I base it on what some professionals are doing with CRT. I mentioned Australia's education system in my response to your previous post. CRT has been added to the "white privilege" mantra. Australia is supposed to accept a collective guilt trip because of the way the country was colonised by European settlers. Yes, wicked things were done. What I won't accept is that I was responsible. I'm not racist. I was married to a part aborigine and my two kids identify as aborigine. It's irrelevant to me.
It would be irrelevant if the whole business of theorising about race relations was to say 'Pete is a racist' or 'white Australians are racist', or something like that, but it isn't. It's not about whether some individuals are racist, that's a misunderstanding. There are, after all, individuals of every different ethnicity who have racist ideas, and many more who don't, in all the different corners of the world.
What makes CRT relevant is that it's an attempt to quantify how practices rooted in racism have shaped modern societies, and what can be done about that. The US is perhaps a test case for ideas of this sort, which supersede the discrete legal actions taken to address inequality in an attempt to provide a more holistic understanding and more fundamental solutions.
In a general sense there's nothing unique about how the US, for example, was formed - humans have been migrating to new territories since there have been humans, and that has often involved conflict, mass killing, and enslavement. Out of that have come empires that have ultimately moved humanity forward. The difference is that we are now at a point in history where the impact of empire-building can be thoroughly investigated in relation to the societies we now live in. This is what CRT attempts to do - on the other side is the idea that things are great as they are, and there is no need for anyone to question whether they could be better.
The conflict over CRT and the ideas that surround it looks like this to me:
A CRT perspective - racist ideologies provided a useful means to economic gain through the use of people as farm machinery and for other tasks. Europeans settling in the Americas exploited this to the maximum, generating wealth through the enslavement of generations of people from Africa. After several hundred years, slavery was abolished in the US. This made little real difference to the lives of many former slaves for decades, and people whose ancestors had been forcibly brought to the Americas from Africa didn't have equal status with other ethnic groups until a few decades ago.
During the centuries that passed prior to this, a nation was being formed. The inequality in the treatment of people according to origin and ethnicity was an integral part of this - in politics, housing, economics, entertainment, in every area of life. It is as much a part of the fabric of the nation as anything else - to argue that everyone is equal flies in the face of the facts. People who have behind them generations who were free and equal citizens over centuries can hardly be said to have the same position in society of those whose ancestors were slaves for most of the history of the country. How would that be possible? Those differences are deeply entrenched, and the business of addressing this in society as a whole has barely begun. CRT attempts to quantify all of this and move forward to a point of genuine equality, whatever that might mean it is necessarily a long-term project; it took hundreds of years to get to where things are now, it can hardly be disentangled and corrected in a few decades.
From the other side of the argument, the appeals seem to me at least to be centered around partial revisions of history and a kind of see no evil, hear no evil denialism. In the US in particular there seems to be a lot of resistance to
any kind of criticism of the standard model of the country's history. Like every great power since Babylon, the US has dreams and nightmares in its closet. I fail to see what is gained from pretending everything is just fine and the past is irrelevant. It just seems like a very immature way of thinking about life, which leads to the probability that unexamined mistakes will find a way of happening again, in one way or another - in the modern context this would probably mean escalating conflict between those groups who want to keep things as they are, to maintain what I see as a largely/partially illusory notion of national identity, and those who think the work of building that identity isn't finished yet. This is important because what happens in the US over the next few decades will have an impact on the rest of the Western world too.
