I’ve been asked by a friend to review some academic papers around Critical Theory and the assorted studies and definitions of Power, Privilege etc. I intend to do so, but Sci-Hub is struggling at the moment and I can’t afford the time or money to chase the papers down individually. While I keep trying to access the specific papers to critique and disect I thought I’d give a basic outline of my problems with this field, giving examples and beginning to layout my analysis – which I believe is both more accurate, and more effective than the Intersectional/Critical Theory approach.
Problem 1: Activist Academia
So much Intersectionality, Race Studies, Disability Studies, Fat Studies and so forth, is steeped in activism. Those working in the field have an agenda beyond simply uncovering the truth, and they start with assumptions, many of which are unsafe or unsound. This leads to extremely poor and unsupportable scholarship, because the papers and studies seek to confirm pre-existing bias, rather than to falsify or factually support a hypothesis being made.
People are often blind to bias in their own fields, so a couple of examples outside the field would seem to be a better way to demonstrate the point.
If the source of claims that Climate Change isn’t happening, or is less bad than we think, comes from studies sponsored by fossil fuel companies, we might rightly suspect that they have encouraged and created a bias within that study. We have examples of this from Exxon, hiding results and snowing climate research under biased and ‘doubting’ material, and before that from the tobacco lobby, again hiding results and sowing doubt through sponsored ‘research’. [1][2]
Creationists go through the same process, they start from their assumption (God did it) and then cherrypick research and results to support their hypothesis, conduct ‘research’ to sow doubt on evolutionary biology and even explicitly spell out their bias. [3]
What separates activists (or some creationists) from powerful lobbies, is that they do it for free. Otherwise, much of the scholarship I object to starts from its conclusions, cherrypicks and biases itself from the get go.[4]
Problem 2: Unscientific Subjectivity
Most science attempts to be objective, to eliminate bias, to test, confirm and falsify and therefore to get to objective truth – or as close to it as we can get. This is a little less rigorous in studying history, but is still the goal. Sources are considered, subjectivity is taken into account and the truth is sought.
These areas of study (CRT, Intersectionality etc) do not tend to do this (there are outliers within these fields). Instead they embrace subjectivity, examine data through a ‘lens’ and start from preconceptions and unsafe assumptions – as noted before.
Whole papers are written around individual cases, subjectively and anecdotally (the plural of anecdote is not data). Peer review is frequently ignored, or limited to a read-through with friends. Bad scholarship, often in defiance of hard scientific data is given legitimacy through a process that has been dubbed ‘idea laundering’[5]. Replicability is rarely sought, and if it is, it often fails. There’s a replicability problem across the soft sciences such as sociology and psychology, let alone these even more subjective arenas.[6] I have personally, frequently observed a failure to control for other factors, assuming race/sex etc to be central, only to discover that when you control for wealth/class disparity most, or all, of the alleged racial or other discrimination vanishes.
Many claims aren’t falsifiable, and thus not scientific in the first place. Opposition or critique is taken as confirmation and attacked as bias or bigotry, rather than answered. Citations tend to move in circles, amongst the same few people, and there has been some evidence of people citing each other more to ‘game the system’. Some even claim that the scientific process and methodology itself is biased, ‘white’, ‘heteronormative’ and other unsubstantiated accusations. They wield accusations of bigotry like a club, to force compliance.[7]
Queries and surveys often use fallacies of redefinition to catastrophise and bias results. This was most infamously the case with the Mary Koss and the 1-in-5 rape statistic, where things that weren’t rape were included within the definition, despite the survey explicitly asking if the subjects had been raped, and then ignoring them when they said they hadn’t. ‘Rape’ was redefined post-hoc. [Edit: https://behavioralscientist.org/what-the-origins-of-the-1-in-5-statistic-teaches-us-about-sexual-assault-policy/ ]
Similarly, in the case of the Sarah Everard murder, one of the statistics being bandied about is that 97% of women have experienced sexual harassment. [Edit: https://www.openaccessgovernment.org/97-of-women-in-the-uk/105940/ ]. However, if we dig into the statistics and methodology we find that, specifically for the age group 18-24 only, 86% reported at least one of a list that included staring, jokes and memes. 3% ticked the ‘none of the above’ box, and 11% ticked none of the listed items, but also did not tick ‘none of the above’. The 97% is quickly starting to get whittled down, especially when one considers we’re trying to determine who was sexually harassed, not who felt that they were. Some surveys, similarly, consider things like ‘being asked out on a date‘ as harassment.
Much of it simply isn’t scientific or objective.
Dr. Walter Bishop: It’s not an exact science.
Fringe
Peter Bishop: [in the background] It’s not even science!
Problem 3: Misdefinitions of Terms
While a certain amount of technical jargon or specialist definition is to be expected, the field tends to engage in a great deal of ‘Newspeak’, which undermines people’s ability to engage with it, and actively makes people hostile to it in a way that isn’t necessarily justified, but is understandable.
What differs from, say, arguments with creationists over the colloquial versus scientific definition of ‘theory’ is that there appears to be a concerted attempt to force these redefinitions into common usage. This doesn’t appear to occur for any other reason than to whitewash their own bigotry by defining it out of existence.
There’s two examples in particular that stand out above the rest. ‘Privilege’ and the meaning of the various *isms (EG: sexism, racism, ageism).
Privilege means:
OED
“A special right, advantage, or immunity granted or available only to a particular person or group.”
We also use the term colloquially to speak of the rich or pampered, wealth is an odd one out as it can both be a genuine case of privilege or not, depending on context, but that’s beyond the scope of this discussion at present.
The police, for example, have privileges, special rights and advantages over and above the normal people. They can break the speed limit, break into buildings, have access to personal information that is normally kept private, can detain you and so on.[8]
In Intersectionality and its attendant ideas, other things are considered ‘privilege’. Much is made of ‘white privilege’ or ‘male privilege’, and while historically this was the case, it is not any more. Men are granted or given no special rights, advantages or immunities as compared to women. In fact, you can make a fairly good case that the opposite is true, when you consider protected class legal status, gender-specific aid and grants and so on. The same goes for being white, and many of the other categories that are flashed up.
A way to visualise privilege is to imagine a horizontal line, a bar, that represents the baseline rights and freedoms of an average adult in that society. Anything above the line represents additional rights and freedoms, anything below the line represents less rights and freedoms. In practice there would be multiple lines representing different individual levels of rights and freedoms, but as a general visualisation this is sound.
A child’s line might be below the societal line. Children do not have the same rights to drink, smoke, or serve in the military as adults do. Children also have restrictive obligations such as attending school, though noncompliance leads to punishment of their parents. On the other hand, children are above the line in other regards, they cannot be held as accountable for their crimes – if they commit them – and they often have priority when it comes to medical care, evacuation procedures and other aspects.
A child being weaker or smaller is not a privilege or lack thereof. This isn’t imposed by the state, it’s innate and it doesn’t relate to their rights and freedoms.
Problem 4: Incomprehensibility & Shibboleths
Much of the scholarship on these topics is virtually incomprehensible or unreadable, nested within itself over and over, redefining terms wildly and communicating itself extremely poorly. This is a problem in a great deal of academia, but here it seems to almost be a deliberate way to rarify itself, to make it into a kind of scripture or canon that can only by read and understood by the ‘elect’.
This incomprehensibility is so bad that two major hoax scandals have exposed these fields as a whole, both the original Sokal hoax, and the Sokal Squared hoax, which was so effective that some still believe one of the hoax papers is genuinely worthy of publication.[9][10]
So long as you cite the right people and mouth the right terms, it seems you can get almost any nonsense published.
Problem 5: Hypocrisy and Inconsistency
Much of this study is characterised as being part of the fight against racism and other, similar bigotries, yet so much of it embraces and emboldens bigotry. The field is full of racist attitudes towards white people, misandry towards men and so forth, much of it seemingly based on a sort of secular idea of original sin. Because white people and male people, supposedly collectively, did bad things (as though no other groups ever have) they are automatically tainted and have a stain they can never eliminate. People today are being held accountable for things their ancestors, supposedly, did.
If you’re against racism, you can’t very well be racist to white people and expect to get away with it. The same with all the other categories and hypocrisies.
Some seek to excuse this by redefining racism as ‘prejudice plus power‘.
It isn’t, it’s just prejudice.
An example debunking this interpretation is the prevalence of racism in groups without power. If one looks at the racial and economic background of the most identifiable racists, they are underemployed or unemployed members of the white working or underclasses. These are people without power, and that lack of power is the root of their racism, not their power.[11]
Another example would be the appallingly racist beliefs of the Black Hebrew Israelites or, more familiarly, the Nation of Islam. Anyone who can read and understand what they believe, and still deny that racial minorities are incapable of being racist, is not someone worth taking seriously.[12]
Problem 6: Practical Problems
An Intersectional approach, one based in this subjective and activist interpretation is maladaptive to the goal of changing society to be more egalitarian and fairer. Blaming all white people for percieved problems of non-white people is hypocritically racist. Demanding rights (privileges) over and above those of others, rather than equality and fairness is counterproductive and puts people on the defensive. Demanding that others lose all or part of their human rights to bring them down, as though this somehow elevates you, is counterproductive for the same reasons.
Intersectionality in the form of Identitarianism weakens and divides movements for social change by splitting ever-finer hairs and creating a new hierarchy, an ‘oppression olympics’ in which people vie for power based on how oppressed they are considered to be.
An excellent and early case in point of this weakness are the Occupy Wall Street protests. Initially these protests had a very broad base of support from across the political spectrum. There was a single rallying point – keep money out of politics. Gradually however, other elements began to be included, and to sign on with Occupy you had to agree with everything, or you would be shamed and pushed out. Radical feminist, queer and other goals – many of them laudable enough in their own right (others ludicrous) were added, dividing the broad-base support down and down until it withered away. Inverting a hierarchy simply creates another, equally unjustified hierarchy.[13]
Something similar can be seen happening in the autonomous zones now, with competent people being excluded because of their whiteness or maleness, regardless of the merit of what they were suggesting. These efforts, like many others, are being hobbled through the exclusion or minimisation of contributions on the basis of race, sex, gender identity, sexuality – all the things we should consider unacceptable bigotries.
It is extremely hard to sell people on left-wing ideas when this pseudo-left, rooted in these ideas, is creating the impression that the left wing is made up exclusively of easily offended, unrepentant racists and sexists. The substance is being lost, the argument for liberty, equality, fraternity is buried under demands for authoritarianism, censorship, inequality and competition over cooperation.
My View
I believe in the value of facts and I try to reject subjectivity when I consider issues, social or otherwise. Perception can be important, of course, but presuming you actually want to fix the problem you’re presented with you have to start with the facts.
“Again and again and again – what are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget what “the stars foretell,” avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors think, never mind the unguessable “verdict of history” – what are the facts, and to how many decimal places?”
Robert Heinlein
Useful action, right action – to put it in Buddhist terms (or is that cultural appropriation?) – can only follow from accurate information, facts. Objectivity is useful, subjectivity is not. What are the facts?
I believe it is more effective to examine the world on a class/wealth/power analysis. Arguing for equality and fairness is relatively easy, and most people want to be treated fairly. Bringing people up to the baseline for society from below it is an easier sell than dragging people down. The idea that a homeless white man has privilege, and a black Minister in government does not, is moronic on its face.
Individuals can have wealth/power irrespective of their race or gender, and their race or gender is irrelevant. The powerbroking classes have class solidarity, financial interests and clout while intersectionality and identity politics has torn the non-powerbroking classes apart. The 99% have power only through solidarity, as a bloc. This threat is part of the reason that the powerbroking class works so hard to divide people on culture war issues.
That the same divisive behaviour and hatemongering comes from within activist academia and media is staggering. Sometimes there’s little to no difference between the Daily Mail and the Guardian, or Race Realism and Critical Race Theory.
As just one example of how my analysis is more useful and better reflects reality can be seen in racialised crime statistics.
Racial minorities, particularly in the United States, are more likely to commit crimes and more likely to have negative run-ins with the police. Racial analysis from the far-right racists would claim that this is because black people have lower IQ and a genetic tendency toward criminal behaviour. Racial analysis from race theory would claim that this is because of oppression of black people and racism in the police force.
A wealth/power analysis reveals that, US-wide, African Americans are about 2.5 times as likely to live in poverty, and that they are about 2.5 times as likely to get caught up in the judicial system. When you control for wealth, the arrest rates are in line with arrest rates of poor whites as well.[14][15]
To fixate upon the race issue – which no doubt still exists on an interpersonal basis and with some individual police – is to ignore the greater, broader issue of the prison-industrial complex in the USA, which is afflicting impoverished whites just as much as African Americans.
If we try to fix this problem from a racialised basis, we will be creating more problems. We will create a form of ‘black privilege’ where police treat ethnic minorities differently based on the racial identity.[16] We would create a racial disparity where it doesn’t seem like there is one (at least in modern times) and we would stir up resentment in the poor white community, who would continue to suffer at the same rate, without special exceptions.
You might well follow-up with the question as to why modern African Americans are 2.5 times as likely to be poor, and that is an excellent question. There was historical inequality and due to a lack of social mobility in American society the opportunity to rise to a higher class is extremely small – relative to more socialistic nations. However, this is not an exclusively African American problem, it affects everyone. Poor whites are just as socially immobile as poor blacks. Fix the economic issue, you fix it for everyone, without adding fuel to racialised conflict and resentment.[17][18]
I want the greatest freedom for the greatest number of people. I want race, gender and sexuality to be as irrelevant as hair colour – at least when it comes to rights and opportunities. This collection of theories acts directly against those goals and ideals by centering these things and giving them pre-emminent importance over and above individual personhood. Broader strokes can be useful, but these are much less useful than class/wealth dynamics – which must also be tempered with individualism.
1: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/stories-53640382
11: https://www.jrf.org.uk/report/brexit-vote-explained-poverty-low-skills-and-lack-opportunities (Note: ‘Brexit voting’ is an imperfect metric for measuring racism, but the results of searches are foxed by studies correlating racist victimisation with poverty. However, since Trump-voting has been used as a proxy metric for poverty not correlating with racism, this will do for now).
The AtheFist 