Johnny Dangerous wrote: ↑Mon Sep 13, 2021 7:15 pm
Really? We read bits of the seminal people in school and the logic seemed to mostly reject the notion of class solidarity or even shared experiences based on class. Everything was based on personal narratives of oppression based on racial indentity, and -lots- of navel gazing based on said identities. It may just be how the stuff I read was curated. Can you recommend some CRT people who take class seriously?
Kimberle Crenshaw (she who coined the term "intersectionality"--which, like CRT itself, has come to mean something different than it initially did) springs to mind. Much of her work focuses specifically on race and gender, but she certainly includes a class analysis in her work. For example, from the
1989 paper in which she coined the term, here's her description of the problem:
Imagine a basement which contains all people who are disadvantaged on the basis of race, sex, class, sexual preference, age and/or physical ability. These people are stacked-feet standing on shoulders-with those on the bottom being disadvantaged by the full array of factors, up to the very top, where the heads of all those disadvantaged by a singular factor brush up against the ceiling. Their ceiling is actually the floor above which only those who are not disadvantaged in any way reside.
...
In much of feminist theory and, to some extent, in antiracist politics, this framework is reflected in the belief that sexism or racism can be meaningfully discussed without paying attention to the lives of those other than the race-, gender- or class-privileged. As a result, both feminist theory and antiracist politics have been organized, in part, around the equation of racism with what happens to the Black middle-class or to Black men, and the equation of sexism with what happens to white women.
Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic pretty much wrote "
Critical Race Theory: the Book", and while I confess I haven't read that book, I know that their work includes a class analysis as well.
More broadly, "Critical Race Theory" was a play on an earlier legal analytical method called "Critical Legal Studies," which was itself modeled on "Critical Theory," an expressly Marxist method of analysis, and especially on Gramsci's work. CLS introduced a leftist, class-based analysis to the legal academy, but its biggest proponents were white men, and CRT was, at least in part, a response to that. The response was not, however, to say "class is unimportant," it was to say, "these other things are important too."
On some level I think institutional/systemic racism it quite undeniable. I think that QQs post summed up pretty well the easily empirically verifiable aspects of that. The CRT stuff I was around was a lot mushier and theoretical.
Yeah, a lot of this stuff mutates into unrecognizability after time.