Comments by "MarcosElMalo2" (@MarcosElMalo2) on "A Guide to Critical Race Theory" video.

  1.  @itsmorphed6416  It’s good for what it is: a start. The problem is that simplistic thinkers believe it’s the final word. They don’t want to engage with the material. I agree it doesn’t go deep, but I didn’t expect it would. I’m disappointed that there are a few gaps that should have been explained better and more directly (for example, what is whiteness, exactly?) Ryan touches on the question without really engaging it directly, imho. Scott (the OP) calls Ryan’s gloss “the unvarnished facts”. I don’t think Ryan would claim that. It’s Ryan’s best approximation, his current understanding. But Scott thinks a 20 minute video is the final word. Something tells me Scott is seeing what he wants to see and hearing what he wants to hear. He wasn’t intellectually curious to begin with.
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  2. The video is an imperfect primer, but it’s better and more clear than any other video in its class. I don’t think the information here is sufficient to prepare one to argue either for or against CRT (but that’s not going to stop people). It’s a good start. It can help us to understand what people might be arguing about, or if they’re even arguing about the same thing. I’m not a proponent of CRT. I think it makes some good points, but fails in some places. CRT is useful as it reopens questions that need to be re-examined. However, the term CRT is also being misused as a bogeyman by certain political actors wishing to discredit their opponents and advance their own authoritarian agenda. Their fight against their imaginary version of CRT is another “war on Christmas”.
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  3. Marxism seeks to remediate racial disparities? What flavor of Marxism has a specific program to remediate racial disparities? Classical Marxism focus on class identity and class struggle. Then as if by magic, racial disparities disappear. To the Classic Marxist, all other forms of oppression are side effects of capitalism and socialism will just make them disappear. Imho, the weakest element of CRT is the attachment to “Marxism”.
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  4. The one weakness is he didn’t really define whiteness within the oppositional framework of white and non-white. He kind of danced around it—you’re identified with the white dominated status quo if you’ve benefited from it, for example. But that doesn’t really get into the modern construction of this opposition (which needs to be understood if we are to understand how it’s supposed to be deconstructed). (I’m using modern in the sense of post-renaissance, not limited to the 20th century.) I’m still quite not sure what to make of actual CRT. It’s a fashionable academic theory, and fashionable academic theories either fade if worthless or get folded into academia if there is some value. There is very little relationship between CRT the academic fashion and CRT the right wing bogeyman.
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  5. It’s well done as a basic explainer, but it does not give you sufficient information to determine merit. If you’ve decided already (either way), you’ve merely taken in sufficient information to confirm a preexisting bias. I suggest you approach the material by asking, “what are its merits?”, not if it has or lacks merit. Where does it hold up and where does it break down? I also suggest that you use this video as a beginning, not as the final word.
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  6. You’ve got a sane approach. The one thing I would point out to you is that the suffering is not left in the past. Another thing I would point out is that it’s an academic theory currently in fashion. It’s “under construction”. I wouldn’t even call it an ideology. Anyway, Ryan gave a nice primer, clarifying some of the important basics. It’s not complete. There are some gaps. It will help you muddle through.
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  7. The people using it in the media generally don’t know either.
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