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

[RoyalCorgi]

Guardian story:

www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/16/uk-academic-sues-university-losing-role-critical-race-theory-row-leeds-beckett

This is pertinent here for two reasons. One is that the academic who is suing Leeds Beckett is using the argument that "critical race theory" is a protected belief, using the Forstater case as a precedent:

"In June, finding that gender-critical views were a protected belief, the employment appeals tribunal said only views akin to nazism or totalitarianism were unworthy of protections for rights of freedom of expression and thought under the Equality Act."

The other is that critical race theorists tend to support the trans/queer theory agenda. In this particular case the academic in question was apparently sacked from her advisory role by Leeds Beckett University after her organisation tweeted to a black person first that he was a "house Negro" and then that he was a "coconut". Apparently these terms are part of standard discourse in critical race theory and so should be protected under the law.

And there was me thinking they were just terms of racist abuse...

Yes, think I’m getting it but need to do a lot more reading. Are we due a return to Marxist theorising after all this post structuralism? Sometimes seems like that to me.

I’m piecing this together now I think and seeing how it builds out of poststructuralism.

Yes, it's inherently poststructuralist.

So we could see this in Marxist terms as a sort of mystification?

I think it acts in that way in some instances. It hides the details of how inequality might be addressed behind this fog of positive sounding twaddle.

To build on another poster's point about educational outcomes: CRT would rather we decolonise the maths curriculum by challenging the racist stereotype that 2+2=4 rather than asking why the data says some communities perform really badly in maths.

(I'm parodying, but only just).

The white working class are the only people in this country whose ancestors were slaves in this country. The consequences of medieval feudalism are alive and well today with the patterns of wealth and actual privilege in this country today. Do not patronise them.

I've said this before here: people understandably don't like the word 'privilege'. If you're a homeless, jobless, white man it must be galling to be told you have 'privilege'.

I prefer the word 'advantage'. In the case above the homeless white man could probably accept he has some advantages over homeless women or homeless black people.

But that’s not what these wealthy types are saying their not comparing to their peers their making sweeping generalisations based on race and that’s Rasict

I don't think I can address that in a way that doesn't agree to accepting sweeping generalisations.

This is an area for nuance and I can plainly not add anything to it in a way that is useful.

@aliasundercover

I've said this before here: people understandably don't like the word 'privilege'. If you're a homeless, jobless, white man it must be galling to be told you have 'privilege'.

I prefer the word 'advantage'. In the case above the homeless white man could probably accept he has some advantages over homeless women or homeless black people.

I agree.

And I have said before: We are not American. The history of the interaction between new Commonwealth immigrants and the white working class is a subject of study in its own right: From the Windrush passengers who marvelled at the sight of white men doing manual labour on the Tilbury quayside, to Rachmann and the eviction of older white women to convert their properties into mass-housing for immigrants, to Powell and his invented example of such a women who got dogdirt through her letterbox, in all probablility the work of a Rachmannist landlord if it ever happened, and so on.

Another related concept is 'Decolonising the Curriculum,' a worthy idea that has predictably been crudely warped to condemn To Kill A Mockingbird and Tow Sawyer as 'racist,' and before you know it you're on your way to racist maths and science because black people can shoot ligthning from their fingers, etc.

Jaysmith 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? You can’t negate years and years of embedded racism in this country by going “ white working class have had it tough”. It’s equivalent to those men who get all bitter about feminism because some women can make a lot of money and some men are homeless war veterans. It’s missing the point of the big picture, it’s denying structural racism/ sexism exists, it’s re-writing history so that you don’t have to feel in any way culpable because you are white ( not that you should feel culpable, but it shocks me just how much white peoples are scared to ever really admit racism exists!)
All I am reading from the explanation of CRT is that it’s saying let’s look at accepted teachings through a different lens, because accepted knowledge is based on the perspective of the dominant class. I’m not saying this works in terms of science, but I can see how it goes in terms of history, and looking at the truth of what happened in the past. That’s a long accepted idea in feminism, that history was written by men and women are invisible, for example. To me it seems like CRT is an exercise in examining this concept, that of re- evaluating what is set in stone, not necessarily literally destroying all science, although some people might take it literally.
Maybe I’m wrong, I’m not an academic, but that’s how it reads to me.
This thread started about an academic throwing insults on social media, now it’s “poor working class white people” ?

All I am reading from the explanation of CRT is that it’s saying let’s look at accepted teachings through a different lens, because accepted knowledge is based on the perspective of the dominant class.

And that's very valid. I and others have made the point that CRT (and indeed all of postmodernism) starts with valid critiques of existing structures.

The problem is that the movements and structures claiming inspiration from CRT now are a very long way past this into territory which is harmful.

In the same way: I have a lot of sympathy for Marx's analysis of the problems of capitalism in his time- I still think communism is evil.

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

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

@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

White Privilege doesn’t mean all white people are privileged! Just like male privilege doesn’t mean all men are privileged.. what it means is that white male is the “default”. It means that if you are both male and white you don’t have the EXTRA things that can create obstacles in a society set up for “ the default”. A rich Black footballer, or a female prime minister don’t negate the fact that racism and sexism exist! I would expect anyone to understand that on this board tbh.

What does it meant to say they are the default, or that they are privileged as a class, if in actuality they aren't?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

@Blakes77

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.

American exceptionalism real, in this any more than anything else. They are part of a longer history that leads back to all kinds of places, and is subject to all kinds of historical happenings and processes. There are a great many elements that come together in American history and interact, many ideas that have contributed to what they are today, many that have changed an developed over the years.

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.

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

@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

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.

@Blakes77

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.

Do you get disgusted by terms like upper class, working class, or middle class? Underclass refers to the bottom of the class hierarchy, often unemployed or directly exploited. In terms of American history, the original very early class of slaves, a good number of whom were indentured and white, was split into two groups - chattel slaves who were black, and an underclass of very poor, powerless whites. It's no more offensive to describe the one group than the other.

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?

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.

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?

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??