If you are trying to understand what’s right, wrong, good and bad about modern social equity philosophy, here’s a nice piece from David Honeg and Steven Lawrence.

It looks at the USA history of racist policy and its effects today. It also looks at how we need thoughtful policy as a result, not what Steven calls Pop-CRT.

Hope it’s useful in helping you come to your own perspectives.

More from Steven at his substack:

https://groundexperience.substack.com/p/whats-missing-in-the-pop-crt-debate

Real CRT vs Pop CRT 

Real CRT–David Honig

There’s a lot of talk about Critical Race Theory, from the theoretical to the hyperbolic.

Please allow me to put it in a relatively simple context, with examples that flow from our lifetimes and the lifetimes of our immediate families.

Imagine, please, two men who served on the same aircraft carrier in WWII, one white and one black.

After the war, they both came home. The white man went to college on the GI Bill, and graduated with a degree in accounting. The black man was excluded from GI education benefits, so he went to work as a laborer.

The white man bought a home in one of the new Levittown suburbs, which were white only, and his loan was funded with a very inexpensive FHA loan. The black man wasn’t eligible for an FHA loan. He rented a house and saved as much as he could.

The white man, after a few years, had enough equity in his house to buy a new, bigger house. The black man took several more years to buy a small home in the black business and residential community downtown. Soon after he bought, an interstate highway was built through downtown, right through the middle of the black man’s neighborhood. Property values dropped to almost zero, and the lead build-up from car fumes, though he didn’t know it, was damaging his young children’s brains.

60 years after coming home from the war, the black man’s net worth was approximately 6% of the white man’s. He couldn’t fund his children’s education through a second mortgage, because he had no equity. And when he died, he left his children and grandchildren with nothing but debt. The white man, who died just a few days later, left his children and grandchildren with enough money to pay off all the kids’ debts and to pay for college for the grandchildren.

The difference was driven entirely by official US government policy, and those who benefited from it continue to benefit from it today. Those who suffered from it continue to suffer from it today.

That’s CRT. It says official racism in this country had a negative effect on those it targeted, and those effects continue to today.

Pop CRT–Steven Lawrence 

This is a good read about the real impact of systemic and structural racial bias that began in “history” and that continues to reverberate today through the disrupted accumulation of wealth, property and other advantages for people of color that have always been more available to the majority demographic of the United States that many call “white”.

Many racially informed frameworks, including the original theoretical framework known as Critical Race Theory (CRT), recognize this and rightly seek to promote this important understanding and to fight for policy changes that can finally put things right (what many are calling “equity”).

However, many of us—including progressives and post-progressives—are concerned with an entirely different matter… We are concerned with the specific practices and epistemically and morally questionable assumptions around the nature of human beings from different demographic groups that are being brought into workplace Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) trainings and into the curriculum of K-12 and higher ed classrooms, and teacher training programs.

It’s not CRT the legal theory that dissident left/leaning progressives are concerned about. It’s the “pop” version of the CRT-influenced practices of segregated trainings, semi-public shaming sessions, racially essentialist readings and teachings, and reductionist and oversimplified meta-narratives that we believe are actively harmful to all people, and in some ways especially harmful to people of color, particularly young students.

It is not “whining” or the need to use “scare tactics” or to conjure up a supposed “bogeyman” that motivates many of us on the left who believe in the principles of authentic equity, deep diversity, and holistic inclusion, but openly question the ethics and intelligence of what can be fairly called “pop CRT”. It’s the empathy and foresight that takes into account the all-too-human pattern of building permanent walls between people from different groups and the consequences of reinforcing the perception of an essential separateness. The historical pattern of imposing that sense of separateness onto society in any part of the world has shown us that such practices rarely if ever lead to harmony or justice, and in many cases, just the opposite.

There is a better way to build a better world. We who dissent with these currently popular world views and practices may not be able to claim that we alone know the way. But, it certainly can’t be the way of separation, dehumanization, and cruelty.