UK academic sues university after losing role in critical race theory row

Females are disadvantaged because they are women, because of childbirth and other biological facts

Right here you have a clear and deeply significant difference with race. And for that matter, with class in the Marxist sense.

Suggesting that recognizing the difference is about some other agenda is bs. Any radical feminist worth their salt understand this. Others who don't have essentially embraced the feminist version of CRT which isn't a good thing. And yes, there are rad fems who fall into that error, whatever they call themselves. If you don't start with material reality you aren't using a marxist class analysis, you are doing something else.

This is such a fascinating discussion, it's helping me start to understand the debates so much. @Blakes77 CRT seems to have significant overlaps with rad fem to me too which is why I think I am aligned with many of its basic principles. But then there's something odd because commentators I understand as being aligned with CRT do not seem to be aligned with the principles of rad fem and are for example very happy to say TWAW. Which I not so comfortable with. So how is it that they can 'see' structural disadvantage in one place but not in another. The trouble with all of this for me is that it's like trying to hold jelly tight in your hand without any escaping. Impossible. And similarly it feels as though making CRT something I either agree with or don't is impossible. I think it was @nauticant up threat who said take bits and reject others, including specific interpretations. That seems like the only approach as I read more.

I think I agree with that DavidTennant. Seems to be a definite agenda, and not necessarily one that is about women’s rights in particular.

given that this board is very rad fem

I'm not sure that this board is as rad fem is it once was though.

Increasingly I see people drawn here by the trans issue who are operting more from an "anti-woke" perspective and who see things like trans rights activism, critical race theory and perhaps even some aspects of radical feminism itself as part of a common front of "woke" activism that they oppose. These tend to be the people who dislike the concept of privelige, not the rad fems.

it doesn’t seem so different to radical feminism

Here's one difference. In the US particularly, and also in the UK, institutions have invited CRT in and are configuring themselves to enable CRT to become widely embedded and to have considerable influence.

It's not the fact that people are free to choose to follow CRT, it's the manifestations of what this means. Say "I won't follow radical feminism" in your institution and see the people look on in bemusement. Then try saying "I won't follow CRT".

People of African heritage rather than Caribbean heritage may (at the moment) do better in the establishment but either one of them misses a penalty for England the racist howling doesn’t discriminate.
Obviously not all black people are the same, or from the same race or the same culture. Some of you sound like you have just realised this, and want to tell others, like it’s news. It reminds me of when a man goes “did you know, a woman can be both pretty AND funny!” and thinks he doesn’t sound like a sexist twat..
And I’m well aware of the history of immigrants in this country, being of that background myself, all I know is that while there are many different cultures within the thousands of immigrants that came, the only thing you needed in the 80s to have dog shit shoved through your letterbox and NF spray painted on your wall was brown skin.
That’s not “essentialist” that’s just fact.
I am not saying I am a fan of CRT- I haven’t read enough so don’t really know, just that it doesn’t seem so different to radical feminism: Females are disadvantaged because they are women, because of childbirth and other biological facts, this is structurally embedded, some women rise to CEO but usually at the expense of something (kids or relationship). The systems need tearing down and re- building so women are not trying to live life according to structures put there by men which set them up to fail.
And yes, sex is binary, race not so, although “ white” and “ not white” is pretty binary. I’m just saying, given that this board is very rad fem, given everything I have read on here, it’s interesting that there is so much denial of racism and panicking about CRT when there seem to be clear parallels to me.

British Racism is a thing all in itself. It is subtle and makes distinctions between different sorts of folk. The British "Indian" army took Muslims, Sikhs and Nepali Gurkhas, but not weedy little Indian Hindu vegetarians who were deemed insufficiently warlike. Ditto in Africa where some were classed as warriors (Like the Luo in the Kings African Rifles) but most were deemed hewers of wood and drawers of water, who when they volunteered for WW2, were set to work digging latrines.

There is an interesting segment in the US educational film for the GIs coming to Britain where they are urged not to address any black men in British uniform as 'boy' or they will soon regret it.

Unlike America, the vast majority of the non-white population of the UK immigrated to the UK in the last 70 years. How much of the structural racism in the UK reflects this instead? Where race is a proxy for outsider? Where white people can hide being an outsider more effectively? In health where there are poorer outcomes based on race it has been recognised that race is a proxy for proverty and occupation. Where this may reflect their immigrant status? Areas where race is under represented in the establishment, how much of this is due to the fact it reflects the establishments slow move from the power structures, education and society of 50 years ago??

The 'point' about Obama's heritage is that his Kenyan Luo and Hawaiian atheist origins gave him a sense of aspiration and confidence in his own abilities that generations of slavery, Jim Crow etc does so much to grind out of people from that background.

Take a look at the black Tories in parliament. Is it just a coincidence they are all from African and not West Indian backgrounds?

Yes, a lot of people do consider the underclass inferior, but it is also still a description of a social class. The implication that many people consider them inferior is part of the point of the word, it ties the existence of the group to the larger question of social stratification.

That Obama came from a different group is related to the point being made that there can be a real artificiality in grouping all black people together as if history and our current social and economic background means they can be analyzed as a block. CRT maintains they are all the same in being black, and gives blackness a real essentialist quality - which is quite weird when you consider that one of it's other claims is that race is socially constructed. But what does abstract blackness even mean? Apparently that you can group all people within a certain range of pigmentation together without reference to actual material differences in circumstances or socialization, unless you go outside a certain range of political opinions or vote for Trump, in which case you aren't black at all.

It's a completely untenable set of ideas.

Underclass is like the German
Untermensch
plural noun: Untermenschen
a person considered racially or socially inferior.
I HATE it’s use to basically describe poor people. And the comments about Barack Obama not being descended from slaves.. so, what? Does that mean he is not really a black man?? What is the point of all this? To try and prove that black people in Western societies are not faced with predjudice because life was also shit once for white people? That Romans enslaved Celts so black Britons are just whining about nothing? Of course life has always been hard for poor people- that’s a given- but a lot of what I have read just puts me in mind of MRA s trying to prove women aren’t oppressed because some men are homeless, or have been forced to go to war, or have higher suicide rates. If you believe that, that there’s no structural racism, that’s up to you, but what the Hell are these arguments doing on the Feminism board?

I don’t have time to reply to all the lectures but just to say the use of “underclass” disgusts me actually. As does a lot of what I have read on here today. Shameful.

@RoyalCorgi
Cris rock is a idiot politics is not about being qualified it’s X factor for ugly people who can’t sing

It’s a popularity contest 🤷‍♀️

Radicals don’t tend to win popularity contests

Oops, should say that American exceptionalism isn't real.

Almost every nation has an underclass, many of them included slavery in some form, a few nations had chattel slaves as a major part of the economy but many places had slavery in other forms. It was only in 1833 that selling serfs in the markets in Russia was outlawed. Factory workers in the UK were kept in very much slave like conditions for as long as slavery was legal.

The point being that the historical processes that lead to where we are now, where we have widespread suffrage, where we have labour laws, where there are rules about firing employees and fair wages, where we have public education, have been part of a long process of a change in view about what it means to be human. It's gone back and forth a little and affected by local economic conditions, American slavery would have looked quite different if white slaves had not become increasingly unavailable, and perhaps if their economy had developed differently. But these are all historic process that are working in the US as in other places.

And yes, sometimes historical events still influence us today, including being historically prevented from access to wealth or power.

But this idea that you can just tie this to abstract ideas like "whiteness" or "blackness" is foolish. There is not one black experience and history. Even in the US different black populations have different experiences and outcomes. Nor is there one white experience - the white underclass is not a group that has made historical gains through their privilege, you aren't going to find a lot of wealthy magnates in their family trees, passing on wealth or access to power

One of the real problems with CRT is that it is so reductionist. You can be an Asian Oxford grad from a royal family whose ancestors were dining with Queen Victoria and having a fun time on the polo pitch, and that is pretty equally removed from the poor sod begging on the streets of Calcutta or an indentured worker in a factory in England or down a mine in Wales.

Just because some white people are poor and some black people are rich doesn’t mean that the prejudice in white majority countries towards black people doesn’t exist!

Arrianna Planey:

When someone manages to rise up through our hobbled alleged meritocracy and is crowned the first to hold a position, I know that does not mean that they were the only one who possibly could. I’d assumed everyone understood this, but it has become clear to me in the last few years, as these news of firsts in media and publishing and film and sports came rolling in, as people wrote and agonized over what felt like a shift in culture, that that was naive.

People in power, the ones doing the crowning, generally believe that there is no one else qualified until they happen to decide to bestow the crown. It’s easier that way, isn’t it? To think that the first happened just because the right person finally managed to emerge and break through, and not because there was a whole system put in place to make sure no one who looks a certain way or comes from a particular background ever has a chance to do so in the first place.

I am reminded of a Chris Rock quote, one he gave during Barack Obama’s second term as president. “To say Obama is progress is saying that he’s the first Black person that is qualified to be president. That’s not Black progress. That’s white progress. There’s been Black people qualified to be president for hundreds of years.”

twitter.com/Arrianna_Planey/status/1318978028152737793

It is surely no accident that the first black US President is not descended from new world plantation slaves except tangentally on his mother's side.

In Roman Britannia there was chattel slavery but there was no racial angle to it. Anglo-Saxon England had captive slavery from wars and skirmishes, but it was the Norman dynasty that saw the establishment of general feudalism among most Anglo-Saxons. This ended in the fourteenth century because of Labour shortages resulting from the Black Death, but the pattern of ownership and inheritance of land had been set.

Slavery was ruled illegal in the UK by the Somerset Case of 1772, the very opposite in its view of the equivalent US Dredd Scott Case. There were a few novelty human pet Africans in Elizabethan England, but the Queen took a dislike and ordered them banished. That set the precedent for empire slavery, which was ended at great cost, you could say reparation, by the taxpayer in 1833, when the condition of the English working poor in the factories and fields was so abject it was seen by some as materially worse in terms of diet and living conditions compared to the workers on Carribbean plantations.

The English working class did not benefit from empire slavery. It depressed their wages and diverted investment. They did benefit to some extent from the Atlantic cotton trade, but showed themselves willing on numerous occasions to stand with the Southern slaves against capitalism.

is around the idea that slavery, by which they mean slavery of black people, is somehow a defining moment in American and indeed western history, and that somehow it underpins American culture as a whole,
Ok. And isn’t the enslavement of peoples a defining moment in history? Surely it DOES underpin American society as a whole!? As does the massive wealth created from slavery in the 18th and 19th century in the UK.
Just because some white people are poor and some black people are rich doesn’t mean that the prejudice in white majority countries towards black people doesn’t exist! A lot of this seems like an attempt to deny racism really exists or to deny white peoples do not start the game of life on an easier mode than black people in the uk ( which is where I am). Where people go in that game, and what they do with it is a separate matter. I am not trying to paint people as victims-just as when I say males start with an advantage to females in most cases, that doesn’t mean women are automatically victims or helpless.
It doesn’t have to be oppression olympics to simply recognise we have a long way to go.

I really don’t know why peoples ancestors having been enslaved or not has to do with anything. I very much doubt only white people have ancestors who were enslaved in this country(!) and what if that were even true?

A large part of the justification for CRT is around the idea that slavery, by which they mean slavery of black people, is somehow a defining moment in American and indeed western history, and that somehow it underpins American culture as a whole, and that is is somehow fundamentally different and separate from the history of slavery more generally. It's wholly unique and somehow apart from normal historical processes.

These are the ideas that serve as an anchor for ideas like white privilege is real, it's a material cause of any disparity between racial groups, it persists even when you are talking about black upper middle class Harvard graduates, and it is un-erasable unless you have a sort of revolution and decolonize and begin an entirely new history.

One of the ironic things about watching the video up-thread about science and decolonization is that anyone who has spent any time in Africa knows that the slave trade is still a big problem there, and things like witchcraft are hardly benign concepts that uplift people - they are in a real way ideas which exist in order to assert power over others. The idea that America is founded on a fundamentally slave-mentality that comes from Europe, but somehow Africa and Asia are free of those ideas, is just completely ahistorical.

To use American examples, since some seem to think this makes sense there, is a guy like Ta'Nehisi Coats's privileged not actually very much part of his being black? Here we have a kid that grew up middle class, from a somewhat famous family of a black activist, he went to Harvard, he has the right kind of way of speaking and accent, he's a gifted writer, and he makes his living as a professional activist, very much on the basis of the idea that he is underprivileged.

Compared, say, to a white man who comes from a factory work background, from the wrong part of the country, with no education, the wrong accent, the wrong way of trying to describe the problems that besets him from the outside world, no real outlet to describe them anyway. The sort of man who would be called a deplorable or white trash. Whose son or daughter would, even with the same academic record, be less likely to get into Harvard than Coates son or daughter. How is being white somehow abstractly a matter of privilege for this guy? It's not, being white is part of his problem, the way people see and treat him, as a down and out loser.

Even in the US there is, and has been for a while, a growing black middle/professional class. One of the things Adolph Reed, who is actually a marxist who focuses on the material basis of disadvantage, has pointed out is that for this professional class, professional activism is increasingly a career path for their young people. And their material interests align mainly with those of other middle class people - they have homes, they live in fairly crime free communities, they have pensions or investments.

@upthefrogs
However from what I can gather CRT also suggests people of colour are oppressed in all circumstances, by white people, while white people always have relative privilege and power, no matter what their class status. (If that’s right then I can’t work out how this relates to Crenshaw’s intersectionality which would suggest something more complex than this, unless in her hierarchy white men are always at the top.) Anyway, I also think that i’m aligned with the basic idea of race as a social construction which has material effects, but people here are suggesting that the more important difference is class, which is material and objective and tells us more about relations of hierarchy than treating race as always indicative of oppression, which in itself is racist, essentialist and deterministic. Am I close? For critics of CRT?

thats a good definition CRT is Rasict and dangerous and I would definitely would pull challenge legally any school that tried to bring that in

@Blakes77 so why are so many none white woke parents against it

because accepted knowledge is based on the perspective of the dominant class.

the dominant class include black and Asian the dominant class is those like lammy and rashford working class the non dominant class included working class whites,blacks and Asian

Ash sarkar is part of the dominant class her type of woke view get much more of a airing than a view like mine ever would