Talk:Critical race theory

Not improvable?

This article is flagged with "multiple issues" and requests for improvement, but editing seems to be turned off. How does one improve the article if one is not permitted to edit it? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.95.43.253 (talk) 19:06, 6 November 2023 (UTC)

If you look in the upper right corner of the article page, you will see a lock icon. Hover the mouse over the icon, and you will see text that the article is semi-protected. This means that only established, verified editors are allowed to edit the article. This is gets set when people using anonymous and/or throw-away accounts descend on an article to make changes that violate Wikipedia policies on reliable, third party sources. Please see Wikipedia protection policy for details. TechBear | Talk | Contributions 19:23, 6 November 2023 (UTC)

A global view? Or a topic only affecting the US?

When reading through the article, it does seem that the topic (and the discussion around it) is very much focused solely on the United States. It would be good if the lead paragraph could explain why the topic is an issue only affecting the US. It does explain that CRT "began in the United States in the post–civil rights era", but not why it's remained an issue that only appears to be controversial/discussed in the US. (Is CRT the cause for much debate in other countries? Or is there a distinct difference between anglophone countries and non-anglophone countries?)

It would also be good if the article could signpost other articles dealing with perspectives in other regions.

DrFrench (talk) 14:02, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

It could be because CRT was developed in the U.S. to explain why African Americans remained disadvantaged even after American law had ended segregation. I don't think the article has to explain why an American school of study designed to address an American problem doesn't have the same influence outside the U.S. TFD (talk) 16:49, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

(I think your summary explains it better than the article's opening paragraph!) It might be worthwhile to make it explicit in the opening paragraph that CRT is a US-specific school of study adressing a US-specific problem. As someone from the UK, I know very little about the topic. DrFrench (talk) 18:25, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

I removed the template "Globalize", because it has been there for a year and it's unclear whether it's really an issue. But feel free to add clarifications to the article if it's not good enough, or to discuss what you would like to see modified. Alenoach (talk) 17:21, 7 December 2024 (UTC)

I agree. Jwilli39 (talk) 01:59, 8 December 2024 (UTC)

I think that because the article focuses on a subject that was started in the United States and continues to be adapted, discussed, and brought up in academic and political settings in the United States only. I haven't been able to find anything (either in Google Scholar, through my university's library services, or through reputable new sources online) directing me to believe that this is an international issue.

I think this article should be edited in its first paragraph to clarify that this is a uniquely American theorem, and any edits that you would recommend about systemic racism for other countries should be added to the main Racism article or that country's specific racism article (or appropriate section about that country/country's politics/country's ideals). I also think that when that happens, the banner complaining about it not including a "worldwide view" on the subject should be removed.

If anyone finds anything suggesting that this isn't just about the United States, please make any and all appropriate expansion to this article. Jwilli39 (talk) 04:44, 22 February 2024 (UTC)

Also, sorry about butchering that first paragraph. Forgot to proofread it before posting. Whoops! Jwilli39 (talk) 04:45, 22 February 2024 (UTC)

Outside the US but definitely within the Anglosphere, the British Government (Conservatives) has debated Critical Race Theory and come out against it and there is a British political party who have pledged to ban the teaching of Critical Race Theory in schools. (It isn't taught in schools, of course). MartinPoulter (talk) 16:24, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

Hey, are you sure vis-a-vis the british conservatives debating it this isn't just a case of reactionaries internationally following American reactionaries in Teutonic lockstep? It's happened before where Trump or some other prominent American on the right brings up an issue, or amplifies one, and then is brought up much more internationally. I'd have to see it being brought up as serious policy, to say it truly exists outside the States. AxderWraith Crimson (talk) 23:41, 31 March 2024 (UTC)

Agree with the last editor. It's just a case of British right-wingers copying U.S. right-wing talking points. TFD (talk) 06:18, 8 May 2024 (UTC)

@DrFrench I found the article confusing as well because when it talks about CRT in general it often mentions the US 110.175.32.209 (talk) 16:08, 7 May 2024 (UTC)

The gimmick with CRT as an academic paradigm is that when it was originally created, it was not originally calibrated to discuss situations in either non-Western or non-American contexts (for example, to my knowledge, there have never been any academic studies using the lens of CRT to discuss systemic racism in Mainland China even though China has over 56 non-Chinese minority ethnic groups, and also despite the fact that this region should in theory should be a fertile setting for discussing inter-ethnic economic disparity in a non-Western context).

Put another way, trying to discuss how the CRT paradigm is applied in non-Western contexts is essentially not much different from trying to apply the philosophy of Ambedkarism to situations that don't involve the indigenous culture of India. Because of this situational oddity, even extremely balanced and well-intentioned attempts to discuss CRT in "a global context" will almost always result in a near-exclusive focus on the US and other Anglo-American countries. Because of this, it's kind of pointless to fault the article for not featuring a level of "global coverage" that has likely never existed. 136.36.123.146 (talk) 06:12, 20 May 2024 (UTC)

"CRT also considers racism to be systemic in various laws and rules, and not only based on individuals' prejudices." Add "Racism does not need racists" https://courier.unesco.org/en/articles/racism-does-not-need-racists — Preceding unsigned comment added by Casandra368 (talk • contribs) 12:11, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

I work in schools in Australia. I've never heard Critical race theory mentioned there at all. HiLo48 (talk) 02:20, 8 December 2024 (UTC)

edit request

The first sentence literally has too many commas: the one before shape and the one after shaped by are grammatically incorrect, implying the necessary verbs are a parenthetical phrase (almost immediately after the grammatically correct use of commas around an actual parenthetical phrase, social and political). Combined with how often the word and appears in the sentence, the text is easy to misinterpret as a (nonsensical) list.

Please change

analysing how laws, social and political, and media, shape and are shaped by, social conceptions of race and ethnicity.

to something like

analysing how social and political laws and media shape (and are shaped by) social conceptions of race and ethnicity.

--173.67.42.107 (talk) 18:54, 11 November 2023 (UTC)

 Done. A. Randomdude0000 (talk) 22:22, 11 November 2023 (UTC)

Resegregation?!?

There is a declaration that schools were resegregated in the 1960s. That's relevantly and legally false. Either remove the assertion or contextualize it.

Riventree (talk) 01:41, 29 February 2024 (UTC)

You have misread the article, which states that 1960s civil rights laws were subsequently eroded, leading to re-segregation. MrOllie (talk) 03:00, 29 February 2024 (UTC)

This is still factually incorrect. In some cases limited resegregation was attempted, primarily in some southern states, but the overall trend in the US was firmly towards resegregation. Your reply implies that re-segregation was re-introduced everywhere, which is patently false. Please correct the original comment to clarify this reality. 187.237.117.227 (talk) 15:02, 14 March 2024 (UTC)

@MrOllie I think a slight re-wording is warranted, to include the below and maybe to say it's a de factio segregation based on location. What are your thoughts?

from the segregation article

"Racial segregation has either increased or stayed constant since 1990, depending on which definition of segregation is used. In general, definitions based on the amount of interaction between black and white students show increased racial segregation, while definitions based on the proportion of black and white students in different schools show racial segregation remaining approximately constant." 194.223.37.69 (talk) 10:48, 7 July 2024 (UTC)

Shifting the time frame to 1990 would be highly misleading, since much of the re-segregation happened prior. Suggesting that this is 'de facto segregation based on location' would also be misleading, since the locations didn't end up segregated by coincidence - it was the chief workaround governments employed to try to get around Brown v. Board of Education. The Color of Law is a book on this subject you might consider picking up, it explains what happened with regard to this topic in great detail. MrOllie (talk) 14:36, 7 July 2024 (UTC)

I may be looking at a different section of the article, but there is this claim:

"by the 1970s, Black children were again attending segregated schools and the quality of education had deteriorated."

The problem I have with this line in the article is not that it is false--I actually don't know if it is true or false. The problem I have is that when my own skepticism/ignorance/bias/privilege led me to click on the footnote at the end of that sentence, I spent 30+ minutes wading through the material referenced and I still don't know. This, I'm pretty sure, is not how footnotes are suppose to work.

First, the footnote in question does not refer to a single supporting source, it refers to three. The first links to a 53 minute podcast interview of Jelani Cobb discussing Derrick Bell and the history of CRT, the second is a 47 page Yale Law Review journal article by Derrick Bell, and the third is a 16 page Harvard Law Review journal article also by Derrick Bell. I searched the transcript of the podcast interview for certain key terms and there was only one paragraph that even comes close to discussing the topic. This is when Cobb recounts a conversation that Bell had with Winson Hudson and expressed concern over the fact that "two decades after Brown versus Board of Education, you are still seeing Black students going to overwhelmingly Black schools". Jelani Cobb then adds (irony alert) "we should also add an asterisk or a footnote here". I read that and thought yup, that's all I'm looking for, a footnote to a primary source. I skipped over the longer Yale piece and read all 16 pages of the shorter Harvard Law Review article in its entirety. It was a good article that provided an interesting window into Bell's thinking at that point in time (1980), but I found nothing resembling support for the statement. At this point I had already spent what I believe is more time than a person should have to spend to verify the accuracy of a fairly straightforward statement, but I moved on to the longer Bell piece. I confess I did not read this in it's entirety but only skimmed it. I would have liked to have been able to focus on only the portions that contained certain keywords like I did with the podcast transcript, but I could not find a searchable PDF that was not behind a paywall.

Now maybe the proof I was looking for was buried in that longer Bell piece and I missed it because I didn't try hard enough to find it. However, I ask again, is this how footnotes are suppose to work? This is a honest question from a person that loves and financially supports Wikipedia. Am I being unreasonable in thinking that in this instance I should have be able to click on a footnote and see, I don't know, a simple graphic showing the trend of the percentage of black children attending segregated schools from 1950 onwards, along with an explanation of where the data for the graph came from? Bradleymckinley (talk) 01:23, 9 December 2024 (UTC)

Edit Request

The topic of critical races has been used to describe problems in asynchronous logic design leading to nondeterministic outputs. Typically tought in automata theory.The fields affected are both computer science and electrical engineering. Please add a note. Critical races, in that context are not theory, but observable fact. Gaither (talk) 07:11, 20 June 2024 (UTC)

This request doesn't relate to the topic of this article. MartinPoulter (talk) 09:45, 20 June 2024 (UTC)

@Gaither In computing and digital electronics, I think it's referred to as a race condition, rather than race theory. 194.223.37.69 (talk) 10:42, 7 July 2024 (UTC)