I greatly enjoy listening to your conversations, gentlemen, and often follow up with your references and recommendations. I appreciate your generosity toward the original CRT texts and your skepticism of how the ideas have evolved as they entered mainstream culture and now especially education. (For my part, I am with Mark Milley in that I think CRT should be taught - age-appropriately in schools - just like I believe people should read Marx. How else can you understand their influence? I think you're both in agreement on this point too.) John, you rightly point this out in your debate with Gloria Ladson Billings, when you cast CRT as different from anti-racism training. I think this is a crucial distinction, and there is one feature of it that isn't much discussed anywhere, which I'd love to see you guys pick up on. That's the way current anti-racist work depends heavily, and largely unknowingly as far as I can tell, on certain artifacts of the human potential movement, especially its therapeutic emphasis and the epistemological centrality of emotions. Let me suggest a few guests you could invite to start to bring this feature of the A-R program to light, who have made this historical connection. (1) Elizabeth Lasch-Quinn, who wrote about it in Race Experts; (2) Mark Lilla, who wrote about it in The Once and Future Liberal; (3) Francis Fukuyama, who wrote about it in Identity; and (4) Ross Douthat, who recently referred to "therapeutic anti-racism" in his conversation on Ezra Klein's podcast. The human potential movement has done about as much damage to our culture as anything I can think of, only it hasn't received its due in terms of historical scrutiny. It is this ignorance if its own antecedents that makes current anti-racist work so ineffectual in its focus on whites' self-rumination, as if only their feelings about themselves changed, society would improve. This is classic HPM pablum, and is actually what I see being promoted in schools as anti-racist "work," not CRT as such.
I greatly enjoy listening to your conversations, gentlemen, and often follow up with your references and recommendations. I appreciate your generosity toward the original CRT texts and your skepticism of how the ideas have evolved as they entered mainstream culture and now especially education. (For my part, I am with Mark Milley in that I think CRT should be taught - age-appropriately in schools - just like I believe people should read Marx. How else can you understand their influence? I think you're both in agreement on this point too.) John, you rightly point this out in your debate with Gloria Ladson Billings, when you cast CRT as different from anti-racism training. I think this is a crucial distinction, and there is one feature of it that isn't much discussed anywhere, which I'd love to see you guys pick up on. That's the way current anti-racist work depends heavily, and largely unknowingly as far as I can tell, on certain artifacts of the human potential movement, especially its therapeutic emphasis and the epistemological centrality of emotions. Let me suggest a few guests you could invite to start to bring this feature of the A-R program to light, who have made this historical connection. (1) Elizabeth Lasch-Quinn, who wrote about it in Race Experts; (2) Mark Lilla, who wrote about it in The Once and Future Liberal; (3) Francis Fukuyama, who wrote about it in Identity; and (4) Ross Douthat, who recently referred to "therapeutic anti-racism" in his conversation on Ezra Klein's podcast. The human potential movement has done about as much damage to our culture as anything I can think of, only it hasn't received its due in terms of historical scrutiny. It is this ignorance if its own antecedents that makes current anti-racist work so ineffectual in its focus on whites' self-rumination, as if only their feelings about themselves changed, society would improve. This is classic HPM pablum, and is actually what I see being promoted in schools as anti-racist "work," not CRT as such.