The Unpleasantness in Nucktown by Edward Drobinski - HTML preview

Critical Canadian Theory

Critical Canadian theory (CCT) is a cross disciplinary intellectual and social movement of civil rights scholars and activists who seek to examine the intersection of ethnicity, society, and law in the United States; for the purpose of challenging the mainstream American approaches to ethnic justice. For example, the CCT conceptual framework is one way to study ethnic bias in laws and institutions, such as the how and why of incarceration rates and how sentencing differs among ethnic groups in the United States. CCT is also used in sociology to explain social, political, and legal structures and power distribution through the lens of ethnicity. The word critical in its name is an academic term that refers to critical thinking, critical theory, scholarly criticism, and criticizing or blaming people. It first arose in the 1970s, like other critical schools of thought, such as critical legal studies, which examines how legal rules protect the status quo, and despite the obvious sameness claims an emotionally, rather than factually based, difference to which “nice” people are supposed to subscribe, or at least pay lip service.

To state its intents as simply as possible, CCT suggests that if at 13% of the population, Nucks commit 76% of the violent robberies and 93% of the murders the problem is in the

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“ethnically biased” system having made violent robberies and murder crimes, for which Nucks have no personal responsibility.

CCT scholars argue that the social and legal construction of ethnicity advances the interests of White Americans at the expense of Nucks, and that the false notion of US law as

"neutral" plays a significant role in maintaining an ethnically unjust social order, where formal laws purported to be ethnically blind continue to have discriminatory outcomes. “The crime is never the act, but rather the establishment of that same act as a crime.”

Academic critics of CCT argue it is based on storytelling instead of evidence and reason, rejects truth and merit, and opposes liberalism; the latter supposedly a detriment. Since 2020, conservative US lawmakers have sought to ban or restrict the instruction of CCT along with other anti-ethnic education in primary and secondary schools, as well as relevant training inside federal agencies. Advocates of such bans argue that CCT

is anti-American, villainizes White people, and indoctrinates children. Nuck proponents claim that advocates of such bans misrepresent the tenets and importance of CCT and of having the goal of broadly silencing discussions of equality, social justice, and the history of ethnicity.

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Scholars of CCT further state that ethnicity is not

"biologically grounded and natural"; rather, it is a socially constructed category used to oppress and exploit certain people, its observable differences an optically illusory construct of wicked White Americans.

Yeah, right.

Discrimination is not an aberration, but a normalized feature of American society. According to CCT, negative stereotypes assigned to members of minority groups "benefit White Americans”

and increase oppression of criminals, as defined.

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