Hello everybody. Today we are leaving the Marxism behind and talking about a social issue.
Yes, 118 videos and I am only now talking about a sjw topic, for the first time.
And we are talking about critical race theory. What is it, what does it do? What does it mean
and why is an anarcho-stalinist-revisionist like me talking about it?
The last one is easy, I am talking about it because I consider it interesting and worth
talking about. Race and class are intertwined in our modern society so a liberation based on class
must include liberation from other structures like race. And the most important reason for
why I think this fits my channel is that I said so. It’s my channel you cannot stop me.
Except if you unpledged from my patreon, but other than that I have full moral integrity.
Of course, this will still be a viki1999 video so I will stay light on my own opinions
and the drama around the topics and I will just explain the actual facts about it.
For many of my topics people fight in the comments but it may be worse this time.
Because for some reason critical race theory was made a political argument in the US.
This means talking about it is offensive to just about half of the voting population of the USA.
If you are within that half and offended by the mere mention of this topic, you shouldn’t
have clicked on this video. I feel like the title was pretty clear on what I was going
to be discussing so please leave your dislike and watch a 5 year old ben Shapiro compilation
while the rest of us learn something new. I will of course like always explain the thoughts
in this theory and why these thoughts are the way they are, you can agree with this or not, makes
no difference to me, matter of fact I will also tell you what I think at points in this video.
So, after all this, let’s get asking ourselves, what is critical race theory? Actually, let me
just stall for 10 seconds to ask you to subscribe! Do you think I will gain more subscribers
from this? I am not sure but I am trying it. Tell you what, in my next video I’ll mention
whether interrupting the video to ask for subs actually changes how many people subscribe. But I
guess you gotta sub to see my next video and know if it worked. Anyways, here we go.
What is a framework? “Critical race theory is a framework
derived from legal theory in the 80s and based on critical theory which is a part of postmodernism.”
You may not know this but when researching I read sentences like that all the time and
you wouldn’t believe how much work it is to untangle something with so many complicated
specific words into a video you can listen to while playing Minecraft. Sorry I just wanted you
to see the stuff I have to deal with sometimes. So basically critical race theory is a framework.
It is a way to explain the world. Things like that are super common we get introduced to frameworks
for all sorts of purposes in our lives. For example a common framework is the one of
markets. When we think of the economy we think of markets and competition first,
that is how we approach the economy. Of course, commies like me come along
and look at the economy from a class standpoint, owning class versus producing
class. It’s important to say that frameworks mostly don’t compete with each other.
You can look at the economy with markets, and you can look at it with classes. These different
looks are important for different things. If you want to set prices looking at the class conflict
is all but useless and if you want to explain inequality using just a market view will cause you
to make the conclusion that the producing classes are just dumb for not inventing the iPhone.
Frameworks look at different things and thus come to different conclusions. If you are a
regular viewer you already know these frameworks by another name, Ideologies. An ideology likewise
is a way to explain something, though they usually explain society or the world as a whole. And the
difference is ideologies are mutually exclusive. Because ideologies tell you how society should be,
you can only really have one at a time. So is critical race theory an ideology?
You could use that word and I couldn’t stop you, but I don’t think the term fits. To me an
ideology is a framework that explains the world AND tells you how to change it. Critical race
theory does explain many things, but it doesn’t really tell you what to do.
There are countless scholars that write about CRT but they never tell you what to do.
Sure some draw conclusions but there are no CRT doctrines. In contrast writers like Marx
and Lenin tell you what to do. So in my eyes socialism is an ideology while critical race
theory is just a way to explain some things. That is why I called it a framework before.
Okay, now we talked about what a framework is for a bit but what kind of framework is CRT? Well,
it is a framework that looks at society, in praxis mostly American contemporary society,
with a focus on designated racial groups, how they interact,
and what makes them different. CRT answers questions like: Hey
why are African Americans disproportionally represented in prisons and police shootings?
Questions which are interesting, and often used by individual racists, to give you an
oversimplified racialised view of complex issues. Critical race theory explains these issues in a
more fact based manner. So now that we have a basic overview, let’s get into the details.
What is CRT about? A Critical theory is
just a way to approach an issue from a different viewpoint than the mainstream. So basically, it
means to critically examine everything, including underlying assumptions people usually make.
Once you know what critical means in this context you can easily figure out what critical race
theory is. It’s a way to look at race in society while critically analysing everything about
society to see if questioning all these things could explain questions about race and society.
And of course, if CRT was useless and found nothing of interest nobody would care about
it. But Critical Race theory found some very interesting explanations of complex issues
which is why I am talking about it at all. Critical race theory as a concept is about 40
years old and one of the core assumptions is that race itself as a concept is a social construct.
If you are a professional SJW like me you already know what that means
but I still hope that some open minded conservatives are watching so let me explain.
A social construct is something that only exists because we all agree that it does. For example,
money only exists because we collectively believe that pieces of paper carry value. Likewise
the racial groups we have right now only exist because people say they do. Of course things like
skin colour are objectively real but the way we think of people because of those are arbitrary.
For example people in turkey or the middle east are usually not seen as white, just like Mexicans,
but people from Greece or southern Italy ARE white. Even though these groups have
the same skin tone. Who is and is not white is determined by arbitrary rules.
Another example example. If a black and white person have a child what do we call that child?
In the western world usually we call them black, but for example in south Africa they would be
considered white. Obama was equal parts white and black yet he was still considered the first black
American president. For some time I would tell people that Obama is white because he is, kinda.
My idea was to provoke people into re-considering their entrenched views on race, instead they just
called me dumb and left. So that was a failure. As you can tell race and the concepts around it
are shaky just from a social standpoint, not to mention how skin colour and our current
racial groups are in no way related to traits of people from a scientific
standpoint. Shaun made a multiple hour-long video essentially saying and proving that.
But despite race being kind of made up, the fact that we all consider it real
makes it a real subject that sociologists can study. And they did. And critical race theory
is different form every other theory about race because it doesn’t care about individual racists.
Critical race theory more or less assumes that nobody is consciously racist nowadays.
But it still looks at things like economic inequality and wonders how it’s happening.
And the answer CRT looks at is a systemic one. If this is not because of many racist individuals,
what mechanics in society lead to those unequal outcomes? Well. Many reasons. Let’s start with,
why are black people poor compared to whites? Number one, school funding. Amazingly in the
united states schools are funded by the local government not the state or federal one. They are
financed via property taxes, so an area with many rich people who own lots of property will have a
really well funded great school for the kids. But if you have like idk a poor inner-city area
where most people rent and don’t own property, then that school will be below
average. And the children will get worse education and perform worse on standardised
tests. Which means they have a lower chance to get a good job or even to go to college.
All without the poor kids doing anything wrong. But hold on. Is that not an issue for everyone?
Poor white kids would get a bad education and rich black kids would get a great one.
And that would be true. If American populations were evenly dispersed, which they are not. As
American you probably know that suburbs are almost all white and that the inner
city is often code for black areas. But why is that? Why do so many white people
own houses and land while so many black people live in cities renting apartments? If I was an
anarcho-capitalist I’d talk about bootstraps now but sadly reality is more complicated than that.
You see in America before world war two there was the great depression so many
people black or white moved to the cities. Back then where you could live was legally
based on your skin colour. It was actual true segregation. Then world war two happened
and when all the soldiers came back the US federal government noticed that too
many people live in the cramped cities in small apartments owned by some rich property owners.
So, they made a government programme that gave people out huge loans from the government on tiny
interest so people could settle in the suburbs and have and own their own home. Here is the
catch. The government decided who those loans went to using maps like this one. What is the red area?
Oh that is the area that gets no government loans to support a better life. Coincidentally these red
zones almost one to one mapped with race. Segregation was over but most black people
still lived in the areas that used to be designated black only, and those happened to be
designated worst by the government. So while the white baby boomers got funding
to build their cheap suburban housing, people of colour were stuck in apartments.
Which is even worse because if you live in an apartment you pay between 30 and
60 percent of your income in rent. If you live in a house that cost does not exist.
So you can instead buy cars, increase your standard of living and crucially, when you
die you pass that wealth on to your children. So, despite these racist government programmes
ending 50 years ago, there is still a disparity in wealth between inner cities and suburbs.
So black people are still poor because of things that happened so long ago, and unequal education
and hiring biases keep things this way. Again this is not because all white people
are racist or whatever conservatives say CTR says, it’s just that it happened this way.
And then critical race theory is just radical enough to suggest that maybe we
should do something about it. And you and I both know that some people in politics
are terrified of the idea that we need to act to solve issues. But to be frank I can’t see
how a free market could solve this so the government may have a thing or two to do.
Another one of these issues critical race theory explains is the sentencing differences between
designated racial groups. You may or may not know that proportionally black people, especially black
men are overrepresented in American prisons. The first reason this is, is based on what we talked
about before. Black people face issues like worse education and racial hiring biases which means
they don’t really have good opportunities to improve their lives inside the system.
So instead desperate people become thieves or drug dealers to make a living.
This is not exclusive to black people of course, it affects all races. People who are poor and lack
perspective make money outside of the law. Matter of fact the lowest income class in the US makes
up about 72% of prisoners. But of course black people are the poorest segment of American society
as I mentioned before, so they are over represented in the criminal justice system.
But there is another reason why people of colour make up such a large part of
the prison population. And that is a bias in the justice system. Black people on average get a 50%
longer prison sentence than white people who committed the same crime. Why is that? Because
of the way American trials work. Basically you have a jury who decides on innocence or guilt.
And those juries are always majority white, since the US population is mostly white. But
sometimes black people are there. But lawyers on either side of a trial can remove some potential
jurors based on no reason at all. So usually even when the criminal is black the jury is all
white. Which is an issue, because these all white juries probably know that black people on average
commit more crimes so they may consider the defendant guilty before the trial even started.
All white juries convict black defendants 81% of the time and white ones at 66% while a jury
with at least one black person convicts black and white people equally. This data is based on
thousands of trials so it is pretty solid. The theory goes that even the presence of
one black person in the jury makes the other jurors question their subconscious biases.
And there is one more reason for why the prisons are so unequally populated. Over
policing. As mentioned black people are for economic reasons statistically more likely to
commit some crimes. So knowing that the police patrols black population centres way more than
white ones. And if you search for something illegal happening you will find something.
When driving people of colour are mostly stopped for things like non-working back
lights while white people are stopped for actual traffic violations. And in addition to that the
police is twice as likely to threaten and to use, violence against people of colour.
You could say that that is down to individual racism or you could look at it like CRT does and
consider that the police subconsciously considers black people a bigger threat
because they see more black people in their day to day job for all the reasons I mentioned above.
There is only one more thing I will talk about here. Naturally
there are hundreds of things CRT can still teach us, this is a video not a 500 page academic book.
But that is the question, why are there so few black people in the government?
Senate has 200 seats and there are 3 black senators. If senate was proportional to population
there would be 28. So what the hell?
Well, it’s easy, in amerca politicians need to pay for their own advertisements to get elected,
which means, more money directly translates to more votes and a higher likelihood to get elected.
As said above, black people are disproportionally poor. But what about Obama? Well Obama was born
to really rich parents so he could afford a good school and a career in politics.
He never lived in poverty like many people of colour in the US do. So despite him being
the first black president he changed absolutely nothing about the inequality of the racial groups
in the united states. In effect he was just like any white democratic president before or
after him. Yet another reason why I provocatively called him white in the past, but this reason is
harder to explain I admit. Outro
The neat thing about critical race theory is that it works as a counter to any argument a
racist can put forth. “If black people are not violent why are so many in prison?”
CRT has an answer. “If black people are not lazy why are they poor?” CRT has the answer.
Of course it’s possible that sometimes CRT gives a wrong or incomplete answer.
Critical race theory is not a god. It doesn’t and can’t know everything. Like every sociological
theory it works well sometimes and not other times. That is the nature of theories about
society, maybe you can find better theories and found “super critical race theory”
but until then I think CRT does a good job of explaining the situation people of
colour in the united states find themselves in. Thank you for watching, leave comments criticisms
and complaints about oversimplification in the comment section and administer likes or dislikes
as you see fit. Thank you all very much for watching this video. It means a lot. I am a
bit indisposed at the moment because I am sort of in a psych ward so don’t expect uploads every
week for the near future. Yea, I just gave you a reason not to subscribe I am great at my job!
Special thanks to: Autumn Kelsey, 태은 Hartley, Allen Vo,
Erik Betts, V, Xander Corvus,2snek,Attila Nemecz, Carissa, Comreade Falcon, Daniel Hyman,
Domenic Cusanelli, Emily Marigold Klassen, EvieRen, Hurdeena, Ian Snyder, Kevin Sanders,
klarstrup, Lazypandaz234, Liam S, Nanne Epema, Nathan Neitman, Pote,
Ramon Deville, RedShocktrooper, Sean Murphy, Stairmasterchef, Theron Gilliland Jr. and trey
Sources: [1]:
https://www.edweek.org/leadership/what-is-critical-race-theory-and-why-is-it-under-attack/2021/05