Okay, Bill, let’s do that.

I assume you are going to accept for the sake of argument that it is possible that a discriminatory outcome is justified. (Otherwise, you would have to just shut up about the gender pay gap forever and just admit that it’s real and should stop).

Then… that sounds like an explanation for male treatment in the criminal justice system, doesn’t it ?

This particular line being so omnipresent in anti-feminist circles is so telling because it so neatly encapsulates their double standard and blindness to it. Anti-feminists love to trot out biotruths about women being less problem oriented and more people oriented, or not being as assertive, or having lower IQ, or whatever. But literally everyone agrees, right and left, that men are more violent. Steven Pinker and HJ Hornbeck agree on it. CH Sommers will concede it.

So do you have any proof that men are treated worse in the criminal justice system when controlling for the scale and nature of their crimes, Bill ?

I’ll answer that for you. No, you don’t . Because no one does. Because it’s not been done. People don’t even try.

When it comes to disparate treatment of women, we have to document every step of a circuitous Rube Goldberg machine to prove sexism is behind the gender sex gap, or behind rotting rape kits. But when it comes to disparate treatment of men? The mere fact of disparate treatment is sufficient. And, no, this is not just rightists trolling or trying to beat the left at their own game. (It is that, but it’s not just that). MRA, MGTOWs, etc. will trot this out unprovoked . Insofar as they ever do any activism, lazy gits that they are, this is the kind of thing they will try to get up off the couch for.

Same with CH Sommers and the “war on boys”. When it’s women? Well, maybe women just “make some choices” that rationally explain the discrepancy! But when it’s boys? There must be a conspiracy! It can’t be that boys just don’t try very hard in school, or their parents suck, or whatever! Nope! That is off the table by default .

So when it comes to adoption, we could have a complicated talk about anti-single mother biases and the fact that women are less likely to have independent incomes in the first place as counterbalancing factors you suspiciously didn’t bring up. We could actually look at the data, and find feminists who point out how simplistic your image is (just like with the bullshit about anti-male bias in child custody when in fact if anything the bias goes the other way when taking into account the likelihood of male domestic abuse and lack of concern for families ). Or I could just point out that it’s hardly women’s fault, and isn’t something women collectively did, to say that men are shitty parents. It’s rather this thing called “toxic masculinity”, where men are supposed to archetypally be dumb violent douchebags and the right will flip their fucking lid over a razor ad that even alludes to an alternative.

In contrast, the gender pay gap is directly caused by the decisions over generations of male employers, family heads, religious leaders, and policymakers. Women don’t want it, they would rather be able to make the same dollar for the same work, and yet it persists.

As for a single woman not inspiring attention: Well, Bill, you’re talking about it, so your argument is self-fucking-refuting . But hey, remember Brock Turner, Bill? Or, hey, remember this guy, Donald fucking Trump , the self-admitted rapist who was also confirmed to be a rapist in court by his wife who got to win an election and then have the entire right wing mold themselves around him?

Bill, this is an elementary point. You can’t even try to prove discrimination without showing at least one set of paired examples. In actual fact, of course, using individual anecdotes sucks. In contrast, notice the detailed social studies work you are responding to! You are being shown the light and deciding to stay in the fucking cave!

There is no argument to be made that men get away with less shit than women, Bill. The very fact that we can have proposals for racial or religious profiling but never gender profiling, even though going after men would actually be a really good way of identifying everything from terrorists to violent criminals to serial killers to mass shooters, is illustrative of the actual bias. But because you have a woobie, you don’t bother making a comparative analysis. Even though you’re obviously smart enough to see why you should. Because whataboutism is just easier.

As for the “white flight” / “gentrification” thing: Hey, Bill. Asshole. Notice how this article actually documents how white flight was expressly racist? Pushed forward by explicitly, consciously racist ideology?

We don’t just infer that whites are racist because they move away from black people. They say it, Bill, whether directly or in code. You can control for variables. You can do the work.

And gentrification is not just coming back to an area, dude. It’s doing so in a way deliberately to change the cultural context of the community, whether by sheer economics or even more direct measures. It would be possible to return to a neighborhood in solidarity with the people living there, working collectively so that everyone was better off and could afford to stay there. Heck, it would be possible to prepare as a community raises in property value to transplant that community in an authentic and holistic way that would let them maintain cultural integrity and profit. But that’s not what happens, Bill. Rather, assholes like AirBNB and monocultural businesses like Panera Bread coopt local cultures while destroying local businesses. If you read the actual anti-gentrification literature, there’s thoughtful concepts in there about how to avoid this problem. It can be done even under capitalism. But since policymakers don’t care about black people, well…

Like, for example, what happened after Hurricane Katrina.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2005/sep/24/usnews.hurricanes2005

https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/white-new-orleans-has-recovered-from-hurricane-katrina-black-new-orleans-has-not/

http://www.timwise.org/2006/07/eracing-katrina-historical-revisionism-and-the-denial-of-the-obvious/

There, it’s basically deliberate ethnic cleansing. I know you would call it that if it were happening to white people, Bill. So keep your pearl-clutching bullshit back.

Now! For your dumbass fucking questions!

First of all, Bill, Richard keeps calling you out on this false equivalence between CRT and much more fringe views. And you keep doing it. You know the answer, so why keep fucking asking the question?

This is dirty pool. You know it’s dirty pool. Why not stop? I can just as easily ask you every time you do this shit, “Okay, if anti-CRT is a good thing, why not embrace Nazism, Bill?” It’s much easier for me to make equivalence between you, a supposedly non-Republican, and a Nazi, Bill, than it is for you to do so with a progressive who likes CRT and a radfem who likes eco-feminism.

But, okay.

Eco-fem? https://freethoughtblogs.com/reprobate/2018/06/13/steven-pinker-and-feminist-glaciology/

Without understanding how women relate to the ecology, given that women are the primary determiners of what is consumed and what basic domestic work is done thanks to sexism, there’s actually huge epistemological gaps in efforts to deal with all sorts of crises. It’s the same as ecological racism, which I know you’d dismiss as a hoax and is true nonetheless.

Logical positivism?

Try understanding modern science without understanding the importance of falsifiability. No, I know that’s not all positivism is, and I don’t care. You behave in such bad faith that it’s entirely legitimate for me to be a fraction as reductive as you are.

Behavioral psych?

Ummm, yeah, dude, if you wanted to talk about the state of psych as a field, you’d need to be at least basically familiar with behavioral psych. The fuck is even your objection here?

Your other complaints are even sillier. Yeah, dude, if you wanted to be an expert in theism, you should know Plantinga’s modal logic. It comes up a lot as you may have noticed! Ditto all the other ones. You’re now actually making an analogy to CRT semi-properly and not even realizing it, and even still fucking it up.

Maybe you could have a very passing familiarity with social science without knowing CRT. Or have an undergraduate level understanding. (I knew this shit in high school, but whatever, debate is a weird field). But if you were to be serious and want to talk about the topic at at all a high level? No. Just like you would not be competent in the history of social science if you hadn’t become familiar with at least the basics of how people have used Marx in the field.

And that’s true even if you don’t like Marxist theory .

I don’t! Marxist theory has huge holes. Check out Michael Albert’s criticisms of it some time. Firmly leftist criticism. I think Marxist theory tends toward being exceedingly economically reductive and pretending that’s a merit by it being “materialistic” and also assuming linear progress. It’s sort of hard to excise those ghosts. I also do think Marxism has blind spots when it comes to power outside of sheer ownership. But I can’t deny that Marxist theory is an interesting theoretical lens and has guided lots of interesting work. Just like Durkheim, who I imagine neither of us would agree with, was hugely influential.

So, yeah, maybe you can be like cocktail-party informed on present social science without brushing up on CRT. (It’d be harder to be familiar with legal theory, but hey, maybe even then). But to be an actual fucking expert? Nope. And if you think you’re going to get away from the kind of research CRT has inspired, the research of folks like Pager? Nope!

Just… Bill. Read a book, man. It won’t kill you.

And while we’re at it… Reducing Bell and hooks (yeah, the last name is properly spelled without a capital, jackass – something you’d know from five seconds on Google) to just novelists is fucking insulting and shows you don’t read intersectional literature (and still don’t properly credit people like Delgado and Crenshaw for CRT’s founding which is again the kind of shit you could correct with five seconds on Wikipedia)…

And people like Tim Wise have been trying to get us to talk about whiteness as a concept for like thirty fucking years. Maybe a bunch of liberals were wedded to color-blind ideology, but centrist liberals being blind as hell ain’t exactly new, buddy.

I wonder if you’re also going to parrot Zizek’s pretty silly takes on transgender folks and revolutionary ideology, or whatever else you want to talk about because you have no social science background whatsoever and think that armchair philosophizing is like super dope man.

Where do you get this garbage from, Bill? YouTube anti-SJW content?

We’re already having this discussion on another thread, Bill, but seriously.

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=critical+race+theory+law&oq=critica

3.4 million results even for just the subset of “law”. Yeah, not seriously, my ass.

Incidentally, if you read some of those papers, you’ll find some informed, interesting critiques of CRT, from interesting issues about CRT in the classroom to CRT being falsely framed as in opposition to other theories, etc.

https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-lawsocsci-110413-030928 discusses some potential issues with CRT acting in the social sciences and explains why CRT discourse can be careful to avoid faux objectivity.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/19371918.2018.1562406 is an actual thoughtful analysis about black fatherhood.

https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9780203882993-11/race-still-matters-gloria-ladson-billings is from someone who early on worried that CRT would become divorced from its legal analysis in a way that would leave people without appropriate context. She points out how corporatized education has led to incentives to whitewash.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01419870.2016.1159708 discusses a CRT perspective on black entrepreneurship.

And while we’re here…

https://heller.brandeis.edu/iere/pdfs/racial-wealth-equity/racial-wealth-gap/roots-widening-racial-wealth-gap.pdf . While I was able to find a sketchy site that had a supposed PDF of Black Wealth/White Wealth for free and probably could find something I was comfortable with, this is Shapiro and two colleagues doing a break down of the causes of black wealth inequality. Discrimination is only mentioned a few times as a contributing factor: Oliver and Shapiro’s analysis centered on intergenerational wealth and the accumulation of advantage.

You just don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, Bill. CRT is well-respected.

Bill, everything you just said is false. Even the Virginia teacher story; you have every fact wrong (he didn’t say any such thing to his students; and what he did say was quite different than you represent; and you haven’t even presented a valid rebuttal to what he actually did say!).

You are trapped in a fantastical delusion.

Get back to reality. It’s better there. Trust me.

Bill, you just pulled the whataboutism, JAQing off, and infinite goal posts troll tactics all in one comment! That’s fucking hilarious.

Try being rational instead. It’s better for you and the rest of us.

And if you have question marks bouncing above your head because you don’t know what I am talking about, click and read that link above. Then come back here and actually respond to the article you are commenting on, without any of this irrational snow-flakey avoidance-of-the-facts bullshit.

One of the things that makes their thesis particularly strong is precisely that they document a specific causal change through other people. It’s easy to point to vague philosophical or activist movements, shared ideas that are all percolating, and then blame all of those ideas on a few chosen people, but doing that is almost always bankrupt because the ideas are obviously in the ether. Here, it really seems they make a very strong case that the specific ideas advanced by Ely, propagated through his specific academic network, were the particular cause. Doing a bit of research on Richard Ely, he had actually opposed even Spencer on specific state action to benefit preferred races, so he was racist even by the standards of his time and his ideological movement .

Good points all.

I share the skepticism of “individual actors” theories, but their approach doesn’t get dinged for me because (1) they contextualize it, thus establishing that had he not done this, someone likely would have (so the thesis acknowledges the social trend as causal factor—every general trend still has to be realized by actual persons) and (2) they accumulate decisive evidence for their point.

Hence the only way to disprove this is to prove the converse that (i) he was just one of several independent actors bringing about the effect, and not merely that (because their thesis already acknowledges that), but (ii) in such a way that removing him from the causal system and not replacing him would have had the same outcome (thus Ely would be causally irrelevant), and that doesn’t seem likely—you could only get the same outcome by replacing him with someone else—and someone of his same zeitgeist (which was admittedly a popular zeitgeist), which is how individual actors realize general trends, per point (1).

So that would not be a thesis different from theirs so as to compete with it. One needs to show Ely’s causal irrelevance. Maybe that could be done (in the ways I suggest), but their paper is so thoroughly evidenced, I think that’s unlikely to happen (which is what historians should always aim for, hence I am a fan of thorough presentations of overwhelming evidence).

If we’re going to talk about the pay gap, then we should also talk about how women are almost never executed for murder (https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/death-row/women) or how almost any woman can adopt a child by herself but a man will immediately be assumed to have suspicious motives if he attempted to do likewise as a potential single parent. In some areas, yes, women do make less than men, all things being equal. In some cases, the reverse is true (e.g. porn).

https://vimbuzz.com/has-lamora-williams-been-sentenced/ A woman who was charged with putting her own kids in the oven yet there were no mass protests, riots, etc. over it. Nobody burned down the police station demanding her head, none of that. However, if a man had done this, he would have been either sentenced to death or killed by another inmate.

Also it’s important that whenever whites leave an “urban” area, they are accused of “white flight” but whenever they return, they are accused of “gentrification” which apparently is just as racist. Like Kafka’s Trial, whites are guilty no matter what simply for existing. I’m reminded of the white BLM activist who was denied a BLM shirt in Toronto and promptly called a “colonizer” before being asked to leave. There’s the “white flight”. To a racist, a white BLM supporter and a white KKK member are the same thing.

Honest question for you Richard: if CRT is “necessary” to understand American history, then:

Is Eco-Feminism “necessary” to understand climate change?
Is Logical Positivism “necessary” to understand physics?
Is Behavioral Psychology “necessary” to understand psychology as a whole?
Is Pyrrhonianism “necessary” to understand the Ancient Greek world?
Is Bheda-Abhedha tattva “necessary” to understand Medieval India?
is Alvin Plantinga’s S5 modal logic “necessary” to understand theism?

I’ve never heard a CRT advocate answer any of these questions, mostly because they still think writing many pages of anecdotes from grad school somehow counts as academic writing. I find it bizarre that CRT is treated with the same reverence by some liberals as the Gospel of John is by born again Christians. People act like this, alone among all the schools of thought, is infallible to the core.

Let’s go into our own turf: higher criticism. Do I personally think HC is “necessary” to understand the Bible? No. Although I’ve had seven articles published in JHC over the years, if someone like Dan Wallace (who I disagree with on almost everything) were to somehow produce a convincing argument that HC is outdated bull-shit, then I would have to agree with it even if it meant dispensing with my toolbox. There’s absolutely no reason to view CRT any differently.

And, yep, that bit about real estate pricing and questioning its logic is critical. Because anyone who wants to defend the status quo actually has to prove that the status quo is just, and they usually just assume it. The gender wage gap is paradigmatic. Even before we get into the details, the “Women just make choices that make them get paid less” excuse doesn’t cut it because we have to question what choices would actually warrant being paid less. Why is it the case that maternity should incur some kind of remuneration penalty? It seems that we as a society want to make sure that some people are having kids since that’s the basis of the society continuing, a premise conservatives happily accept when they need it for their bigotry. But if that’s the case, any market that punishes women and particularly only women for reproduction is acting in a way we don’t want as a society, creating a disincentive for behavior we don’t want artificially deterred (and acting against reproductive rights). And it goes down the line. The fantastic rebuttal that AmpToons made ( https://amptoons.com/blog/?p=10083 ) to the CONSAD Report points this out, that just punting to women’s choices circularly assumes that women are making choices in a just context, which is literally the debate that’s being had!

That’s why the sociological imagination is so important, and why it really does tend to be a huge dividing gap between people who accept basic social justice conclusions and those who don’t.