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> Occupy failed for many reasons but primarily it failed because it couldn’t get funded. Donor class and corporate sponsorship are required for progressives to attain the power they want. Class warfare - the traditional progressive cause - died and gave birth to a new identity politics (we call it Woke today) that could get funded.

Yup, my interpretation was the corporations / government funded the woke politics to divide. If you review the old Soviet era plans to bring down America it was effectively to focus on inflaming racial tension. That’s effectively what critical race theory is, instead of class dynamics you have racial dynamics; the end goal is the same. Gain power through a divide and conquer strategy to bring in an era where all are “equal”, some are just more equal than others.

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> to bring in an era where all are “equal”, some are just more equal than others.

But that's the era where you are now. Consider the humble speeding ticket. Same flat fee for everyone. Well that means rich people can afford to break the rules.

In a "more equal" nation like Finland, speeding tickets are income proportional. A billionaire speeding is gonna pay a huge fine, and that's what makes it fair.

But this is fundamentally different. It is the same percentage of income for everyone and is based on the individual. It isn't based of some caste or group membership, which is a key component of woke policies. Ironically the same fault as people with prejudices towards groups extrapolating to individuals..

This displays a fundamental misunderstanding of CRT.

I’ve read a few books on the subject. They explain that as the objective in the early work. So no don’t really think so, I think most people don’t take the time to understand / read context.

Can you say which books you're talking about, and by which authors? I've also read my fair share of CRT, but mostly papers from the last 10 years rather than books, so I'm curious who you're referencing.

are the results different? i cant believe in usa the divide between black and white are bigger than being poor or middle class. certantly there are certain big picture "identity" dinamics (or the remaints) at plays, but to solve social issues the solution are simple and proven across countries and time. lift the poor out of poverty with economic and social chances (effective education is a simple solution) and control the problems originated by poverty in those communities by law and by "social" investments. the CRT discourse looks, behave? and talks like a divide et impera

I think you're underestimating the effect of racism in the US. The economic and social chances you're using as a remedy for poverty are absent for many minorities, and the CRT discourse is all about why. There's a huge contingent in the US that believes that any attempt to address "the problems originated by poverty in those communities by law and by "social" investments" is socialism, or reverse racism or giving preferential treatment to minorities.

Is CRT specifically actionable? Does it suggest anything we can do for racial disparities (besides awareness) that we don't need to do for poverty anyway?

And while we're at it, why do US-based affirmative action programs not distinguish between descendants of slaves and recent immigrants from Africa (i.e. poor American blacks vs. rich African blacks)? I hear that despite Harvard students being 15% black, the number of undergrads actually descended from slaves can be counted on one's hands.

(I'm not sure that you need this additional context, but benefit from it)

> Is CRT specifically actionable?

Setting aside for a moment what is CRT, there are debates about problems related to actionability in different accounts of racism on the left. One critique of some accounts is that they are too pessimistic, too mysterious, and too inactionable. You might find this read interesting as an example: https://auth.jacobinmag.com/2017/05/ta-nehisi-coates-racism-...

> And while we're at it, why do US-based affirmative action programs not distinguish between descendants of slaves and recent immigrants from Africa

Some black activists, especially among those demanding reparations for slavery, have sought to form a movement around this question. It's called 'The American Descendants of Slaves' movement. If you Google 'ADOS' you can find movement websites and both sides in various debates

Thank you for the article. That was up my alley.

> Does it suggest anything we can do for racial disparities (besides awareness) that we don't need to do for poverty anyway?

Why not do both?

> And while we're at it, why do US-based affirmative action programs not distinguish between descendants of slaves and recent immigrants from Africa

Slavery impacted affected West Africa as well. The trade eventually destroyed communities leaving them vulnerable to colonization and exploitation.

Some African countries have former slaves e.g. Liberia. Individual slaves were traded multiple times across different countries. Do you include slaves when America was a British colony or only after the revolutionary war.

I assume Affirmative action policies pertain to current racism not just past racism.

Thank you for the coherent defense of a pan-African-American broad affirmative action. I haven't seen that argument made clearly before.

I believe CRT underlines and fortifies issues facing minorities. It cements them as minorities not having a stake in culture.

No, any reaction to “woke” happened later and unfortunately comes from the worst possible places. Woke fits in way more with the general culture than racism and sexism on the GOP spectrum does. Am I going to jump to a conclusion that corporate America deliberately boosted racist perspectives to divide us? No, because that’s not rational and you’re driven by an agenda.

American culture, and most minorities themselves, still embraces color blindness,[1][2] which wokeness rejects. And it embraces being proud of America and it’s history, which wokeness rejects.[3]

Arguments about “GOP racism” might be justified if they were the ones constantly talking about people’s race, but they’re not. In my 33 years in America a Republican has never dared to call me “brown” or “a person of color” or lumped me in with a grab bag of other minorities based solely on skin color. They’re not the ones fighting to legalize discrimination against my kids.[4]

My family immigrated to Reagan’s America, where my brother and I could compete on objective standards. My kids will grow up in an America where they’ll have to compete by telling some story about their grandfather growing up in a village in Bangladesh, hoping to appeal to the subjective aesthetics of some white administrator.[5] It’s not the GOP doing that.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2019/05/08/america...

[2] https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/article/2022/05/02...

[3] https://theliberalpatriot.substack.com/p/working-class-and-h...

[4] https://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2021/12/09/biden-adm...

[5] https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/thomas-jeffer...

[2] is interesting, saying "For gender, 82 percent think it shouldn’t be considered" in admissions decisions.

However, many universities seem to be opposed to having an imbalance, a situation that would presumably be expected given the gap in high school graduation rates.

The modern GOP isn't the party of Reagan. It's no mystery why the party of Paul Gosar and Steve King is perceived as racist.

The modern GOP has some racists in it, but at least apologizes for it. The modern Democratic Party has mainlined racism and institutionalized racism in routine interactions business and education. I would 100% rather deal with a Steve King who worries about white replacement, than with all the ways white progressives find to center race, use them as clubs against other white people, and disrespect the autonomy of minority groups.

This argument would be more persuasive if you could name one of the racists in the Democratic party, and that racism was something ordinary people would recognize as such; by way of example, I just named two Holocaust deniers.

If you define “racism” as “treating people differently based on race”—a pretty typical definition—Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren and most other Democratic politicians would count. It’s a different, more patronizing and paternalistic racism, but it’s racism nonetheless.

Indeed, this sort of racism is pervasive among at least progressive democrats. See: https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/white-liberals-presen.... It’s been wild to me to realize how many progressives I know would hate Bangladeshis if they were white. But as far as I can tell they don’t think non-whites have moral agency.

Rayiner, I have the conventional, non-Twitter non-message-board definition of racism, the same definition I'd get from a random person I stopped on the street. There's no interesting conversation to be had if we're going to just say "racism means whatever I can persuasively argue it means". You can "persuade" anybody of anything on a message board just by exhausting them, which is how a lot of really stupid lefty thought happens.

So, no, I'd ask you to try again to square the Republican party of Paul Gosar and Steve King against a Democratic party that has none of those figures.

You made an observation that implied it was somehow risible to think the GOP is a racist party. I don't think it's especially useful to designate one party or another as "racist". But what I said is true: it is not a mystery why people think the GOP is racist: there are out-and-proud racists in high elected office in the GOP, and there aren't in the Democratic party.

You make some great and insightful commentary on many issues here, but I wonder if your fealty to the US Democrat party is putting some ideological blinders on. Racism meaning "treating people different on the basis of race/skin colour" is a pretty normal understanding of the term, and certainly it's not jargon from "Twiter or a message board". The random person on the street would likely agree that "treating people differently on the basis of race" is racism, plain and simple.

And as such, Rayiner's point about elected reps in the Democrat party, including but not limited to the President and high-ranking members of the Senate and House, making race the lens through which everything is discussed and planned for, is racism plain and simple. And it's frustrating for minorities to be disrespected and have their agency taken away by mainly caucasian liberals pretending to represent us. The sad part is that people like Biden and Warren know better, but they're just pandering with to a specific demographic that also views race as the primary driver of everything, but that in turn makes the middle ground also shrink, as people naturally look to mimic their leaders.

This tiresome focus on race-for-everything is making society much more racist, not less, and yes, I would agree it's mainly the Democrat party and it's current policies and rhetoric that is worsening it.

Both 'Democrat party' and a definition of racism that strips it of any notion of prejudice or animus (compare that to, say, one you might find in a dictionary) are very much politically-inflected jargon.

I don't know about other people, but being treated differently based on your race doesn't actually make me feel better just because the other person thinks they're helping.

Sure and I (a white Eastern European immigrant) might place a different weight on those thoughts and feelings in part because you are a brown South Asian immigrant, without it being racism. It's a shoddy redefinition better abandoned in poorly ventilated dorm rooms and talk radio studios. You touch on the problems with the whole 'who are the real racists' millstone yourself when you mention agency. If Democrats are the real racists, what sort of rubes are the majorities of Black Americans who vote for them? It just doesn't go anywhere but a circle of nothing or worse.

> Rayiner, I have the conventional, non-Twitter non-message-board definition of racism, the same definition I'd get from a random person I stopped on the street.

I'm not using a novel definition of racism here. Promoting racialization (categorizing people into different races), and treating people differently based on their race--both under the law, through racial preferences, and socially, through DEI--is racism. And Democrats do it much more than Republicans.

> So, no, I'd ask you to try again to square the Republican party of Paul Gosar and Steve King against a Democratic party that has none of those figures.

The Republican Party has some racists. In the case of Steve King, the party stripped him of his committee assignments and he lost his seat.

The Democratic Party is engaged in a fundamentally racist project of co-opting minority identities to advance the ideology of white liberals. It starts with promoting racial identity in schools, focused on an oppression narratives. "Asian studies" curricula, for example, focus on discrimination against Chinese Americans in the 1800s (people few Asian Americans trace their ancestry to), instead of for example the rapid upward mobility of Vietnamese, Koreans, and Indians in the 1960s and 1970s (which many Asian Americans today do trace their ancestry to). It continues to Democrat-dominated educational and professional institutions that center people's race and expressly treat them differently based on it.

The fact that it's a paternalistic sort of racism--Democrats think they're helping--doesn't change the fact that it's racism. At the end of the day, all of this is to advance the agenda of white Democrats. That's quite apparent when any non-white Democratic group diverges from white Democrats either out of cultural differences or divergent interests (e.g. Asian Americans when it comes to color-blind metrics or Black Americans when it comes to religion).

My feeling is that there only two kinds of people who would find this argument persuasive: (1) people who already strongly believe it, and (2) people who don't read it carefully. The argument relies on its audience assuming that any noxious behavior involving race is "racism", and that simply isn't the case. There is no equivalence to be drawn between Paul Gosar denying the Holocaust and overeducated, cliquish busybodies at nonprofits "co-opting" minority identities.

The minorities can speak for themselves on this issue (and are, by voting out the co-opters and switching parties). At least, they can as long as Paul Gosar doesn't have his say.

I didn't say that the Republican party was going to lose all minority support, or that every Republican is racist. As I said, I don't think it's productive to describe any party as "racist" (though apparently you disagree). But if I asked you to guess which party has the big-state governor candidate who paid $5000 to be featured prominently on the openly white-supremacist site that featured the Tree of Life shooter, you would not honestly have to think carefully about the question. It is, as I said, not a mystery why people say that the GOP is a racist party; it is many things, and one of them is the party for racists.

Arguments about “GOP racism” might be justified if they were the ones constantly talking about people’s race, but they’re not.

They'd be justified if the party endorses racist views, elects racist candidates, puts racist policies in place. "Talking about race" is a very narrow and selective definition of "racism".

The side that promotes racial identity and classification, wants to teach it to elementary school students, and supports treating people differently based on skin color is the “racist” party. Supporting race-neutral policies regarding law enforcement or immigration, by contrast, is not “racist.”

Democrats are engaged in a sweeping effort to redefine “racism” to serve the purposes of white liberals: https://contexts.org/blog/who-gets-to-define-whats-racist/ (“White elites —who play an outsized role in defining racism in academia, the media, and the broader culture — instead seem to define ‘racism’ in ways that are congenial to their own preferences and priorities…. Charges of “racism,” for instance, are primarily deployed against the political opponents of upwardly-mobile, highly-educated progressive white people.”)

I don't think that link makes or really directly supports the vastly broader claim you're making. And of course 'Democrats' includes a Black political elite influential enough to play kingmaker for the democratic party presidential nominee just this last election. The republican party just doesn't have a Black political elite, never mind an influential one. It's weird to claim whatever Democrats are engaged in has the sole purpose of serving the interests of white liberals.

But let's try 'race neutral policies regarding immigration'. In the previous administration, was VDARE fan Stephen Miller, in your view, advocating for and working to implement race neutral immigration policies?

It feels like America became MORE racist in the past 2 years, not less. I am starting to think all this talk about diversity and inclusion is having the opposite effect than intended.

Any action gets a reaction. The bigger the action the bigger the reaction. I wouldn't be surprised to see a very far right Trump as the next president. Let's hope that people will start "seeing" each other again and meet in the middle instead of the current "F*ck you, you are wrong!"

It's the amount of in-your-face this stuff has become. White guilt is getting kinda ridiculous.

I think the "woke" term is loosing its meaning. Are you "anti-woke" if you don't want to watch gay movies?

I think you drank the Kool Aid. This might sober you up. I am looking at the Pew Research poll you posted [1] and Republicans seem to lag on polls where they ask about the value of racial, ethnic, and language diversity.

You really have to ignore a lot of Trump’s rhetoric about Muslims (Bangladesh is 90% Muslim), Mexicans, etc. Closing your eyes to the tiki torch carrying Neo Nazis, the racist congressmen, the Jan 6th confederates, the list goes on and on. Perhaps you did not hear when Reagan called black people monkeys (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/07/ronald-rea...) or when Trump called Haiti, etc Sh*t hole countries (https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/trump-referred-...) They don’t see race at all.

I am not sure in what universe that Pew poll looks positive for Republicans. Republicans don’t need to talk about race much according to the poll because they don’t live in diverse communities.

I get that you don’t like affirmative action. It has been a great wedge issue to factionalize minorities against Blacks in particular. The Supreme Court will ban it in due time. You probably did not know that the Civil Rights Act (passed after decades of blood, sweat, and tears of Blacks to protect people like you) and Immigration Act 1965 (repealing anti Asian ban) of that allowed your grandad to immigrate here was introduced and signed into law by Democrats. A lot of pain went into getting you here. You should read about it. (Before they ban those books too)

> Am I going to jump to a conclusion that corporate America deliberately boosted racist perspectives to divide us?

Look who funds universities with large endowments and specifically which departments and buildings they fund. Money means priority and importance and is upstream of culture.

It’s no coincidence that what were fringe ideas that were mainly academic (for decades) and an extension of theoretical post modern philosophy departments very quickly became the truth according to the same power structures that own mainstream cultural energy sources. Judith Butler and Kimberlé Crenshaw probably can’t even believe it.

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