigenous peoples, The Chicano Movement, disability rights, and other movements for social justice.

Many of these movements initially advocated for a type of liberal humanism (individualism, freedom, and peace) but quickly turned to a rejection of liberal humanism. The logic of individual autonomy that underlies liberal humanism (the idea that people are free to make independent rational decisions that determine their own fate) was viewed as a mechanism for keeping the marginalized in their place by obscuring larger structural systems of inequality. In other words, it fooled people into believing that they had more freedom and choice than societal structures actually allow."

• Robin DiAngelo - Is Everyone Really Equal An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice Education, p. 47

Kimberle Crenshaw

It's important to note, in this section, that what we're actually finding is the proof that Critical Race Theorists are themselves racists by their own definition of the term Racist. That is, the definition that selectively replaces other terms whenever it is most utilitarian to do so for the proliferation of the theory. That is, racism becomes a stand in for any resistance to proletarian struggle as defined by the party - power + privilege. If the party is "for the people", then any ascription of "privilege" or "power" is insofar that it limits the liberation of "the people".

You are not allowed to make a criticism about one being implicated as guilty or lacking knowledge or capability in any regard by virtue of their race, unless it has been granted by the Critical Theorist through their acknowledgment that your identity, that which they've evaluated and assigned to you, indicates a race which is or is not privileged.

In this quote we see that Kimberle Crenshaw decries the category of race as being something which has been wrongfully imposed, and that this is the means by which racism has been used to stratify society through oppression and domination. For this reason, in a paper where asserts her positions on the basis of postmodern deconstruction, she claims that no one has the right to deconstruct race except the Critical Race Theorist. They acknowledge that race was wrongfully imposed, creating racism in the first place, and now they demand that they can deconstruct all aspects of the social sphere to their express purpose of Critical Praxis and that they will do this through race essentialism.

Again, that is to say that they assert that the advent of racism and the unfair stratification of society was done through the imposition of race, and they are also claiming that they will impose race as a "statement of resistance" and "positive discourse of self-identification". They will do the very thing which created oppression and domination, and they will set the conditions to make it properly basic that any criticism of this strategy is inadmissible, making it the complete opposite of the practice of critical thinking under a presumption of liberalism. They are, by their own definition, racist. They are privileging themselves and and asserting power on the basis of something they deem to be a social construction that could be deconstructed in a rational discourse, and they've forbidden that discourse in order to ensure that they maintain a position of power. The fact that they are able to do it without scrutiny proves that they have power and privilege, and the fact that they impose this manner of thinking proves that they are racists.

Preceding thought by Lindsay: "That is, it is the fusion of neo-Marxism (as racial “liberation politics”) fused with elements from postmodern Theory. This is perfectly consistent with her argument in “Mapping the Margins,” which takes to task both liberal approaches to civil rights (and liberalism) and also postmodernism, as being insufficient to address “the exercise of racial power.” Ultimately, Crenshaw’s contribution to this fusion is in figuring out the necessary neo-Marxist alchemical formula to set aside racial category (identity) from postmodern Theory’s deconstructive digestive juices. Racial identity and the oppression neo-Marxist thought ascribes to it shall not be deconstructed. Indeed, she frames the attempt to do so as necessarily rooted in precisely the privilege that racial neo-Marxism (Identity Marxism) builds itself around critiquing."

Crenshaw:

"It is helpful in this regard to distinguish intersectionality from the closely related perspective of antiessentialism, from which women of color have critically engaged white feminism for the absence of women of color on the one hand, and for speaking for women of color on the other. One rendition of this antiessentialist critique—that feminism essentializes the category woman—owes a great deal to the postmodernist idea that categories we consider natural or merely representational are actually socially constructed in a linguistic economy of difference. While the descriptive project of postmodernism of questioning the ways in which meaning is socially constructed is generally sound, this critique sometimes misreads the meaning of social construction and distorts its political relevance. One version of antiessentialism, embodying what might be called the vulgarized social construction thesis, is that since all categories are socially constructed, there is no such thing as, say, Blacks or women, and thus it makes no sense to continue reproducing those categories by organizing around them...

But to say that a category such as race or gender is socially constructed is not to say that that category has no significance in our world. On the contrary, a large and continuing project for subordinated people—and indeed, one of the projects for which postmodern theories have been very helpful—is thinking about the way power has clustered around certain categories and is exercised against others. This project attempts to unveil the processes of subordination and the various ways those processes are experienced by people who are subordinated and people who are privileged by them. It is, then, a project that presumes that categories have meaning and consequences. And this project’s most pressing problem, in many if not most cases, is not the existence of the categories, but rather the particular values attached to them and the way those values foster and create social hierarchies.

This is not to deny that the process of categorization is itself an exercise of power, but the story is much more complicated and nuanced than that. First, the process of categorizing or, in identity terms, naming—is not unilateral. Subordinated people can and do participate, sometimes even subverting the naming process in empowering ways. One need only think about the historical subversion of the cat egory “Black” or the current transformation of “queer” to understand that categorization is not a one-way street. Clearly, there is unequal power, but there is nonetheless some degree of agency that people can and do exert in the politics of naming. And it is important to note that identity continues to be a site of resistance for members of different subordinated groups. We all can recognize the distinction between the claims “I am Black” and the claim “I am a person who happens to be Black.” “I am Black” takes the socially imposed identity and empowers it as an anchor of subjectivity. “I am Black” becomes not simply a statement of resistance but also a positive discourse of self-identification, intimately linked to celebratory statements like the Black nationalist “Black is beautiful.” “I am a person who happens to be Black,” on the other hand, achieves self-identification by straining for a certain universality (in effect, “I am first a person”) and for a concomitant dismissal of the imposed category (“Black”) as contingent, circumstantial, nondeterminant. There is truth in both characterizations, of course, but they function quite differently depending on the political context. At this point in history, a strong case can be made that the most critical resistance strategy for disempowered groups is to occupy and defend a politics of social location rather than to vacate and destroy it.

Vulgar constructionism thus distorts the possibilities for meaningful identity politics by conflating at least two separate but closely linked manifestations of power. One is the power exercised simply through the process of categorization; the other, the power to cause that categorization to have social and material consequences. While the former power facilitates the latter, the political implications of challenging one over the other matter greatly."

Marcuse

"The concept of the primary, initial institutions of liberation is familiar enough and concrete enough: collective ownership, collective control and planning of the means of production and distribution. This is the foundation, a necessary but not sufficient condition for the alternative: it would make possible the usage of all available resources for the abolition of poverty, which is the prerequisite for the turn from quant ity into quality: the creation of a reality in accordance with the new sensitivity and the new consciousness."