Oh, I see. I had misunderstood you as leaning toward the position that racism is primarily psychological and not-so-much structural, and I wanted to push back on that a bit. I understand now, from your comment, that you believe these types “constantly interact in complex ways,” which I agree with.

My understanding of CRT—which I have gleaned from recent articles and audio programs, but, alas, not yet from a book dedicated to that topic—is that it is a “framework of legal analysis” (that phrase per Britannica). So, we could reasonably expect CRT to be “primarily located in law schools” (that phrase per your article).

I am focused on this sentence you wrote: “One of the fundamental assumptions of CRT (inherited from CT) is that racism persists because of institutional structures and dynamics, not because individuals themselves are explicitly or intentionally prejudiced.” My perspective is: If CRT is a framework that analyzes why certain laws exist and how they interrelate, then, very nearly by definition, it will be concerned with “institutional structures and dynamics” more so than with anyone’s individual psychology. That doesn’t mean it’s making a broader claim about all the ways (outside the legal system) in which racism persists. We could start a sentence with “Racism persists because of…”, and CRT is only ever going to chime in with “...a racist legal system,” as that is the topic with which the CRT framework is concerned and it is the only answer it is equipped to give. If I don’t want to study the legal system, I have to excuse myself from that university classroom and walk down the hall to register for a different course. Similarly, a (hypothetical) school of thought for academic psychology, when prompted with “Racism persists because of…” would likely fill in the blank with “…individual biases” because that is the type of answer their framework is best equipped to give. It doesn’t mean that the frameworks are mutually exclusive, that they can’t recognize each other, or that a single individual can’t be an expert in both legal and psychological topics. An academic framework is inherently narrow in its focus, but an individual scholar can be broad-minded.

So, I appreciate that you personally acknowledge that racism can be both individual and institutional (and in complex ways), as I also acknowledge the same thing. What I am not convinced of is that CRT, as a legal framework, needs to take as its central focus anything other than the legal system. If there is a problem with the way people are teaching law in law schools—if, for example, law schools should teach more psychology—that is different from saying that the law professors and law students don’t already understand the real, broader reasons why racism persists. Again, by analogy, if I am signed up for an accounting course and I feel that it has too much focus on numbers in spreadsheets and isn’t talking about the broader meaning of money, I need to sign up for an economics course instead. Possibly I may also critique the narrow way in which accounting is taught, but that does not imply that the accounting professor doesn’t already know or recognize broader economic ideas or that the professor is somehow opposed to economics as a discipline.

I observe your claim (as expressed in your quotation of the Atlantic subheading of Anne Applebaum’s article) that CRT academics have “a tendency to see their own view of the world as the only valid one.” I don’t have the personal background to know whether that generalization is true. Of course, ideally, academics ought to be able to hold multiple ideas in their heads simultaneously, at least to weigh their respective merits and to do so on an ongoing basis, and sometimes to endorse more than one.

The cultural context I am aware of is that right-wing media have recently sized the term “CRT” and are using it to mean any discussion of race or racism whatsoever—never mind in law school, but even at the kindergarten level—and they are doing so for the purpose of implying that anyone who acknowledges racism is a dogmatist who needs to be “both-sidesed” or otherwise edged out of the conversation, because these right-wing people don’t want racism to be discussed at all. Applebaum acknowledges that in her paragraph on Fox News. (As an aside, last year I read her book on authoritarianism; I am aware that she was a Republican until 2008 and is now a voice against Trumpism.) The right-wing realizes it makes them look bad to say don't talk about race, and it's easier for them to express it as don't teach CRT because that mentally registers with their audience as don't teach Marxism to kindergarteners. (That no one has been teaching CRT or Marxism to kindergarteners is irrelevant to the right wing's strategy for winning culture wars and elections.)

I see Applebaum's claim, in the Atlantic article to which you linked, that “some of [CRT’s] more facile popularizers” believe “that their way of seeing the world is the only way worth seeing the world." To me, it seems kind of true by definition that facile people are this way. There seems to be an additional implied allegation, for which Applebaum doesn’t provide sufficient grounding, that people in general are struggling to hold “disparate ideas in [their] head at the same time.” Nor do I imagine that studying CRT is likely to make us this way. (As an example of someone who didn't get sucked into a dogmatic trap and was capable of having a conversation, she acknowledges the late Charles Mills, who believed we can read CRT thinkers and Enlightenment philosophers side-by-side. Apparently Mills avoided fetishizing either CRT or the Enlightenment. So others should be able to do it, too.)

The second point I made in my previously posted comment feels less relevant now. I had been referencing a different meta-ethical debate that I remember from the ‘90s. That debate was (to describe it reductively and briefly) a Christian/atheist discussion about whether morality is objective/absolute or, on the other side, subjective/relative. A common objection that absolutists make toward relativists goes something like: “Don’t you think A is better or worse than B? Don’t societies get better or worse over time? If you ever use those words, then you have some kind of moral benchmark, which means you’re an absolutist, not a relativist. Relativists can never say ‘better’ or ‘worse’ if they truly believe there are no absolute moral facts and values.” The absolutist typically believes this line of argument proves their case.

Where Applebaum seemed to prompt us to acknowledge the reality of moral progress, I understood her to be subtly referencing that debate. At least, that's what it pinged in my head. Specifically, when she says that CRT alone can’t “explain why the U.S. did in fact have an Emancipation Proclamation,” she’s probably right, though it's true in the trivial sense—we need multiple disciplines, theories, viewpoints, etc. to explain anything about our world. (To generate another example: A Freudian theory of sexual differences, even assuming it were generally correct, would still not completely explain any specific historical instance of gendered human behavior.) I think what she’s really asking is: If our country is so thoroughly structurally racist, you’d expect us to be irredeemably so, with our heads firmly stuck in a structural racism bucket and no light or air coming in at the edges; yet institutions do change, our heads come out of that bucket, and that means that racism isn’t omnipresent and isn’t solely structural. That argument (if I’ve interpreted her correctly) is invalid. What that question "really" asks is more properly about inertia and change, i.e. how anyone ever pulls their head out of whatever bucket it’s currently in. Saying that our heads are always stuck in multiple buckets (structural and individual racism) doesn’t answer the question and only makes the problem appear more intractable. Saying that the buckets are not so firmly stuck after all (“racism is not everywhere, in every institution, or in every person’s heart at all times” —Applebaum) might begin to answer the question, but I am worried that this confuses the question and veers off topic. Racism is a sticky morass of real-world harms (both the causing and the receiving of the harms), and discussing how un-get-out-able we find our practical situations to be wasn't the original topic; the original topic was whether we rely on a closed-minded approach to studying how to get ourselves out of that morass. So, when Applebaum observes that people and institutions are occasionally non-racist, that's a shift in topic, and it doesn't validly answer the question of how racist people and institutions might become non-racist, nor does it imply what academic framework (one or multiple) best helps us figure that out.

I think my one-sentence summary here is that the legal framework of CRT doesn't equate to single-mindedness.