Critical Race Theory (CRT): a curse or a blessing?

Part 2 of 3: What do we mean by race?(edited: see paragraph on 2000 Census)

by Robert Archerd, March 8, 2022

In Part 1, I shared some of the systemic discrepancies that particularly impact people of color in areas such as education, housing, justice, healthcare and income. I shared that the available data show the median income in America, as of June 2021, for a White household to be 8 times that of a Black household ($188K to $24K), and that our general tendency to doubt such a discrepancy is called by psychologists “motivated cognition,” a phenomenon I myself experienced upon first reading of this disparity. I had difficulty accepting that the gap was still so large, so I continued to google it and kept getting basically the same result.

Now to the main question of CRT Part 2, What do we mean by “race?”

A main tenet of Critical Race Theory is that race is not a biological determination but a social construct, and that science (as demonstrated in the Human Genome Project) refutes the idea of biological racial differences. According to scholars Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, race is the product of social thought and is only tangentially connected to biological reality.

Race, then, is a fluid concept used to group people according to various factors including, ancestral background and social identity (see my article “So Who Gets to Play Othello?” in which the concepts of what it means to be a Muslim, as well as a Black African, are examined, albeit…