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Comment by TheSoftwareGuy | Hacker News Reader

Not by itself. But if we don't talk about it, how could there possibly be hop of fixing anything?

By focusing less on race and other identity issues, and working to remove racist policies across the board regardless of which group they benefit or harm. The 20th century saw immense improvements for almost all underserved groups, without any talking heads bickering about intersectionality or identity. Now that kind of coverage is everywhere and progress has stalled or even reversed in many areas.

My impression is that a huge portion of identity politics and coverage is more about picking fights where each side can feel smug and superior, rather than actually changing things for the better.

How does one address racist policies without discussing race? That's a knot I can't tie myself into.

So this would be under the umbrella of "Critical Race Theory" which has been misrepresented and unjustly criticized as of late.

Maybe. Despite the number of times I've heard about CRT and how bad it is, and how good it is, I still don't have the foggiest idea what it is. One time, I tried to look it up on the internet. Signal to noise was so bad, I still don't know. I've written off the possibility of ever knowing what it is or understanding anyone who's talking about it.

As with any field, there's a number of detractors and charlatans. With CRT in the political spotlight, I completely understand how it becomes a mess to make heads-or-tails of.

Broadly speaking, it's the study of how law and media impacts society's view and treatment of others through the lens of race.

As for my opinion on it:

I generally support it because it advocates for another mechanism to study the impact of law.

I think most legislation should be regularly studied for impact, effectiveness, and fairness. For example, stimulus bills ought to be reviewed for economic impact, regulation ought to be reviewed for effectiveness/relevance, laws with social impact ought to be reviewed to ensure it doesn't harm the people.

A number of scholars seem to adopt a blameless mentality to figure out how laws (even unintentionally) have negative impact, and use that to propose solutions. I admire this approach to legislative critique.

While I think a few ideas some scholars advocate for are infeasible to implement, the broader field has a lot of merit.

I think it's a question of measure. When things are talked about fairly and equally then progress is made - there are serious pressing issues right not and they're not only about identity/race/gender, that these things are ignored is a big problem. When things turn full on on one direction they don't accelerate any progress, it may actually do more harm than good.

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