https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=3dYZV1MGKIc
That damn intersectional theory, to me, as someone who’s somewhat versed in statistics, that’s just a miracle of ignorant stupidity. Because all it is is the rediscovery of the interaction term. So if you’re trying to model a phenomenon, you can use a linear combination of variables, which just means you add them together and maybe weight them slightly differently. But then you can also multiply them together. Now and then, that’s an interaction term. And so the idea would be, well, if you’re tall and big boned, you’re likely to be heavy, and possibly tall times big boned equals even heavier. You can add an additional term. And the idea, this is the radical idea of the intersectionalist, that while there’s more than one form of oppression operating simultaneously, and the effect might be multiplicative. It’s like, well, Jesus, could you come up with something more obvious than that? And the answer is no. And it’s like, why do you get tenure at UCLA in the law, in the faculty of law, for developing a theory of intersectionality when it’s so bloody obvious from the basic perspective of primordial statistics that it goes without saying? That’s supposed to be the intellectual contribution. Well, if you’re black, you’re oppressed, or Hispanic, or whatever the hell it is, Irish. But man, if you’re a woman, you’re also oppressed. And then, well, if you’re an Irish woman, I mean, look at how oppressed you are, multiplied by endless, demented categories of identity. It’s such an intellectual, it’s so shallow intellectually, it’s such an appalling Marxist sleight of hand that its crookedness and malevolence can hardly be overstated. But I think it’s important that, maybe I’ll disagree slightly. I think that is right. They base their legitimacy not on the objective value of their ideas, which they reject, but on their positionality. So intersectionality, for example, is promoted by Kimberlé Crenshaw, a black woman. And so she has authority, not based on the idea, but based on her positionality. And then she gives it a complex, Latinate term, intersectionality, which makes it seem maybe more sophisticated than it is. But I think it’s important, the question of roots. And I’d like to maybe push back. As much as I would like to blame the French, critical race theory is not based in any meaningful sense on the ideas of Foucault, the ideas of the French deconstructionists. I think if you look at queer theory, that’s 100% true. The queer theorists themselves, the founding generation in the 80s and 90s, said explicitly, Foucault is our lodestar. His history of sexuality, his idea of sexual transgression is our founding principle. The critical race theory, scholars, are a homegrown in the United States phenomenon. And they say it very clearly. They actually lay out their intellectual lineage. They take it from Gramsci, the kind of marks on the axis of culture. But really what it is, it’s repackaging the ideas of Angela Davis, repackaging the ideas of the Black Panther Party, Black nationalist ideology, and then repackaging identity politics based on the Combahee River statement and other kind of Black feminist literature. And so it’s coming from Marxism, Marxist-Leninism, Black nationalism. And so this is the ideology that then they made a decision in the late 1980s. As the Soviet Union was kind of just poised to collapse, then it collapsed in the early 90s. The critical race theorists said, hey, we can’t be putting bandoliers across our shoulders and wearing the cool hats and promoting the Black Panther Party. We have to take those ideas and then package them in euphemisms, package them in intellectual jargon, create the idea of intersectionality, which is just a rehash of Angela Davis’s women race and class from the previous generation. And then we have to seek legitimacy through the academy. That’s exactly right, Garrett. I’m the type of person who wants to know exactly what ingredients I’m using in my skincare routine, which is why I’m loving Genucel. Their products are made with antioxidants and formulated by a compounding pharmacist, and they’re all about preventative skincare. With summer coming up around the corner, I’ll be using Genucel’s powerful retinol alternative, which is safe to use on your skin in the hot summer sun. They also have a dark spot corrector, which helps reduce the appearance of dark marks and sunspots. Right now, you can get them both in Genucel’s most popular package at genucel.com slash jordan. You heard it here first. Don’t miss out on this amazing deal just in time for warmer days ahead. Go to genucel.com slash jordan to get 70% off their most popular package. Every order subscription includes a luxury gift box with two free springtime essentials. That’s two free gifts, plus free shipping. Go to genucel.com slash jordan. genucel.com slash jordan. They did this very deliberately. They said, we need to get CRT scholars to start taking over institutions, using the politics of identity to start vanquishing our opponents within the academy and asserting dominance for political activism. They’re very explicit about it. They say, we don’t do scholarship. We don’t do objective research. That is the kind of the white male toolkit. We do left-wing activism, and we’re going to legitimize our ideas through elite institutions, through manipulative strategies within the institution pioneered by Derrick Bell. That’s how we’re going to gain power. That’s how we can then filter our ideas from those elite institutions down to K-12 schools to the point where you have first graders in Cupertino, California, for example, getting the teachers, third graders rather, dividing the class on the basis of intersectionality into oppressor and oppressed. They did it, and that’s how the power maneuvering worked. I would say in relationship to your intellectual history, we could put Marx at the bottom in some ways, although not only Marx, and we could have the French deconstructionists emerge out of that, and then the Gramsci tradition emerge out of that too as somewhat separate streams. The case you’re making is that the CRT stream is more properly identified with the Gramsci sort of theorists. That’s, to me, perfectly reasonable. I still think that what we’re facing on the culture war front is a pastiche of postmodernism and Marxism. Yes. But there’s certainly no reason for us to either further that conversation or to disagree. So let’s talk about Derrick Bell for a minute. Now, do you want to point out some of his signal contributions to this entire mess? Yeah, you know, Derrick Bell is a fascinating guy. I did an entire section and a book that I’m writing that’s going to come out this summer with Harper Collins on Derrick Bell. And he’s actually a pretty compelling biographical figure. He was the first in his family to go to college. He got a law degree. He worked with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. He ran, I think, something like 300 anti-segregation cases in the Deep South. And you know, a really compelling guy who, I think, fought the good fight at that time. He went down into Mississippi, organized black families, got their kids across the color barrier, really shut down the segregation policies of the time in the Deep South, you know, and really courageous person. But then something in his psychology shifted. And the great black economist Thomas Sowell describes it as, you know, he really abandoned those principles and then fought not for an equal society, but for a revenge society. That was Thomas Sowell’s words. And then he became famous by promoting not a vision of racial progress, racial integration, kind of moving past the racism of the past, but he came up with this theory of racial pessimism, saying that racism was the permanent and indestructible feature of American life. He spread these kind of conspiracy theories that the United States might be on the verge of what he called black genocide in the 1990s. And then he became famous from this. So the incentive structure that fed Derrick Bell’s academic career, really from the 90s to his death around 2010, 2012, was that he was the kind of doomsayer. He said there could be no progress. It was all an illusion. The 14th Amendment, the Constitution, the Civil Rights Act, the Emancipation Proclamation, all of that talks a good game, but it’s really a myth to uphold white supremacy. And even the election of Barack Obama, as he was an elderly man, he said, you know, Barack Obama is the president of a white supremacist country, nothing more. And so you see this really tragic figure. A generation into kind of a unidimensional paranoia. Yeah, and he had a verbal tick towards the end of his life where he would say on interviews, I might be racially paranoid, but, and then finish his sentence. And so you see this kind of really heroic figure, just descend into this pessimism, cynicism, fatalism, and then he’s rewarded by society and really predominantly white liberal society. And so he’s this tragic figure in my book. Not an evil man, not even a bad man, but I think a man who succumbed to kind of, to succumb to this temptation of fatalism that I think then characterizes the second generation of scholars that came beneath him. They play cynical political games, they’re cynical about the United States, and they cynically use their own identity as a substitute for their, for kind of creative and confident intellectual output. Right, which they also then decry as like the markers for that creative, competent output, just as part of the white patriarchal power game. I’ve seen these charts recently laying out the attributes of a white supremacist society, more or less on the temperamental front, like punctuality, for example. And I read through those traits and I think this is so interesting because I know that low conscientiousness predicts leftist liberal view. So it’s high openness, low conscientiousness. And all the traits that are attributed to white patriarchy are the traits of conscientiousness. It’s so amusing. And that conscientiousness, by the way, is the best temperamental predictor of life success. It’s second only to general cognitive ability. And so, but what’s also interesting is there are absolutely no racial differences in the distribution of trait conscientiousness. And so the claim that conscientious temperamental virtues are somehow white or supremacist or patriarchal is only the claim that conscientious temperamental traits are characteristic of success. It’s so interesting to see. And it’s deeply condescending to people who are racial. I mean, it’s like, it’s insane. And I think what the actual, the essence of this point and the essence of that chart is that these people who are kind of left liberal elites, let’s say, they imagine themselves as the great kind of cosmopolitan figures who have a wide understanding that surpasses the backwards, you know, traditional American way of life. These people are deeply parochial. These people have never seen and traveled around the world. It’s like, if I took that chart and went to Asia, went to Latin America, went to, you know, Lagos, Nigeria, where I’ve spent a significant amount of time and say, hey, look, you know, these are really white traits of showing up on time, doing hard work, self-efficacy. I mean, I would get slapped and rightfully so because, you know, this is actually racist. It’s kind of inadvertently racist. And it takes traits that are virtues. These are virtues that everyone can participate in and reduces them to a kind of race essentialism that I think betrays a total lack of curiosity and a lack of experience with the real world.