[tptacek]

Nikole Hannah-Jones is a journalist, not a Critical Race Theorist. Find a better descriptor for this (perhaps prevalent) "worldview" than "the CRT worldview". Prompted by a bunch of unproductive discussions like this one, I took some time and actually read a bunch of CRT journal articles, and none of these discussions intersect what actual CRT work says. That may be as much a fault of popular culture and pop sociology as it is HN's, but either way, it's annoying.

It is easy to make a case that Nikole Hannah-Jones essentializes the transatlantic slave trade. But it is unreasonable to generalize from Hannah-Jones to a whole field of study without evidence.

[rayiner]

Nikole Hannah-Jones has a degree in African American Studies, so I think the label is perfectly apt. It's like "supply-side economics." It's a useful label for political ideas that are adjacent to an academic theory of the same name.

[tptacek]

Hannah-Jones has a bachelors in history. My sister has a degree in Russian Literature. But she's a lawyer, not a literature critic. Hannah-Jones is not a Critical Race Theorist. That is an actual thing, and your education brought you closer to it than Hannah-Jones' did.

[rayiner]

https://profiles.howard.edu/nikole-hannah-jones (“Hannah-Jones holds a Master of Arts in Mass Communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and earned her Bachelor of Arts in History and African-American studies from the University of Notre Dame.”).

The ship has sailed on trying to limit “CRT” to its original academic meaning. People needed a word to refer to the ideology that had suddenly become prominent in public discourse, and “CRT” won. See: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/please-just-fucking-tel...

[tptacek]

No, I don't think I will defer to the culture warrior Freddie deBoer on this. Hannah-Jones is a journalist, not a theorist or an academic, and words mean things.

[rayiner]

DeBoer is just describing the phenomenon: We needed terms for ideas which are increasingly prevalent but resist labeling. So we appropriated “CRT” for that purpose. Words mean things, of course, but they can mean multiple things according to popular usage. “Nicole Hannah-Jones thought” is the dominant meaning of “CRT” today. Almost nobody means to refer to some obscure branch of legal academia.

[tptacek]

I'd be much more amenable to that if the people "appropriating" terms like CRT weren't doing so to tar actual CRT theorists, but they are, so I'm not at all amenable to it in this case.