Thank you for your response, Eve (and onetime fellow Texan in California). Assuming I understand your question, Enlightenment reason—a primary target of the postmodern left—provides an option. Merit in datasets of anything—global mean temperature, rainfall, animal populations, forest cover—are skewed by inherent biases by the device of measure itself and whatever method is employed by that device. The devices come with calibration procedures which must be repeatedly exercised or the device drifts in its fidelity to the purposes for which it was built. Despite that calibration, however, they still have biases. By comparison to other systems and processes, those biases are well known and corrected for, ultimately ending up in a group average with uncertainty bounds posted to each datapoint.

Reason and its method provide the same option for the merit of datasets in social arenas: inner city test scores, crime rates, graduation rates. Once the cause of biases in each set is found then the problem each presents can be rationally addressed and corrected for. Calibration comes from repeated reference to ethical norms, moral standards, equality before the law, access to education, etc. Instead, we employ systems that do not address the biases but rather try to fix them without upstream correctives. That’s like changing the numbers in the dataset without knowing how the system screwed them up to begin with.

For example, Affirmative Action seeks correctives after real racism has already done its work, say, at inner-city schools. As the law says, to “remedy the results of prior discrimination.” Instead of fixing inner-city schools—a massive undertaking—Affirmative Action seeks to make corrections after the damage is done, thereby e.g., admitting students in California (in violation of Prop 209) that are underqualified for Berkeley, UCLA, etc. While university administrators take great solace in their diversity of surface features as they pump out their highest dropout rates among precisely those underqualified students. Those who are, however, pushed through then fail their race-blind BAR, CPA, etc. at the highest failure percentages of any group. Who’s getting a favor here? The students saddled with mass debt who can’t find employment, or university administrators lauding their diversity credentials? (The book, “The Diversity Delusion” offers ample footnotes on state government and academic data to check this.)

CRT provides an even more ridiculous solution: everyone is racist all the time, and it can never be fixed, which is not solution at all. Only the power hierarchies of the powerful can be destroyed, and the powerful are anyone “they define” as such. This is a recipe for accusation, conflict, and violence and can never be employed to actually solves problems. Which is not the goal of postmodern theories of the academic left, like CRT, anyway. As a postmodern variant, CRT denies any such Enlightenment approach to problem solving. Asking CRT to propose solutions, not invectives, is like asking Trump Republicans to analyze a social/political problem and propose a solution rather than simply engaging the grievance industry (of the New Right in this case) with no clue or need of a solution but ample fodder for Goebbels radio and FOX RT angertainment. Not possible.

Again, thank you for your read and response.