JOEL MODIRI: Critical race theory is being attacked as need to take racism seriously can no longer be ignored

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Attacks on critical race theory intellectuals and ideas are marked by aggression, bad faith, racist anxiety and ignorance — a toxic mix not easily appeased by facts or argument

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In 1995, African-American legal theorist Prof Derrick Bell published a paper prophetically titled “Who’s Afraid of Critical Race Theory?” Today, in post-Trump 2021, this question finds its answer in the ferocious right-wing onslaught against critical race theory , which has set off a political and cultural explosion in the US.

This is also why CRT has attracted the ire of right-wing conservatives across much of the Westernised world. According to the anti-CRT right-wing movement, race and racism have over time declined in significance and belong largely to the past.

This to my mind is a mistake. CRT does indeed mean to dismantle white supremacy, expose interpersonal and structural racism and agitate uncompromisingly for justice and redress. But this response is mistaken for a more obvious reason: the large swathe of critics of CRT ranging from bloodthirsty conservatives to discomforted liberals quite simply have no idea what they are talking about.

It is the uninhibited expression of a whiteness that increasingly feels wounded and displaced by the world it sought to make in its own image. Emptied of direction and meaning in a globalising world struggling with history and difference, a once-confident whiteness has turned resentful, fatalistic and angry as growing protests and critiques in academic and political spaces call it out, expose its hidden faces and demand radical change.

CRT emerged in the legal academy at a time when the promises of formal freedom and formal equality failed to materialise in the form of lasting, substantive and meaningful material change in the lives of black people. CRT therefore is a mode of analysis that consciously studies the historical effects of racism on present social arrangements and emphasises the structural, systemic and institutional features of racism.

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iLuvUJuju For studious reasons, I would like to research some of the references relied upon here.

I pity the white students UPTuks when this is the drivel spouted by a dept head. They are seen as irredeemably racist because of an immutable feature, and dissent only “proves” the “racism”, and the theory. Infallible doctrine went out of fashion during the reformation. Fucked.

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