SHOULDN'T A THEORY HAVE TESTABLE IMPLICATIONS?

Debra Humphreys makes the case for critical theory as a legitimate academic discipline.

An area of legal and academic study honed for decades, this scholarly effort simply charts how racism and discrimination are baked into our systems of justice, education and other aspects of life. It’s a fact-based approach that helps us to chart the impact of racism historically and in the present. It helps us understand and begin to address today’s undeniable realities of inequality -- in income, wealth, housing, educational attainment and practically every other area that matters.

In principle, that is straightforward.

First steps:  But for emancipation, how much worse would black life be?  But for voting rights and public accommodation law, how much worse would black life be?  But for school desegregation, how much worse would black life be?  If you want to be provocative, but for urban renewal and the War on Poverty, how much worse would black life be?  Would a peer-reviewed journal publish research that suggested urban renewal or the War on Poverty actually worsened conditions relative to the baseline?

Next steps, somewhat harder: how much of the remaining "undeniable realities of inequality" is a residual effect of discriminatory policies?  Does that account for the entire residual?  If not, how much, and with what margins of error?

It's precisely to those contrarian points of view that Ms Humphreys should be speaking.

Those who developed and practice critical race theory are part of a broad and strong scholarly community that continues to teach, study and improve our understanding of history and society. This community has thrived thanks to a distinct feature of our educational institutions. At their best, schools and colleges are powerful zones of inquiry, debate and civil discourse. But we cannot take this feature for granted. We must fight to preserve the academic freedoms needed to build curricula that tell the whole truth about our history -- not just the inspiring struggles for justice but also the shameful racist realities.

You don't add by subtracting, though, which is where the push-back is coming from.  John Ganz summarizes, "I happen to think racism and white supremacy remain real social problems even if stupid anti-racism trainings might butcher and oversimplify the issues. Critical Race Theory is also real thing: it’s a movement among legal scholars that arose out of the failures of conventional civil rights approaches to affect the change in society it promised."  He offers an interesting observation on but for.

I recently read a collection of essays by the big Critical Race Theorists. I found they are really not that radical. In more than one essay the authors actually defended the liberal order of rights and a kind of constitutional patriotism against the more traditionally Marxian Critical Legal Theorist movement, because of the success minorities in gaining recognition and power through the liberal discourses of rights and democracy.

It's in the but for that the work, to use a term the wokerati like, remains.

I think basically the proper left-wing response is to just basically say a lot of Critical Race Theory is good and correct about a lot. And so is a lot of Marxism. And so is the American ideal of democracy for that matter. The fact of the matter is that society is divided by race, gender, and class in a lot of complicated ways and it requires concerted thought and effort to untangle them. Racism wasn’t invented by Critical Race Theorists any more than the problems of capitalist society were invented by Marxists. From what I’ve read so far, I happen to prefer the Mari Matsuda or Kimberlé Crenshaw variation of CRT, with its endorsement of formal equality and liberal democracy, much more than the apparent pessimism of the Derrick Bell variation. But the point is this is actually a body of ideas worth reading, thinking, and arguing about. It deserves better than to be the fodder for “trainings” or “cheat sheets.” I will say that the way CRT has been popularized has not done its practitioners any favors: for instance, the fall-off in intellectual level between the collection of primary source essays I read and the Introduction to Critical Race Theory text I also read, which was evidently targeted to undergrads, was severe. That being said, probably no efforts at intellectual rigor would have rescued CRT from bad faith attacks.

It's on the academic practitioners to be good stewards of the traditions of scholarly inquiry.  It's possible, as Keith Whittington appears to be arguing, that the vulgar versions of critical theory are making the attacks, whether in bad faith or not, more feasible.

There are plenty of reasons to be sceptical of critical race theory, and the excesses that conservatives frequently identify with it. There is an ideological battle being fought over the future of liberal democracy and capitalism, and both vulgar and sophisticated forms of critical race theory are part of that battle. At the same time, ordinary citizens are getting a dose of what race peddlers and diversity, equity and inclusion grifters are selling and are looking for ways to push back. Entrepreneurial politicians and activists will take advantage of their grievances.

Unfortunately, universities have become an easy target for American conservatives. Conservatives have often complained about the left-wing tilt of academia and been critical of universities, but in recent years they have shifted to thinking that universities are actively harmful to society. Unsurprisingly, such attitudes tend to translate into public policy. Republicans have become increasingly bold in interfering with university governance and attacking university endowments.

Turnabout is fair play, isn't it: if the people in higher education decide that stakeholders, whoever they might be, ought to have a say in what businesses do, or what participants in shooting sports do, oughtn't they be held to the same standards. There's a lot more in the essay about the proper role of academic inquiry, by all means, go and read it.  Kindly be guided, though, dear reader, by this observation.

The political discussion is less informed by engagement with serious scholarly works than by rumours of what is happening in corporate diversity training workshops and what popularisers and propagandists like Robin DiAngelo and Howard Ross offer to mass market consumers. When professors and universities cancel entire classes dealing with the subject of race so as to avoid raising the ire of politicians, the educational mission of the university is potentially damaged. There is no reason to think that politicians can evaluate what work merits discussion on a college campus.

Mr Whittington also observes,

The campus left has long contended that the mere presence of a speaker with disagreeable ideas on a college campus is tantamount to an institutional endorsement of those ideas and that a student’s discomfort at ideas expressed on campus undermines that student’s equal educational opportunity. It was only a matter of time until the political right leveraged those arguments for their own ends. The university is either a haven for free intellectual inquiry and for expressing controversial and difficult ideas or it is a safe space in which students are to be protected from ideas that they might find discomforting. Republican lawmakers may be hypocrites for embracing the safe space model when it comes to critical race theory, but universities have been giving away the high ground on this issue.

Indeed.