Will Skillman Fellow in Education A child walks by graffiti on H St. NW, on Monday, June 1, 2020, after weekend protests sparked by the death of George Floyd occurred near the White House. Tom Williams / CQ-Roll Call, Inc / Getty Images
Key Takeaways
CRT theorists see capitalism’s disparities as a function of race, not class. Capitalism, all the leading CRT proponents believe, is therefore “racist.”
CRT intellectuals are trying to change the view that racism is an individual issue, and insist it is systemic, in order to get society to change the entire system.
The purpose of the CRT training programs, and the curricula, is now to create enough bad associations with the white race.
We spend many waking hours preparing for work, at work, or recovering from work, and many of us live in societies that, in the words of scholar Kathi Weeks, “expect people to work for wages.” In
The transatlantic slave trade in the 1500s–1800s bound up capitalism with colonialism and racism. Slavery was progressively abolished starting in the late eighteenth century in Haiti and continued through the nineteenth century, but this did not bring an end to racial hierarchies or the entanglement between race, capitalism, and colonialism. Instead, the transition to free wage labor accompanied the rise of scientific racism, the rapid growth of industrial capitalism, and heightened rivalries among competing empires.
American Identity
By David Roediger
Democrats and Republicans vie for the lead in terms of promises to stand up for the putatively noble but chronically fragile middle strata of the class structure. Both parties praise the middle class as the broken heart of the nation and hold that only they can mend it.… The hottest controversies over the size of the middle class have come from the left, and especially from writer-activists in the developing field of working-class studies.
In rejecting the idea that an overwhelming majority of Americans are members of the middle class, Michael Zweig, long-time professor of economics at the University of Stony Brook, and labour studies educator Jack Metzger offer critiques turning on how ‘middle class’ is defined. They point out that surveys in which the term ‘working class’ is absent from the choices offered to respondents artificially inflate the numbers of those choosing a middle-class self-identification.
Statues of former US presidents in Croaker, Virginia. Photograph: Randy Duchaine/Alamy
Before the 17th century, people did not think of themselves as belonging to something called the white race. But once the idea was invented, it quickly began to reshape the modern world
Tue 20 Apr 2021 01.00 EDT
In 2008, a satirical blog called Stuff White People Like became a brief but boisterous sensation. The conceit was straightforward, coupling a list, eventually 136 items long, of stuff that white people liked to do or own, with faux-ethnographic descriptions that explained each item’s purported racial appeal. While some of the items were a little too obvious – indie music appeared at #41, Wes Anderson movies at #10 – others, including “awareness” (#18) and “children’s games as adults” (#102), were inspired. It was an instant hit. In its first two months alone, Stuff White People Like drew 4 million visitors, and it wasn’t long before a book based on the blog became a Ne
Even if the movement for reparations someday transforms the profound economic disparities that fall along racial lines in this country â addressing income disparities, the wealth gap, housing and health care inequities, and unemployment disparities â a fundamental problem of anti-Black racism still wonât be solved.
What remains is a fundamentally
ontological problem: the reality of the
being of whiteness, and its denial of Black humanity within white racist America.
White privilege, white immunity from systemic racism, white forms of racist habitual embodiment, white claims to âinnocence,â gatherings of white religious practitioners at monochromatic white places of worship, and predominantly white institutions where white students walk around their predominately white campuses feeling wanted and at ease â these are manifestations of white ontology, white modes of being.