SIO299: Debunking CRT Attacks with Dr. Ery Shin

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:11 Thomas: Hello and welcome to Serious Inquiries Only. This is episode 299 on a big landmark episode coming up next. I'm Thomas and that's Lindsey.

0:00:18 Lindsey: Yeah. Hi.

0:00:21 Thomas: As always, Dr. Lindsey Osterman joining me. I'm so excited about today's episode, I think we're to learn a lot. Lindsey, do you want to introduce our guest?

0:00:29 Lindsey: Absolutely. Our guest is Dr. Ery Shin. She is an assistant professor of English at the University of Southern Mississippi, which is my alma mater. So, this is very special for me. Thank you so much for coming on, Eri.

0:00:38 Thomas: Yeah, welcome.

0:00:43 Ery: Thank you so much, Lindsey and Thomas. It's my pleasure to be here.

0:00:47 Lindsey: That's great. So do you want to tell us a little bit about your background?

0:00:50 Ery: So my field, I would say, is modernism and avant-garde practices. But over the years, I've really gained a lot of interest in gender and sexuality studies, race, and art history. So all of these things right now, especially what's going on in America at the moment, or what's always been happening in America, has really kind of focused my interest in a way that I think, not out of line with contemporary politics, especially recent debates about what's going on with critical race theory and educational legislation.

0:01:19 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

0:01:26 Thomas: So I was thinking back and realizing in doing an episode of kind of, you know, what is critical race theory, I realize it's unintentionally part of a series that is responding to the different moral panics throughout the years. Like I've realized I've had a, what is postmodernism? Like I know I've done that episode when that was the buzzword that everybody was scared of on the right. I don't know if I've been on the show what is intersectionality, but I think we've talked about it a lot and there's probably some other moral panic words. So I just think that's such an interesting component of this, that there's always a, seems, seems like there's an evolution to the next kind of scaremongering buzzword, um, but at the same time, I, I think critical race theory is a super fascinating thing that I would like to learn more about. So I suppose I don't mind a chance to, uh, to talk about it.

0:02:13 Lindsey: Mm-hmm.

0:02:13 Ery: Now, you're absolutely right. It's a new variation of an ongoing debate, an ongoing conversation, an outgoing ideological battle. But at the same time, it is its own new thing as well. So it's a mixture of both. So I'm sure from the way that you're talking, you've already broached the same ground in a number of different ways in previous podcasts.

0:02:35 Thomas: All?

0:02:35 Ery: But in terms of what it actually is right now, the way it's being used is kind of a broad catch-all phrase for anything historical, anything political, anything philosophical that relates to teaching kind of America's racist past and present or racial discrimination in the United States of America. America, more technically and specifically, though, and I'm not going to say that I'm against that kind of broad approach, because the way that I understand and the way that I teach it is also more kind of conveniently broad, but at its core, to be exact, it's it's a legal movement that really got crystallized and finalized in the late 1980s, by legal scholars around 30 or so, that really focus their attentions on how racism is embedded at the very heart and core of America's legal codes and institutions and has thereby been perpetuated by them. And there's a heavy emphasis sometimes on personal narratives, testimonials, but really that's the heart and heart of it, even though, again, it can be used more broadly to talk about history, philosophy, sociology, politics that deal with systemic racism in general.

0:02:54 Lindsey: Yeah.

0:03:51 Lindsey: That makes sense. So, so you, you teach in the English department, um, uh, Eri mentioned that you, you were teaching a, grant a graduate seminar on critical race theory this, this upcoming year, um, so like what kinds of things do you cover from the perspective of your, your discipline?

0:04:05 Ery: So I'm going to be covering recent kind of America-based publications, such as Hamilton's Broke, The Racial Consequences of Underfunding Public Universities, Rothstein's The Color of Law, Alexander's The New Jim Crow, Kendi's Stamp from the Beginning, and Wilkerson's Caste. But more broadly, I'll go back deeper in history. I mean, Marx, Fanon, Freire, Gandhi, Spivak, Foucault, Hurston, Beauvoir, Wright, Baldwin, Césaire. I think there's all of these people and more throughout history that talk about not just legal codes and institutions, but how theories about race and what that word and what term means, how that's evolved over time for the benefit of certain groups over others, that's the big question here, and how, again, it's grown more insidious and also simultaneously more flagrant over time, especially in the American context, even though I'm again drawing globally.

0:05:10 Thomas: That stuff sounds, uh, far above the heads of, like, you know, third graders, possibly. That, and it seems to be the, the panic right now is, they're teaching this to our kids. And indeed, a lot of these bills are targeted at, at, like, you know, K through 12 levels. In fact, I was going to bring up, I saw a meme that was really funny that I cannot track down. I'm so frustrated, but it's from the Simpsons, and it's that Ralph Wiggum one where he says, you know, I saw two teachers and they were doing a critical race theory in the closet, and then there was a kid there, a student there, and they did a racism or something like that. Just the point of which being that it is a moral panic that it feels like nobody knows, nobody who's doing the moral panicking really knows what they're talking about. And I wonder, is this the kind of thing that is at all taught to our kids? I mean, the curriculum you brought up doesn't seem like it would be something in K-12, but I could be wrong.

0:05:40 Ery: Oh.

0:06:06 Lindsey: Don't know. Foucault's got to be pretty accessible to third Third graders, I would think.

0:06:08 Thomas: Yeah.

0:06:10 Ery: No, totally, exactly, over apple juice and ciggies, totally. Um, it's it's, you know, it's so funny, I think the major core about it, no, absolutely not. No, I totally agree. This is realistically, at its core, officially not getting taught at the K-12 level. But they just don't want to talk about, I guess, America's troubled past and present. And so I think the big buzzword was divisive politics. And there, there's more questions that come in because, number one, the first and foremost question would be, are divisive politics necessarily a bad thing? Is it necessarily a terrible thing to have people, especially young children, at the very beginning, confront what is the root and core of American history, which is that it is a nation built upon white European supremacy, founded on genocide and slavery?

0:06:59 Ery: And how are we right now, as a civil democratic society made up of many, many diverse populations, supposed to grapple and come to terms with that and move forward? So that's a tricky one. But again, a question that is incredibly necessary, and in my opinion, incredibly kind of morally emphatic, morally urgent. So it's not something to shy away from. This question of division, that's not necessarily a bad thing. Division in this context can actually bring us together. Well,

0:07:34 Lindsey: So I'm guessing that it's things like that where certain people get the claim that, like, critical race theory teaches school children to feel bad about themselves being white, or that, you know, I means, how would you respond to sort of that version of, or that description of it, I guess, that version of describing it?

0:07:52 Ery: Two responses. Not necessarily understanding something in a mature, nuanced way doesn't necessarily fill you with self-hatred, guilt, rage, or violence toward yourself or your peers. And then the second one is the, the opposite approach. So what if people do feel bad, especially children? That's not necessarily a bad thing either, to have these kinds of negative emotions. I think America, and I'm talking incredibly generally, I'm generalizing, but so much of American pop culture is so nervous about negativity and negative emotions, without thinking about the productive benefits and side effects of having these kinds of tough conversations, again, which I think will lead to emotionally mature and resilient people moving forward.

0:08:39 Lindsey: Yeah, that's a really interesting point.

0:08:41 Thomas: And when you're talking about learning history, know, it does bum me out. The more I learn about U.S. history, the more it bums me out. But I think looking historically speaking, I mean, if I found out that like, you know, my grandfather robbed somebody or something, just to make an analogy. Yeah, I don't feel good about that. And I would want to make restitution if I could. But at same time, I do feel like, oh my God, I am horrible for this or something necessarily. So, it is like a different kind of, I think, negative emotion than just like a plain self-hatred, I think.

0:08:47 Ery: Absolutely.

0:09:15 Ery: It's a kind of learning moment, again, in the general, in the collective, and in terms of legacy, it's not you personally as a person. I mean, none of us were there when these original things happened, and to say the sins of the fathers are visited upon the daughters and the sons, I mean, that's so outdated, dated. So this is really kind of again a broader scholarly kind of emotional collective conversation, as opposed to an isolated teenager or child feeling bad about themselves and personally feeling accountable for everything that's happened. Oh.

0:09:21 Thomas: Well,

0:09:49 Lindsey: Think I that, that's a, that's a particularly important point, because I think what, in the criticisms that I hear about this, the misconceptions that I hear about critical race theory, a lot of it seems to be missing the point in a very specific way, which is that it's it's very interpersonally focused. And so, you know, this, this claim that it teaches school children to feel bad about themselves, I feel like, is missing the part of, like, shifting the, the emphasis to these kinds of systems and structures and things. Do you agree with that? Or, um,

0:10:18 Ery: No, absolutely, and also, think about our education. If we took on everything that made us feel bad, there'd be no sports as well. I mean, 99% of sports, football's pain, so I don't know what they're talking about when they're thinking, oh, oh, it makes us feel bad. It makes us think, I mean, everything. If it doesn't, it's a good kind of a pain. It's a good kind of a burn.

0:10:23 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah.

0:10:39 Thomas: And I think one thing that has changed me a lot throughout the years of becoming more informed about our own history is, and this is kind of a recursive thing in that the more you deny history, or deny, I guess, even American school children the ability to learn their history, the more I think it leads to this sense that a lot of uninformed people have in this, this country, that I think is really prevalent, which is these things are in the past and they were fixed in the pass, you know, and they were atoned for in the path, whatever. I think that's, it's easy to feel like that when you haven't learned about it. And what I think has the most depressing part of digging more into this history is, no, no, these things not only weren't fixed in the past, they still haven't been fixed.

0:11:24 Thomas: And that the decades and indeed even centuries of of cumulative effect of never having properly atoned for it makes it even more morally urgent, and it makes it even harder to deal with. Like, it's it's ballooned out of proportion so much that it's going to be even harder to properly reconcile.

0:11:46 Ery: It is incredibly counterproductive. I couldn't agree more. I mean the kind of moral complacency and amnesia that it deliberately breeds. I mean, it is hurting white America now too, much more flagrantly. So it doesn't help anybody. Socioeconomic inequalities keep deepening. Public services keep getting privatized. I I mean, we could go on with the list of evils that are growing in society, but denying the lessons of history means that these lessons keep repeating, and then again, evolving and expanding in much more kind of frightening guises. So absolutely, knowledge is power. I hate to sound so corny about it. I wish I had a catchier, sexier kind of phrase, but it's true. It's true, or

0:12:25 Thomas: Knowledge "Is power," with a little star shooting in, that worked great in the 90s on TV, I think, or is it "the more you know"? Yeah. Yeah, wonder what was this like, I don't know, on a personal or professional level, to see this subject, something that you know a lot about, go from not in the public sphere, mainly not in public discourse, to the number one search catchphrase among a certain segment. I mean, the usage on Fox News, if you've seen those stats, I mean just, it's such a ginned up artificial controversy, but what's that like to go from like, do-do-do, going along to like, oh my God, this is everywhere in the news now.

0:12:59 Lindsey: I've

0:13:15 Ery: Probably, I think, and I'm sure other others could chime in and give more detail about this. But then BLM and then Biden's election and then Chauvin's trial and prosecution, the verdict, that's probably inflamed and really brought everything to a fore in terms of, oh my goodness, what's going to happen now. Those, I think, and I'm Of course the phenomena is broader, but if I were to pinpoint exact events, that's, that's where my money would be in terms, if I, this is happening.

0:13:44 Thomas: So did it not really come as a surprise to see this latest moral panic be stirred up over critical race theory?

0:13:49 Ery: Yes and no. I wasn't surprised in terms about, okay, Fox and the right and all of these forces gathering to create some new fear-mongering tactic. I was very pleasantly surprised. I did chuckle when I, I saw critical race theory thrown all over the headlines because I was thinking, where did they get this word? I mean, it's so technical and random.

0:14:11 Ery: And again, when we were talking about it before, I, it's, it's as if you picked up something from NASA. I mean, I, I was thinking, where did they latch on to this word? Who, who, who brought it to them?

0:14:11 Thomas: Yeah,

0:14:22 Lindsey: Got a hypothesis. I

0:14:23 Thomas: Yeah, isn't it Rufo? And maybe James Lindsay a little bit.

0:14:27 Lindsey: I was gonna talk about James Lindsey, but yeah, talk about Refo.

0:14:29 Thomas: Yeah, I thought I would have guessed just from my exposure that it was James Lindsay, but I think it turns out it's mainly this Christopher Ruffo person. We talked about a little bit over on opening arguments, but it really is, I think astroturfed is the correct word. I mean, it really istop Down. It's amazing the coordination that goes into to creating this moral panic around this word. And it just feels like it's, or phrase rather. And it juste feels like it's staggering to see in real time. Like I've learned about some previous moral panics, you know, the satanic panic or the whatever. And it feels like, oh, okay, this was something that organically people freaked out about maybe. And, you know, over the passage of time, they learned like, oh, yeah, okay, maybe we weren't, maybe this was off base to be so concerned about this thing. Whereas this feels like everybody on the right consciously saying, let's create a moral panic right now in this moment. It's, it's such a weird feeling. So

0:14:30 Lindsey: Oh.

0:14:43 Ery: Oh.

0:15:29 Lindsey: No, yeah, I, I, um, so I, I was thinking about, I, I looked up some stuff, uh, from, uh, James Lindsay's website, New Discourses, which is a project that he's been working on. Um, and I, I have a, I have a bunch of, uh, what, how he summarizes the, the quote-unquote tenets of critical race theory, so we could talk about that if that would be interesting. Um, He presents eight tenets. I don't think we should talk about all of them, but there are a handful here that I think I'd be really interested in seeing, hearing your, your taking on his position here. So, according to James Lindsey, uh, critical race, race theory, which he sets up as like a sort of a noun, like it's this thing out there that's doing all these things.

He uses a lot of action words about how it treats things and believes things. And that kind of thing. So one thing he says, he says critical race theory believes racism is present in every aspect of life, every relationship, and every interaction, And therefore, has advocates look for it everywhere? And in explaining this proposition, he goes on to say, these assumptions lead people who take up critical race theory to look for racism in everything until they find it. That is, after all, the job of a critical theorist or activist to look för the hidden problems that they assume must be present in whatever they scrutinize. Do you have thoughts about that? Yeah.

0:15:48 Thomas: Great.

0:16:12 Thomas: Stealing your children, it's robbing you at gunpoint, that kind of thing.

0:16:50 Ery: I see, so he's saying it's causing trouble where it's, it's rocking the boat where there's no rocking involved. And two things I would say, I mean, that, that seems to be a very kind of naive and, again, overly general approach to say that race is somehow non-existent anymore. We exist in a colorblind society where race doesn't affect literally every interaction, but it really does. The first thing you see is the physical appearance. And from that, all of these other small judgments automatically come together in less than a second. And this includes fashion as well. So I can't, that it's creating a problem or creating an issue or a phenomenon where there's none, especially considering our implicit biases.

0:17:39 Ery: That seems, again, a bit excessive. And then secondly, he treats paranoia or kind of the paranoid reading lens as something that's 100% detrimental. And again, that's not necessarily true. Looking at the world in this particular context through a paranoiac lens can be very productive and can help people point out and finally waken up to and recognize ways in which institutions and then, of course, individuals continually disrespect and slight them in very small and large ways all the time. And finally, now people feel more empowered to actually speak back and speak up instead of just taking it and swaddling it and letting the bile and the bitterness and resentment just build over generations.

0:18:28 Lindsey: And I think another implicit assumption in the claim that he's making here is that people just generated this hypothesis, if you will, about racism out of nowhere. And I think, you know, you said pretty earlier in our discussion that critical race theory is like a heavily historical kind of idea, right? So his what he calls like an assumption, right, that comes out of nowhere, I think is actually, you know, it's an assumption based on evidence.

0:18:59 Ery: And it's really not in the recent past. I mean, people's great grandmothers, grandfathers, even grandparents, depending on how old they are, were born into slavery, into periods of slavery. I know of a philosophy professor at Stanford. He's in his 50s, maybe early 60s, I believe. And one of his stories, anecdotes that he opens lectures with, is that when he was a teenager riding around, I believe in Georgia, his father was disrespectfully addressed on many occasions and had to go through separate entrances. And this, again, is somebody standing before us as a teacher, as a professor. So it's not this distant, again, abstract, remote past. It affects, and there's memories of it within people living today. I

0:19:45 Lindsey: Yeah, absolutely. Do you want to do another one? I think this is a fun game. Yeah. So another, another way that he characterizes critical race theory is to say that it, critical race theory is against free societies and wants to dismantle them and replace them with something its advocates control. Yeah.

0:19:51 Thomas: Yeah,

0:20:02 Ery: The basis of a free society is free debate and conversation, where you have a range of different opinions and thoughts. It's not just one kind of monolithic authoritarian approach. So critical race theory, indeed, inspires the kind of variegated and rich debate that's critical to a democratic society.

0:20:22 Thomas: Sort of sounds like the opposite of that would be banning subjects from being taught in schools, don't you think?

0:20:31 Ery: The way that the legislation, I mean, it makes you think, I means, are we some kind of authoritarian dictatorship that we like to point fingers at so many places in the world? That we like, I mean, is that really going to happen on home soil? But you know what I mean, scary enough as it is, this thing keeps on gaining traction. Well, granted, I also don't know how much power this legislation would have over individual public school teachers and their autonomy. In classrooms, but still, it's very kind of disturbing to think about that this would be somehow sitting around legalized in any, any kind of way. It

0:20:56 Lindsey: Uh,

0:21:07 Thomas: Absolutely, especially with how broadly when people are banning a thing they don't understand, it seems like the danger of that being such a broad overreach, I guess, is just such a instrument to do something that's already a bad idea to begin with. Doesn't it seem like this is going to restrict not just what might actually reasonably be called critical race theory, but just any discussion of race and history? I don't know how this is gonna turn out. It seems unbelievably authoritarian, as you say.

0:21:40 Ery: Really brings to mind so many, again, frightening images and recollections of book burnings throughout history, all over the world. So on, on that kind of, yeah, more sober noted, it really is striking a chord of unease for me, so many scholars and, and just in the general population, the general public. Absolutely. I

0:22:00 Thomas: Can we get you on record, though, that so this is not correct, what James Lindsay just said about about your, do you have plans to overthrow? What was it again?

0:22:09 Lindsey: It's against free society, wants to dismantle them and replace them. Yeah, well,

0:22:11 Thomas: Okay. Yeah. Are you planning on doing that? Okay, yeah,

0:22:15 Ery: Am I am not, I am NOT against overthrowing free society. Absolutely. So

0:22:21 Lindsey: That's a relief, I was, I was worried for a second. This next one, I think is an interesting one, um, requires, I think, a little bit of explanation. I had to read more about what he was claiming here. So the short version of the claim is that critical race theory only treats race as socially constructed groups. So there are no individuals in critical race theory. So he goes on to say, critical race theory isn't just against free societies and the individualism that enables them, but it also doesn't even believe individual individuals meaningfully exist at all. In critical race theory, every person has to be understood stood in terms of their social groups. And these are determined by their identity, including race. So there's a lot to unpack there.

0:23:03 Ery: Mm-hmm.

0:23:04 Lindsey: Might

0:23:04 Ery: And I would say the crux of it is he's, he's got it backwards. He's got it wrong. If anything, it valorizes and protects and promotes the individual by deconstructing, destabilizing, interrogating racial categories and saying that they're not as absolute, God-given, as census, as different polls, as the box on so many applications have us believe. It's not this intrinsic, innate, omniscient category. It's something that society has evolved as an idea and then chooses to categorize, is divide its population by. So

0:23:47 Lindsey: Be worth lingering on that point for a minute. So what does it mean to call race socially constructed? And like, what is that contrasted against?

0:23:55 Ery: Usually the main thing that, and again, this is kind of a ongoing field that's, it's constantly developing, and scientific facts are also constantly open in negotiation and changing all the time, but basically right now what's, what's the forefront of the discussion is that what do we mean by race when we categorize different people by race? I mean, the five races, 23andMe, all these kinds of things, what does that actually mean, and When geneticists are looking at it genetically, 99.9, if not more, of our genetic material is the same. So what does, does that actually mean genetically? It means nothing, virtually. So then is it based on physical appearances? But then so many people within the same, quote unquote, race look so different from each other. And then, black, shall we say, what about those who pass who look white? Are they still considered black? I mean, there's so much gray area and confusion that the term itself, itself, seems to cast more obscurity, more stereotypes, and again, more prejudices and bigotry than it actually helps bring any clarity. And based on these racial categories, one step further, so much historical disenfranchisement and discrimination has happened.

0:24:22 Lindsey: That

0:25:14 Ery: So that's the big ongoing question. Where did these categories develop? On what basis? And then what are the political ramifications of these categories.

0:25:25 Lindsey: Makes sense. Like

0:25:26 Thomas: You know, I know I've brought it up before, but I read a very interesting article about these, you say 23andMe and those kinds of genetic tests and to somebody just just totally coming at it fresh, it seems like you're like, oh yeah, you enter your genetics and it could tell you all this stuff, including what race you are. And then it turns out that it's entirely based on self-reporting of people and of regions and of that kind of thing. It's interesting algorithm to try to essentially figure out through your genetics, what race you might be, but it can be wildly different depending on which one you choose. So like Like in this article, somebody who identified as black, but was unsure after an ancestry test, after one of these genetic tests, because each one that they tried gave a different answer and gave misleadingly precise answers.

0:26:22 Thomas: You know, oh, you're 1.2% this, or you're 3.5. And this whole article was debunking the fact that like, these are just guesses. Like these are not as precise as the test would have you believe. And it's a much more complicated question than that.

0:26:36 Ery: Absolutely. And also think about biracial people. Obama, he's always talked about as a Black president, Black this, Black that. But his mother looks very incredibly Caucasian. So then if it's half, I mean, the math, I means all these kinds of things. And then that's also why, because of these questions, cultural and philosophical and political, again, geneticists, from what I understand, are now leaning more towards emphasizing where ancestry has kind of regionally developed, where one's ancestors have come from geographically instead of anything else, which again brings up all these kinds of tricky implications.

0:26:39 Thomas: Right.

0:27:10 Thomas: Well,

0:27:14 Lindsey: What?

0:27:15 Ery: To force oneself to identify as a race.

0:27:19 Lindsey: I'm a psychologist. I, so I read that question a little differently. I like the perspective that you brought to that. But I mean, you know, from the perspective of, you know, somebody who studies sort of like multifactorial influences on psychology, it's like, what, why, it just seems like a false dichotomy to pit, you know, group identity against individual characteristics or something. It seems like a very oddly simplistic way of viewing, you know, the human experience, which is influenced by all kinds of things, including, you know, sort of membership in social groups and individual characteristics. Six, I don't know, it seems, it seems like a very odd way to frame this.

0:27:58 Ery: See.

0:27:58 Lindsey: I

0:27:58 Ery: You know what, to nuance this, to add one One layer then to our comments. Let me amend my previous comments. I would say critical race theory, and again, it really tries to protect the individual by taking off the kind of constrictions that racial categories have historically and currently opposed, put upon, and project upon the individual. At the same time, part of the way that it upholds and promotes the individual is by recognizing how strong and powerful the individual's ethnic ties may be. And when I say ethnicity, I mean kind of cultural affiliations based on common descent, ancestry, language, culture, all of these kinds of things, religion.

0:28:46 Ery: So a bit of both. It's a little of both. You're trying to uphold the individual by getting rid of certain things. At the same time, And you also recognize how much individuality is indebted to the community and communal ties.

0:29:00 Lindsey: Like that a lot.

0:29:01 Ery: So it's tricky. I mean, I wish, again, that it's kind of a one-way street and kind of an easy, snappy soundbite. But like all of these kinds of things, there's a lot of different things going on in different directions. And I think that's also why it's gotten distorted and so much kind of strange media coverage recently, Because they're trying to force it to kind of twist into these really easy, snappy, again, soundbites when it's not like that. It takes a little bit more time to unpack and kind of digest. I

0:29:31 Lindsey: Most things are, as it turns out, um, okay, I, I think this one is interesting too. I'll be, I'll interested to hear your, your thoughts on this one. So, uh, James Lindsey says that critical race theory believes science, reason, and evidence are a white way of knowing and that storytelling and and lived experience are a Black alternative, which hurts everyone, especially Black people.

0:29:54 Ery: Wouldn't say that critical race theory is negating any of the things that he says it's negating. It's simply calling to attention how those things that he claims are not ideological, completely 100% objective, somehow universal, transracial or post-racial, are incredibly, incredibly subjective, have been been incredibly kind of vulnerable to historical pressures, that there is no non-ideological stance. I mean, even the stance, the statement, and I heard this kind of wafting through the recent debates, just teach facts, not ideology, that in and of itself is an ideological statement. So what he's saying, again, is incoherent. They aren't doing that, but those things that he thinks are above everything are themselves incredibly subjective. Oh.

0:30:43 Thomas: Yeah. It plays This is something that's come up in, in kind of debates I've had. There seems to be among a certain skeptical-minded person, the idea that like the goal is to be free from ideology. If you have any ideology, ideology, you're biased. The goal is some view from nowhere, ideology free thing. Um, I'll get, you know, I get criticism. So, oh, they're a good point here, but this, are you just pretty ideologically? And it's like, well, I don't know when it comes to something, pick something simple, you reproductive rights, like any discussion that I would have about that, I would think yeah, I would proudly wear that ideology on my chest, I guess. I mean, why would I talk about that free from an ideology that people ought to have a right to reproductive health choices and all that? Like, why, why Would I ever want to take a view from nowhere on that? Or like, talk in a way that wasn't, quote, unquote, ideological? Is that sort of what you're getting at with that?

0:31:09 Ery: No.

0:31:46 Ery: Absolutely, and also what I thought was extra ironic and extra kind of amusing at this stage was that the fathers of this supposedly non-ideological stance, pure objectivity, kind of European science and progress, the philosophical big names, uh, of this illustrious tradition would absolutely vehemently disagree. Degree. Kant, there's no such thing. I mean, a view is always a view from somewhere. He always emphasized in his transcendental idealism that we're always framing things by our human subjectivity. And Heidegger, if we're going to choose a more recent example, and also affiliated with the Nazi party in his time, he also emphasized that every view is always a view view from somewhere, every science is an art, every art is a science. So again, this myth, this fiction of absolute objectivity has always been kind of-- Mean just a kind of a convenient, a tool. I mean, it's, it's a constant, just work in progress, but no one has ever taken it seriously as something that can actually be real, at least not within human civilization and not within human minds. Oh.

0:32:53 Thomas: About I think they like to stick to cases that make this argument more difficult. I mean, what, what About the idea that like this even applies to basic math, Is you there an ideology to basic Math? Is that something? How would you respond when people talk about that yeah that does seem to be something that exploded online and I They're Making T-Shirts That Say Two Plus Two Equals Four Ironically Converting That Into An Ideological Statement Oh

0:33:12 Ery: That two plus two is four, that kind of a thing.

0:33:28 Ery: Well, I have two responses. One, kind of the everyday statement, I mean, I'm on this the same ship, I don't think, you know, you can say if you can, want, there's certain things that you shouldn't do, just common sense, don't wander around in traffic or else you're going to get hit by a car and lose your life. But now on the more kind of abstract philosophical side, two plus two is four can still be an open-ended subjective interpretation of reality. How so? You take four little balls of Play-Doh, you put them all together, it's not four, it's one. And that's just simply one response out of many that you can to approach that very same question. So these basic facts, if you swivel them and push them and prod them in many different ways, they themselves actually aren't as straightforward as people think.

0:34:18 Lindsey: Another thing that's occurred to me in hearing some of this conversation about objectivity in science is like, you maybe you disagree with this, I'd be interested in that, because I know there's a number of sort of versions of this argument. But I am a social scientist, and I'd like to think that there's something that we can take across time. There's something that allows us to accumulate knowledge through the scientific method. But the thing that really resonates with me when I hear this discourse about the very deeply human nature of science is that always humans that are collecting and interpreting data. And so whatever is going on historically, socially, politically, in a given moment, it's obviously going to affect the interpretations of scientific information. Um, yeah.

0:35:11 Ery: And so many kind of past scientific truths that were taken for granted, oh, of course it has to be this, have been just discarded into the waste bin of history. Now, on female hysteria, on the innate intellectual kind of inferiority of people of African-- Descent, of Jews, I mean, one could go on, right, these kinds of things that people were nodding along, of course, of course, now it's, it's completely bogus, they sound incredibly outdated and laughable today, but such is the kind of journey and the history of science. So again, it's not this, a hundred percent, oh, actually, to even give a more kind of a familiar easier example, people thought that everything, the sun revolved around the Earth, I mean, that was considered scientific fact. So in light of all this, how can we not say that science is as much an art? Science has always been subjective or inner subjective, at least, because it's been mediated and framed by human subjectivity, human opinions, human biases, human cultural conditioning and values.

0:35:27 Lindsey: Absolutely.

0:36:17 Lindsey: Right, and and a few of these examples that you just gave, I think, I think speak to the, the larger point here, right? Like the, those scientific claims that now have been discarded, right, about, you know, racial differences and intellectual inferiority and things like that, those were based on, on, you know, real observations, they just were applying the wrong explanation for them a lot of times, right? Like there were, there were massive sort of, uh, historical events and forces that might have been producing like those observations. And of course, like, I think probably the way that those things were being, uh, with the way the data was being collected and evaluated and things, right, the, the paradigms of the moment were affecting all of that.

0:36:57 Ery: You're making absolute sense. And I was just thinking, I read an article recently about this all comes back to Lee Ross's fundamental attribution error, so much of it. I mourned him because of his passing. So I was just thinking about all these kinds of things. So absolutely, it's all part of that.

0:37:15 Thomas: Could I Ask What what that is, to explain that to the lay people.

0:37:15 Lindsey: Yeah.

0:37:18 Ery: Oh, Not at all. Lee Ross's fundamental attribution error, a theory that says we tend to blame or explain things based on the inherent qualities of that person, that agent, that subject, instead of the surrounding situation. So it's not that, it's so, an example of this would be, Aerie is bad, she did all these things because she's a wicked, wicked person, instead of a combination of, of my income, my personal life, my, I mean, all these kinds of things that make up who I am.

0:37:36 Thomas: Right.

0:37:56 Lindsey: How much, how much? Sleep, I-- Got, yeah. Yeah, exactly.

0:37:57 Ery: Exactly. The background for my life, for anyone's life. And...

0:38:01 Thomas: And it's interesting how much that kind of coalesces with an overall Republican ideology of blameworthiness versus praiseworthiness in policy too. I mean, it to whether it's welfare or whatever it is, it seems to me that the left is more about like, how do we help people who need it? And the right is more more about, but do they deserve it? You know, like, do they do something wrong? And I think that sort of is reminiscent of what you're saying. Like the idea of looking at factors, systemic factors, life fact, whatever it is, rather than focusing down on, is this individual a bad person or not?

0:38:38 Ery: That's part of the a huge backlash that's happening or this falls debate manufactured by certain kind of far right or just right news outlets right now about critical race theory. Uh, it's not that there's been ongoing, hundreds of years of systemic inequalities and injustices that are causing this societal phenomenon or phenomena. It's that the Black population, Black communities, minority, minority communities are inherently bad, barbaric, inhumane, I mean, so on and so forth, the adjectives could continue. So that's a huge, a huge issue. And I was also thinking about that joke as well as you were talking, Thomas, where there's a right joke that a lefty is simply somebody who hasn't been mugged yet.

0:39:27 Ery: And once they're mugged, then all of sudden they change into an about face. So it's part of, yeah, there's so many things that are happening here.

0:39:35 Lindsey: I've got one more thing to wrap up the science thing, because what I've been thinking about more and more is that this lens to look at scientific information through, they're calling it anti-science, but it actually sounds like the opposite to me, right? It's almost like it's an advocation for more variables to sort of be introduced into the analysis, really important variables that have been ignored for a really long time. And so, this critique in particular, I mean, obviously, I take it personally because it's, you know, it's my area. But I don't know. I just, I think it's interesting that this is considered anti-science when it's like, no, we just, we need to add in this additional layer of information that we didn't have before that seems very consistent with the enterprise of science.

0:40:16 Ery: Yeah, it's basically yet another kind of full frontal ideological attack to kind of cover up science's ideological and ongoing ideological origins or elements, shall we say.

0:40:27 Lindsey: Yeah, yeah, I absolutely agree with that. Yeah. So here's, here's another James Lindsay thing that I think was, was fun. So critical race theory rejects all potential alternatives like colorblindness as forms of racism, making itself the only allowable game in town, which is totalitarian. Yeah

0:40:46 Thomas: Oh my

0:40:48 Ery: Wow. I would say in this case, race theory is trying to get to that ideal colorblind state, but basically letting everyone know we're not there yet. Far, far from it. So the ideal that everyone seems to be wishing, we all wish it was here, but it's still a far way off to go, and here are the subtle and not so subtle ways it's ingrained and embedded again in the fabric of our daily lives at the legal and institutional level, and then just on the the personal, with slights, insults, a book, a touch, a word.

0:41:26 Lindsey: I think that's a great way to put it.

0:41:28 Thomas: Gosh. That, you you know, makes itself the only allowable, what was it? Game in town or something. I am so sick of that kind of victim mentality. You know, like that's just what it is to come up with a philosophy, you know? Like supply-side economists make themselves the only allowed economic theory in their own world. You Know, it doesn't, there's no, that's what people do. They're like, I think this is the right thing. And this is The Right Approach. This is the Right Framework. That it doesn't make sense to be like, but you should also say this other framework is right too, because you want to be, like, oh, you know, I don't even, what would that even mean? Supply-side economists be like... But also not supply-side economics. It's weird.

0:41:33 Lindsey: That's right. Yeah very

0:42:02 Ery: Exactly.

0:42:09 Lindsey: Very totalitarian of you, Thomas.

0:42:09 Ery: And Also, it's repeated in the very title. Critical race theory is a theory, and so that by definition doesn't mean it's some kind of absolute, authoritarian, timeless reality, monolithic, just for all time. It's not the, the only game in town, as one can see in its very, again, title. Oh.

0:42:17 Thomas: Yeah. I wonder if it's worth, talking about, like kind of the diversity of thought within critical race theory. I mean, would it even be possible to say like, these people think they have the one right answer when like, I imagine like any academic field, there's going to be a lot of thinkers who disagree with each other and take different approaches, right?

0:42:32 Lindsey: Sounds

0:42:49 Ery: Absolutely. I mean, I was gonna say the original kind of names, Kimberly Crunch, uh, Marie Matsuda, Patricia Williams, Derrick Bell, Richard Delgado, and Charles Lawrence, and the ones really kind of at the founding, they all disagree from each other on small and large kinds of things. And now, as the movement is, kind of where the theory has evolved over the decades, today's contemporary voices don't agree at all with everything that people before Cain said. So absolutely, nobody in the field is going and thinking that everybody has to agree. Far from it. There's internal squabbling all over the place, disagreements, different things, revisions, back and forth. So it's not at all some kind of united front, and it was never meant to be as well.

0:43:38 Ery: And it's also not all African American. I also want to make that clear as well. I included a name earlier, and this came out February 2021, actually, oh my goodness, so recently. Laura Hamilton's broke the racial consequences of underfunding public universities. She's a Caucasian professor at UC Merced, so it's not that critical race theory is also somehow some monolithic block of the community as well, in terms of representation. It's from all different people, all different voices, who are interested in, again, law, society, culture, systemic racism.

0:44:13 Lindsey: Like a thriving discipline.

0:44:15 Ery: And like all thriving disciplines, again lots of family in-house and out-house fighting. And that's part of the spice, that's a part of this spice, if there's no fighting, there's nothing going on.

0:44:20 Thomas: Yeah,

0:44:24 Lindsey: And that's important to say because, you know, implicit in this and a lot of these criticisms is that, you know, these ideas are like orthodoxies. And if people don't, you know, agree with this monolith that is, you know, critical race theory or whatever it is, then they're ostracized, right? They're canceled, maybe.

0:44:45 Ery: And that is a complete distortion of what academic discourse is anyway. Anyway, the heart and core of it is exactly disagreement, constant backs and forwards, qualifications, interruptions, passionate battles about all this. So it's not at all complacent agreement. And in fact, academics who agree with everything that everybody else around them says tend to not make it very far, to be honest.

0:44:49 Lindsey: No kidding.

0:45:11 Lindsey: That's a good point. Yeah, I'm not sure how you, you would get published if you, uh, just you know, agreed for 10 pages on something. I don't know.

0:45:21 Ery: Exactly. Academic originality and achievement is also based on putting one's own opinions into the mix, which means not 100% agreeing and actually taking an independent stance. And that's where, again, in critical race theory, the critical, the criticism, the critique, that element would come in.

0:45:38 Lindsey: Yeah, absolutely. Um,

0:45:39 Thomas: I think the pivot that you get a lot in these arguments is, all right, well, you're talking about academics and all that. I'm talking about how critical race theory is manifesting in the real world in our schools of everyday politics. I just wonder if you have anything to say about that, if that as a concern makes any sense to you.

0:45:59 Ery: The first, I response I would make is that there's no such thing as then the real world and then academia. It's all one world. These aren't separate things. So I'm not quite sure when they kind of trivialize, oh, it's all up there and then we're doing this. We're all in the same, at the end of the day, the same space, the sane political sphere. So it's integrated. It's connected. So critical race theory absolutely should be taught at universities and in a different form, kind of more broadly, in K-12. It's going to come in any way, regardless, simply through surveying history.

0:46:45 Lindsey: Maybe one specific example, because I think, mean, I agree with that sentiment, um, but I've heard a critique, for example, about how critical race theory is applied in, like, diversity trainings, and that, that, that application, even if, if the academic side of it is solid, that that application is very poor. I don't know if you have thoughts about that.

0:47:04 Ery: Oh, I see the execution on specific kind of training workshops and kind of employment activities. Ooh, hmm. You know what? I'm not sure. I haven't actually attended one of those. So I'd actually have to kind of go through and see how it kind of translates in the execution for me. So that may be kind of different, actually.

0:47:08 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah,

0:47:25 Thomas: I seen a lot of critiques of those too. And I just think that, I don't know, my initial thought is that that there's no way you would have to endorse every application that someone is doing. Which, by the way, these often, I think, are for-profit things. People are coming in making money as consultants or whatever for these diversity trainings. I don't think it's fair to pin every bad action on the entire field itself. Um, I think people are definitely able to, um, misapply things or apply them badly. Uh, and I don't think that takes away from the overall legitimacy of the field.

0:48:02 Ery: To just take away critical race theory wholesale because of a bad kind of camp for training or one seminar. I mean, that's incredible overreach. Do

0:48:07 Thomas: Hmm.

0:48:12 Lindsey: Maybe maybe this is a good place to wrap up. This is related to the last one. So critical race theory acts like again, this kind of like making it an agent of some sort of monster seems like a strange way to frame it, but whatever. So critical race theory acts like anyone who disagrees with it must do so for racist and white supremacist reasons, even if those people are black, which is also totalitarian.

0:48:34 Thomas: I'm not sure I understood that one.

0:48:37 Lindsey: You you can disagree, like you're forbidden to disagree because disagreement per se means that you are racist. Me

0:48:37 Ery: I see I see kind of where the question's coming from, that they feel the heat that people get for kind of asking or challenging certain tenets or principles, that they feels it's so intense that they're afraid to speak out. And I say, don't be a coward about it, it's fine, say it, it okay. And the point of academic discourse, the point of all this, and people talk about cancel culture, and, oh, I'm gonna be, they're gonna think I'm, like, no, you're, you're imagining it in your own head.

Whatever you want to say in the debate, step up and say it and make the debate richer. Don't just hang in the shadows and then blame, blame the other side for somehow playing unfair or throwing too big of sticks and stones. That's not the case at all. So I think that's kind of a cowardly way out, a cowardly excuse for not speaking up or we're just knowing that there's whatever they're going to say is going to get ripped up by the other side. It just doesn't have any ground legs to stand on. So then again, they're blaming the other side. Oh, they're just punching down too hard. But if you really feel like you have a lot of juice and a lot, lot good things to say, it should be okay. I'm

0:49:50 Thomas: It, hmm. Do you mind if I ask you a closing question? It's going to sound like kind of a basic one, but maybe for people listening to have a takeaway.

0:49:57 Ery: No, not at all, please. It's

0:49:58 Thomas: So in conversation, or in, I guess, in absorbing the news about all this, what should somebody say, or what would you say if you're asked just a basic question, what is critical race theory, what's the overall takeaway here? Oh,

0:50:13 Ery: The study of systemic racism in America, and that's absolutely critical for all, all Americans everywhere, if they're really going to come together as Americans and move forward to create the kind of America we long for and that we all deserve.

0:50:32 Thomas: Wow, what a great answer. I'm so glad I asked that question, that helps a lot. Thank you so much.

0:50:35 Lindsey: Too.

0:50:36 Ery: It was really useful, so I could kind of think about it as well. Thank you so much.

0:50:39 Thomas: Yeah. I, just want to thank you again so much for joining us, that was a real pleasure. I learned a lot.

0:50:45 Lindsey: Yeah, thank you, Ery.

0:50:46 Thomas: Yeah, thank you.

0:50:47 Ery: The pleasure was all mine. Thank you so much for inviting me, Lindsey. Thank you so much, Thomas. And I guess otherwise, enjoy the rest of your week.

0:50:54 Thomas: You too.

0:51:03 Clip: Thank you so much for listening to Serious Inquiries Only. If you like the show, the absolute best thing you can do is support us at patreon.com/seriouspod. The second best thing you can do, is please share it on social media or by word of mouth. Speaking of social media, follow me on Twitter at Serious Pod. If would like to be Facebook friends, send me a request at facebook.com Thomas podcast. If not up for that level of intimacy, that's fine. Maybe you want to join the discussion at facebook.com/groups/SIO members. Thank you again for listening. We'll see you next time.