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Critical Race Theory Quotes

Browse 32 quotes about Critical Race Theory.

Critical Race Theory Quotes

“Undoctrination Sonnet If we teach kids history, They say we're indoctrinating them. If we immunize them against disease, They say we're microchipping them. If we teach kids science, They say we're practicing blasphemy. If we teach kids biology, They say we're messing with their identity. With such mentality of a caveman, How on earth did you manage to conceive! I guess, to raise a human takes common sense, But to make a baby takes only genital breach. Hence it is more reason for reason to persevere. There is no way we can let stone age reappear.”

SlaveryBigotryScience And ReligionBlack HistoryDiversity And InclusionHomophobiaSystemic RacismConspiracy TheoriesCritical Race TheoryEquality No Discrimination
Book:High Voltage Habib: Gospel of Undoctrination
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“[P]assing expresses a form of agency as well as a promise of restoration, which is to say that passing—as a limited durational performance—signals a “return” to a natural-cum-biological mode of being. This narratological strategy shaped how passing would be deployed as an interpretive frame for all manners of trans-identificatory practices—both contemporaneously and reiteratively into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. No less performative but lacking a clear biologized semiotic referent, fungibility in this chapter expresses how ungendered blackness provided the grounds for (trans) performances for freedom. By describing their acts as performances for rather than of freedom, I am suggesting that the figures under review here illustrate how the inhabitation of the un-gender-specific and fungible also mapped the affective grounds for imagining other qualities of life and being for those marked by and for captivity. Brent/Jacobs referred to this vexed affective geography as “some- thing akin to freedom” that, perhaps paradoxically, required a “deliberate calculation” of one’s fungible status. Rather than regarding Jones, Waters, Jacobs, and the Crafts as recoverable trans figures in the archive, this chapter examines how the ungendering of blackness became a site of fugitive maneuvers wherein the dichotomized and collapsed designations of male-man-masculine and female-woman-feminine remained open—that is fungible—and the black’s figurative capacity to change form as a commoditized being engendered flow.”

TransBlacknessCritical Race TheoryTrans Studies
Author:C Riley Snorton
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“Page 141: Political anger and demands for privileges are, of course, not limited to the less privileged. Indeed, even when demands are made in the name of less privileged racial or ethnic groups, often it is the more privileged members of such groups who make the demands and who benefit from policies designed to meet such demands. These demands may erupt suddenly in the wake of the creation (or sharp enlargement) of a newly educated class which sees its path to coveted middle-class professions blocked by competition of other groups--as in India, French Canada, or Lithuania, for example.”

Affirmative ActionCritical Race TheoryAnti White DiscriminationPreferential Policies
Book:Race And Culture: A World View
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“Critical Race Theory hinges on the dubious assertion that the economic success of the United States is resulted from the free labor provided by the slave population during its founding. This assertion ignores the fact that 94% of all slaves brought to the Americas went to nations south of the border, which, by and large have remained ‘Third World’ economies. Thus, it begs to question: If a slave population is the precursor to economic success, then why did the nations that absorbed 94% of the slave population remain impoverished and underdeveloped economies into the 21st Century? Clearly, slavery did very little to boost their chances at economic stability, much less success.”

SlaveryAmerican HistorySlavery In The United StatesIvory TowerCritical Race TheoryCrtCultural MarxismThird World PovertyAmerican Academia
Author:A.E. Samaan
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“It is bad psychology to tell people who do not believe that they are racist—who may even actively despise racism—that there is nothing they can do to stop themselves from being racist—and then ask them to help you. It is even less helpful to tell them that even their own good intentions are proof of their latent racism. Worst of all is to set up double-binds, like telling them that if they notice race it is because they are racist, but if they don’t notice race it’s because their privilege affords them the luxury of not noticing race, which is racist.”

RacismCritical Race Theory
Book:Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody
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“So meaning is only a moment and a transition from absurdity to absurdity, and absurdity only a moment and a transition from meaning to meaning. Oh, that Siegfried, blond and blue-eyed, the German hero, had to fall by my hand, the most loyal and courageous! He had everything in himself that I treasured as the greater and more beautiful; he was my power, my boldness, my pride. I would have gone under in the same battle, and so only assassination was left to me. If I wanted to go on living, it could only be through trickery and cunning. Judge not! Think of the blond savage of the German forests, who had to betray the hammer-brandishing thunder to the pale Near Eastern god who was nailed to the wood like a chicken marten. The courageous were overcome by a certain contempt for themselves. But their life force bade them to go on living, and they betrayed their beautiful wild Gods, their holy trees and their awe of the German forests.”

MetaphysicsMulticulturalismShadow WorkCritical Race TheoryDiversity PoliticsRace NationalismBlack Vs White
Book:The Red Book: Liber Novus
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“I have found much value in considering monster theory, color theory, and the history of racial analogies in speculative fiction. However, when we read literary and cultural texts from the perspective of the monster, not the protagonist, we find ourselves in a completely different ballgame. This is why taking a supposedly 'neutral' or 'objective' approach to theorizing the dark fantastic is problematic; the default position is to allow those who are used to seeing themselves as heroic and desired the power and privileged of naming, defining, and delimiting the entire world and everything that is in it. We never notice that monsters, fantastic beasts, and various Dark Others are silenced because we have never been taught the language they speak. Critical race counterstorytelling provides both translation and amplification for these subsumed narratives.”

MonstersSpeculative FictionCritical Race TheoryColor TheoryMonster TheoryCounterstorytellingRacial Analogies
Book:The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games
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“Heritage dot org, May 5, 2021 Purging Whiteness To Purge Capitalism By Mike Gonzalez and Jonathan Butcher KEY TAKEAWAYS 1. CRT [Critical Race Theory] theorists see capitalism’s disparities as a function of race, not class. Capitalism, all the leading CRT proponents believe, is therefore “racist.” 2. 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. 3. The purpose of the CRT training programs, and the curricula, is now to create enough bad associations with the white race. Race is suddenly all the rage. Employees, students, and parents are being inundated with “anti-racism” training programs and school curricula that insist America was built on white supremacy. Anyone who raises even the slightest objection is often deemed irredeemably racist. But what if the impetus behind a particular type of race-based training programs and curricula we see spreading at the moment is not exclusively, or even primarily, about skin color? What if race is just a façade for a particular strain of thought? What if what stands behind all this is the old, color-blind utopian dream of uniting the “workers of the world,” and eradicating capitalism? … If this all sounds very Marxist, it should. All the giants in whiteness studies, from Noel Ignatiev, to David Roediger, to their ideological lodestar, W.E.B. Du Bois—who first coined the term “whiteness” to begin with—were Marxist. In the cases of Ignatiev and Du Bois, they were actual Communist Party members.”

CommunismMulticulturalismMarxismRace RelationsEthnic ConflictCritical Race TheoryRace Baiting
Author:Mike Gonzalez
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“He knew his antenatal history, knew it in every detail, and it was a thing to keep causes well before him. What was his frank judgement of so much of its ugliness, he asked himself, but a part of the cultivation of his humility? What was this so important step he had just taken but the desire for some new history that should, so far as possible, contradict, and even if need be flatly dishonour, the old? If what had come to him wouldn't do he must make something different.”

HistoryCritical Race Theory
Book:The Golden Bowl
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“This excerpt from When Race Becomes Real: Black and White Writers Confront Their Personal Histories, edited by Bernestine Singley, appeared in 2002 as part of Harvard Magazine’s coverage of recent books by Harvard affiliates. The excerpt concerns author Noel Ignatiev’s role in launching a journal “to chronicle and analyze the making, remaking, and unmaking of whiteness.” … The goal of abolishing the white race is on its face so desirable that some may find it hard to believe that it could incur any opposition other than from committed white supremacists. Of course, we expected bewilderment from people who still think of race as biology. We frequently get letters accusing us of being "racists," just like the KKK, and have even been called a "hate group." ... Our standard response is to draw an analogy with anti-royalism: to oppose monarchy does not mean killing the king; it means getting rid of crowns, thrones, royal titles, etc.... Every group within white America has at one time or another advanced its particular and narrowly defined interests at the expense of black people as a race. That applies to labor unionists, ethnic groups, college students, schoolteachers, taxpayers, and white women. Race Traitor will not abandon its focus on whiteness, no matter how vehement the pleas and how virtuously oppressed those doing the pleading. The editors meant it when they replied to a reader, "Make no mistake about it: we intend to keep bashing the dead white males, and the live ones, and the females too, until the social construct known as 'the white race' is destroyed—not 'deconstructed' but destroyed.”

MulticulturalismCritical Race TheoryAnti WhiteImmigrationn
Author:Noel Ignatiev
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“Words and terms are born out of a need to describe the world. But because the victors, who get to write the history, had little need to describe the fate of the conquered, the words did not exist soon enough to describe and ultimately prevent the wholesale destruction of black communities in America.”

LanguageRaceHistoryRacismLinguisticsAntiracismCritical Race Theory
Book:Buried in the Bitter Waters: The Hidden History of Racial Cleansing in America
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“At the end of an interview for her first post-PhD job Tessa abandons the politically correct answers and says, "The doctrine of equity sounds good--and maybe the hearts of some of those who profess it are in the right place. But in reality, it's immoral, unfair, harmful to academic standards, and deeply paternalistic. So in response to your question, Dr. Franco, I do not promote equity in the classroom. I promote education instead.”

EducationRacismSatireEquityCritical Race Theory
Book:The Adamant I: An Anti-University University Novel
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“Katherine Watkins, teacher at Cedar Park Middle School, Beaverton School District, Oregon: I'm going to say something that's not nice, and not sweet, but it's true. If you're not evolving into an anti-racist educator, you're making yourself obsolete in this field or profession. Our district is only getting browner and browner with our children and so if... you know, obviously you can't change your melanin, but you can change your mind so that you can actually function in a district that is full of BIPOC [Black, Indigenous, People of Color] children. So if you're being resistant, I understand that, but your going to have to eventually come to the light, because if your going to keep up those old views of colonialism it's going to lead to being fired because you are going to be doing damage to our children, trauma. And so as we fire the teachers who sexually abuse our children we will be firing the teachers who do racists things to our children to traumatize them. And while our district might not be completely on there, OEA [Oregon Education Association] is working on it, NEA [National Education Association] is working on it, and so it's just a matter of time. So it's like you either evolve or dissolve.”

EducationCritical Race Theory
Author:Watkins, Katherine
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“From the introduction by Arthur Livingston Page xxv: What is the secret of the amazing subordination of the armies of the West? Mosca finds the answer in the aristocratic character, so to say, of the army, first in the fact that there is a wide and absolute social distinction between private and officer, and second that the corps of officers, which comes from the ruling class, reflects the balance of multiple and varied social forces which are recognized by and within that class. The logical implications of this theory are well worth pondering. If the theory be regarded as sound, steps toward the democratization of armies—the policy of Mr. Hore-Belisha, for instance—are mistaken steps which in the end lead toward military dictatorships; for any considerable democratization of armies would make them active social forces reflecting all the vicissitudes of social conflict and, therefore, preponderant social forces. On the other hand, army officers have to be completely eliminated from political life proper. When army officers figure actively and ex officio in political councils, they are certain eventually to dominate those councils and replace the civil authority—the seemingly incurable cancer of the Spanish world, for an example.”

MilitaryImmigrationCommunismMulticulturalismMarxismAffirmativeCritical Race Theory
Book:The Ruling Class
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“YouTube: Psychiatrist facing backlash for saying she 'fantasizes about killing white people' by Fox News On April 6, 2021 Dr. Aruna Khilanani, addressing Yale School of Medicine Child Study Center via “Common Sense with Bari Weiss” said: “I had fantasies of unloading a revolver into the head of any white person that got in my way, burying their body and wiping my bloody hands as I walked away relatively guiltless with a bounce in my step. Like I did the world a f***ing favor. … White people are out of their minds and they have been for a long time. … We are asking a demented, violent predator who thinks that they are a saint or a superhero, to accept responsibility. It ain’t gonna happen. They have five holes in their brain.”

ImmigrationMulticulturalismEthnic ConflictCritical Race TheoryAnti White Racism
Author:Aruna Khilanani
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“Telling people that they are racist—on the basis of immutable characteristics, using incomprehensible definitions that they may not know or understand—then claiming they are “fragile” and in denial when they try to defend themselves, or accusing them of “gaslighting” when they don’t agree with you, is a punitive way of treating people, whatever their colour.”

RacismCrueltyGroupthinkCritical Race TheoryWhite Fragility
Book:Cynical Therapies: Perspectives on the Antitherapeutic Nature of Critical Social Justice
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“There is also a risk that repeatedly telling people they are victims may lead them to develop a sense of “learned helplessness” and a belief that they have no control over their lives, leaving them vulnerable to depression. Yet, CRT would accuse anyone from a minority group who expressed such contrary views of having “internalised oppression” or of “acting white”.”

DepressionTherapyCritical Race TheoryLearned Helplessness
Book:Cynical Therapies: Perspectives on the Antitherapeutic Nature of Critical Social Justice
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