The author is a lawyer, which is important to note because a lot of what they say about how "we don't have a race-based system now" seems to be considered exclusively through an explicated, legalistic framing. They say as much by chastising that "it isn't 1930 anymore". This perspective excludes any 2nd- and further-order effects as regards correlations between latent/implicit bias and statistical outcomes for people belonging to certain groups, which is the primary focus and concern of critical studies. By definition critical studies starts where legal studies ends.
It's uniquely grimly funny because "how do disparate impact & outcomes emerge across racial lines in systems that are explicitly written without regards to race" is a pretty complex and interesting question that a lot of scholars have added to the understanding of over the years.
The loosely collected framework formed by those approaches was what used to be called critical race theory, before the right wing moral panic got their hands on it and made it mean something else.
A formal (e.g. legal) system is by definition uncritical, as it poses axioms that are not challenged but simply assumed as true. You can only criticize something that is already formalized, as criticism is inherently a skeptical practice whose explicit aim is to challenge known assumptions.
And yet she is a black lawyer, despite of all the assumed systemic oppression. Maybe she knows more about the actual challenges of black people than the CRT theoreticians?
That it's possible in an oppressive and hateful environment that someone managed to get a job title?
When I was a child, I had multiple field trips to a plantation in Louisiana. We didn't live very far away, so it was a convenient spot to go when our history teachers wanted to take us somewhere. And on the three separate trips I took, from the time I was a first grader to the time I was a junior in high school, not once did we ever visit the slave cabins, nor did the tour guides or teachers ever discuss the living conditions of the slaves or the fact that there were dozens of dead black heads on pikes outside of the entrance after the outcome of a slave rebellion. No, the tour guides talked about the artwork and the owners and the types of crops that grew.
It turns out we've been covering up the sins of our ancestors for generations, and it's part of the reason people like you are so stone-cold ignorant on the issue. Because if you're going to teach history, you should fucking TEACH HISTORY, not the whitewashed version that excludes all the naughty bits that make your ancestors look bad.
I'd hazard a guess that black lady lawyers and CRT theoreticians such as, say, Kimberlé Crenshaw know something about the actual challenges of black people in the USofA and likely teach that and a bit about the history of black law in the USofA.
What with CRT being a university level course and all.
Are you arguing that we should take the word of of, say, black people as being more valid in this debate? Because if so, I'm not at all sure that most black people would vote on this issue the way you seem to suspect they would. The reality is that this is one person's opinion. It's not more valid than mine simply because she's black and I'm small town Wisconsin. Nor is it more valid than the voice of the white liberal. Nor even the voice of the black liberal for that matter.
In short, your bringing up her race, is completely irrelevant to the validity or invalidity of the arguments presented. (Which are pretty much boilerplate by the way. As conservatives, and liberals for that matter, we all really need new material if this is the best we can do.)
You just assume most black people would feel oppressed? And how would you disentangle that opinion from them being taught they are oppressed in school?
Would you say it absolutely doesn't matter how black people feel about it? Wouldn't that make the whole subject somewhat ridiculous?
And of course a black lawyer is a data point against the claims of systemic oppression.
Ah, so we've arrived at the truth: you don't actually understand the concepts being discussed, so you reject them out of hand to avoid contending with your own lack of knowledge in a social space that highly values deep and wide competencies.
I promise you, if you dedicate yourself to good-faith study, you will discover the essence of what people are talking about when they talk about "systemic" forces at play in the world.
Note that I am referring specifically to systemic forces because this encompasses the sum total of all causal influences on all elements of the system writ large. Systemic oppression is merely one half of a dichotomy, the other half being systemic privilege. Every sub-population within a general population can be evaluated along this 1D quantitative axis of "net-oppressed" vs "net-privileged". Some may be exactly balanced at the origin on this axis, but it would be simply absurd to assert that every sub-population is on average net-zero on that scale -- the probability of that happening is "almost surely zero". Ergo, some groups are more oppressed than others. Further, our constructed systems are not so complex that causation is unknowable. The civilization that humanity has built has relatively direct cause-effect relationships, largely due to its artificiality. So it stands to reason that we can determine that a) some groups are more oppressed than others, and b) the reasons for that net-oppression of a given group can be determined as functions of the components of the system they inhabit. Does this help clarify things?
