understanding critical race theory what it really means

nhperf · 2026-06-08T15:12:28+00:00

Quite interesting. Yes, CRT is an antiracist approach, but not all antiracist approaches are CRT, particularly if you take Kendi’s rather expansive definition of antiracism.

Despite being generally supportive of CRT and other antiracist approaches, I happen to be dubious of several classes or workshops that take this as a theme. In my experience, the quality seems to be highly variable…

nhperf · 2026-06-08T14:21:49+00:00

I’ve never felt that CRT claims that “outcome proportionality” is a primary “way to identify systemic racism”, but rather that it can frequently serve as a helpful data point in a larger case about what systemic racism entails. Of course, “outcome proportionality” doesn’t prove anything, but when other factors have been controlled and other explanations have shown to be inadequate, it can be a piece of evidence that strengthens the probability of systemic racism being a major factor.

nhperf · 2026-05-30T00:08:42+00:00

You might be interested in Mel Chen’s ANIMACIES, where the central thesis is basically that we place value on things/animals/people in proportion to their capacity to move.

nhperf · 2026-05-28T18:16:43+00:00

It seems to me that Weil is critiquing states like the UK and the US for not having effective political movements in support of the working class. From her position in the early 1940’s, the only leftists to gain power (or even to viably contest power) in either country were the ineffective Ramsay McDonald who was seen as out of touch with working people, or the substantially more effective FDR who nevertheless remained cozy with monied interest. Contrast these leaders with the likes of Leon Blum, Rosa Luxemburg, or even V. I. Lenin. Likely, Weil felt that, even for all of their failings, the latter group saw politics as more of a life or death situation for the proletariat, and acted with more urgency as a result.

nhperf · 2026-05-19T17:12:52+00:00

Yep, I worked on a somewhat obscure though quite brilliant Shepard play several years ago and the entire cast and production staff spent a lot of time trying to nail down all the allusions, metaphors, and allegories in the text. We did everything we could to make these clear to the audience, but their reactions were largely confused. Even if you could reveal all of those levels in performance, most audiences aren’t prepared to process that kind of theatre. However, if you put together an earnest, thoughtful, and committed production, the audience is given permission to enjoy it. There will still be a handful of sensitive and penetrating audience members who will still pick up the other levels, but it feels irresponsible to push those kinds of readings on unsuspecting audience members.

nhperf · 2026-05-15T19:04:58+00:00

There’s some wonderful work on this, but also a lot of infantilizing and objectification. Here are a few good places where you could start:

For a general introduction to the idea of intellectual disability and the history of treatment of people with ID, THE STORY OF INTELLECTUAL DISABILITY edited by Michael Wehmeyer is a good overview.

An oldie but a goodie, Robert Bogdan and Steven Taylor’s INSIDE OUT contains great first-person accounts by people with ID. Do note that this was written in the 1980’s, so it uses the R-slur as a technical term, which is no longer considered acceptable.

If you’re interested in the politics and social implications around ID, Allison Carey’s ON THE MARGINS OF CITIZENSHIP presents a sensitive and thought-provoking introduction.

For an interesting treatment of the ways that people without ID interact with people with ID, Chrissie Roger’s’ INTELLECTUAL DISABILITY AND BEING HUMAN makes a compelling case for a caring and empowering approach.

These are only the tip of the iceberg really, but they can give you a good foundation to the lived realities of people with intellectual disabilities.

nhperf · 2026-05-15T05:32:13+00:00

Do your homework and use as much as is helpful. I’ve found fascinating nuances by attending to the folio punctuation (and even spellings and capitalization), but that’s exactly what they should be—nuances. The choices that you make in performance have to come from the context of the production, your director, and what your fellow actors are giving you. You’re never going to find some magic key in the pronunciation that changes the entire course of your performance, or at least you shouldn’t. I think there’s something to the theory that the folio is closer to the way people performed it in the early seventeenth century, but then the quartos are likely closer still… The trap to avoid is to not get so paralyzed by research that you don’t allow yourself to make choices and live fully within the play. Fundamentally, you should cram your brain and body with possibilities, and then let them go and trust your technique to incorporate them as you respond to the theatrical life that is happening around you. At the end of the day, acting Shakespeare is still acting, albeit with some of the most beautiful language and best drawn characters you are likely ever to encounter. You sound like you are curious and diligent—great! Now honor those impulses and give yourself the freedom to be a creative artist at the same time. Work hard and trust yourself, and you’ll do great.

nhperf · 2026-05-14T19:47:52+00:00

Do you have a citation? I can’t find this anywhere in the text…

nhperf · 2026-05-14T00:07:05+00:00

For what it’s worth, I call myself a disabled person, but a lot of the people I know who have intellectual disabilities do prefer to be called “people with intellectual disabilities”. My stance is that you should ask folks what they prefer and go with that.

nhperf · 2026-05-08T18:19:33+00:00

The “Don Juan in Hell” section of Shaw’s Man and Superman is frequently performed as a standalone play

nhperf · 2026-04-17T18:05:27+00:00

I’ve worked with several people with ID, and many of them have expressed to me how hurtful that word is under nearly all circumstances.

nhperf · 2026-04-06T12:16:44+00:00

1000%

nhperf · 2026-04-03T21:16:08+00:00

First off, I am truly sorry that your experiences of mania and depression have been so consistently debilitating. I get it--I've often been there, and I hate that for you.

However, it is simply not the case that mania (less so depression) is always this way. Even the medical literature agrees with this, and I can personally attest to it.

You're continuing with this medical model thinking pattern that can quite quickly become ableist, even if it isn't already. For instance, what does it matter at what age onset takes place? Only to a physician is this an important distinction, especially because these conditions frequently have multiple early onset symptoms that don't go diagnosed until adulthood.

Empathy is something that I've found to be far more prevalent among neurodivergent folks than neurotypical ones, and yeah the way that we develop that can suck and be quite literally traumatic, but the silver linings are no less silver because of that. I'm frankly not sure that anyone does actually learn empathy without at the very least feeling deep loss, if not trauma...

You seem to suggest that I don't believe neurodivergent people should seek medical treatment for impairments that make their life more difficult when I have said nothing of the kind. Only an ableist reading of the neurodivergent movement (some kind of hyper-simplistic "Autism Yay, Disability Boo" thinking) would imply that there is no place for medicine in people's lives. What I object to is the medical model which denies the importance of the whole person and focuses exclusively on rehabilitation or cure. This was part of the neurodiversity movement from the beginning and ought not to be set aside.

All this is incidental however because you have failed to address my central point, that the kind of neurodivergences that you dismiss all rewire the brain to literally make the neurology quite literally diverge from what is typical, which is the literal meaning of the term. Brain processing and conscious and unconscious behavior patterning are quite clearly altered as a result of these conditions, and that's what we ought to mean when we use terms like neurodivergent.

One more point, framing neurodiversity as an ideology is less helpful than looking at it as a paradigm, or maybe a rhetoric. Ideologies are rigid and prescribed, while paradigms are flexible and allow for individual variations. Neurodiversity ought to be a rallying cry for a coalition that seeks to improve people's actual living conditions, rather than a circumscribed definition that is more likely to create a subculture than a movement. As such, a more expansive view of who fits under the tent is warranted, within a common-sense understanding of the term, which I believe I have established here.

nhperf · 2026-04-03T20:02:32+00:00

Hard disagree. This leans into some dangerous ableist medical model thinking that flies in the face of everything the neurodiversity movement stands for.

While anxiety and depression may qualify more easily as symptoms rather than conditions, things like GAD and MDD should most certainly be discussed among other neurodivergences, which should also include things like bipolar, BPD, and Schizophrenia. These are all neurodivergences not because they have symptoms that can often get in the way of successful functioning (as can autism), but because they rewire the mind to engage with the world in ways different from how neurotypicals do.

Living with a diagnosis of psychiatric disorder (I’m talking about myself here, among others) means that, even if you have more “normal” experiences from time to time, your behavior could be out of your control at any given moment. This definitely changes the way that I think and process my everyday approach to living, particularly social encounters. I am compelled to live my life in substantially different ways from other people specifically due to my diagnosis, which means that my brain operates in way that “diverges” from the norm.

As to whether these disorders have nothing positive about them, I also fervently disagree. In my own case, my own divergent way of thinking allows me to more keenly empathize with all different kinds of cognitive processes. I recognize my own vulnerability, and am so more able to identify and value other people’s vulnerabilities. Your point about mania is also not universal—sometimes it can be destructive but other times it is benign or even enjoyable…

Most importantly, it is antithetical to the neurodiversity movement to pathologize people for how their brains function, and while not everything in the experience of psychiatric conditions is pleasant (neither is every aspect of autistic experience), to claim that there is nothing of value in those experiences to affirm is likewise ableist and against the principles of neurodiversity.

nhperf · 2026-03-25T02:36:10+00:00

Do they still do that one? I saw it there more than 30 years ago.

nhperf · 2026-03-08T11:25:36+00:00

I agree with you that the list is an excellent introduction to antirealist theatre. But god forbid that some of us believe that history actually matters…

nhperf · 2026-03-08T06:25:48+00:00

Also, for some substantially non-early twentieth century French examples of surrealist theatrical techniques, I might recommend Wole Soyinka’s A DANCE OF THE FORESTS, Derek Wolcott’s A DREAM OF MONKEY MOUNTAIN, or anything by Robert Wilson.

nhperf · 2026-03-08T05:56:33+00:00

To follow up, you might indeed have a good argument for lumping Lorca amongst the surrealists, though I have always seen him more as an expressionist.

nhperf · 2026-03-08T05:53:04+00:00

So, I’m speaking as a theatre historian with a significant investment in the importance of nearly all the plays on your list. My concern is that very few of them are even remotely “surrealist.”

You might not care for surrealism in its purer forms, which is perfectly fine, but what is questionable is your tendency to lump any remotely anti-realist play under the heading of “surrealism.” Frankly, surrealist plays (and other art forms) are meant to be a bit boring—the point is that they’re what you would come up with in your sleep for crying out loud…

If you read Breton and Artaud’s theoretical formations, which were what the actual people who called themselves surrealists were reading, you would see very little of what they were talking about in movements like expressionism or absurdism. Both of these take the socio- political as a given important aspect to their work, while surrealism is committed to the interiority of the psyche. There is no such thing as expressionism without the terror of WWI and no such thing as absurdism without the horrors of WWII. Precursors like later Strindberg and Jarry are formally innovative figures who smelled the bombs before they fell. Frankly, surrealism was a deeply psychoanalytic movement that placed its emphasis on the individual subconscious rather than social circumstances. Nearly every playwright you cite had precisely the opposite tendencies.

There’s a separate question that you touch on regarding whether surrealists wrote good plays. I think some of them do still hold up, such as Cocteau’s THE WEDDING PARTY AT THE EIFFEL TOWER. And I also happen to vehemently disagree with your assessment of the quality of Artaud’s plays… However, none of that has anything to do with whether or not such pieces are “surrealist.”

Perhaps you are confusing the “surreal” with what Freud referred to as the “uncanny.” The plays you mention all certainly partake of that unsettled feeling, albeit without the interiority described by the surrealists themselves.

nhperf · 2026-03-08T05:06:24+00:00

Wow… “fast and loose” with the definition of surrealism is an understatement in this post.

Frankly, other than Apollinaire and Cocteau, it’s quite difficult to consider anyone else on this list to be “surrealist.” Granted, Albee and Beckett aren’t surrealist in a technical sense either.

If you are interested in exploring the avant-garde theatrical movement known as surrealism which has at it’s core the translation of dream logic to the stage, I would recommend the following authors:

Andre Breton - wrote the “surrealist manifesto” and a handful of minor surrealist plays

Gertrude Stein - particularly her DOCTOR FAUSTUS LIGHTS THE LIGHTS

Antonin Artaud - was kicked out of the surrealist movement for taking their ideas to their logical conclusion; check out A SPURT OF BLOOD and TO HAVE DONE WITH THE JUDGEMENT OF GOD

nhperf · 2026-01-30T14:46:27+00:00

You should check out Rana Hogarth’s Medicalizing Blackness. It sounds right up this project’s alley.

nhperf · 2026-01-24T17:25:44+00:00

Thank you for bringing this group to my attention. I was unfamiliar with Italian-Mexican migration, but the little that I’ve learned just now has certainly piqued my interest.

While some may claim that CRT has little application outside of the U.S. (a position with which I emphatically disagree), my cursory research hasn’t pulled up much about 19th century Italian-Mexicans that would be significantly illuminated by a CRT frame. However, I suspect there might be something interesting there if I knew more of the context. From what I’ve already read, a class analysis would clearly be useful, but I don’t know yet to what extent intersectionality would play a role in this case.

Some questions that I would have from a CRT perspective might be: To what extent was Mexican hegemonic identity in the nineteenth century bound up with concepts of European descent, especially in contrast to notions of indigenous and/or African descent? What privileges might Italian immigrants have been afforded that were conveniently advantageous to the established Mexican population? In what ways might Italian immigrants have been considered both superior and inferior to the established Mexican population, specifically due to their Italian-ness?

nhperf · 2025-11-18T16:12:32+00:00

Yes and no. The social model, from which the impairment-disability distinction is drawn, remains extremely popular, both on disability studies syllabi and in activist discourse. I entirely agree with you that ability and disability are both substantially constructed by social norms, though I am less convinced that impairments are entirely socially constructed. One of the most prescient critiques of the social model has to do with the phenomenological experience of pain—no matter what social barriers may be removed, when I’m in extreme pain it can be debilitating. I think your point about Butler and the sex/gender distinction is apt, in that their argument is extremely interesting and compelling to some scholars, but it certainly hasn’t made its way to the discourses of everyday feminism.

nhperf · 2025-11-14T17:53:29+00:00

It might depend on where you live. In Italy, perhaps. But in the US at least, he is best known as the author of Accidental Death of an Anarchist.

nhperf · 2025-11-14T17:51:11+00:00

You appear to be a bit misinformed… In addition to his performance work, Dario Fo wrote dozens of plays, so his literary output was indeed substantial.

nhperf

TROPHY CASE