I want to take my friend @wokal_distance's point in this thread (and whole thread) a little further, perhaps in an ill-advised direction that cuts to the point of why there really can't be a transracialism even though transgenderism is encouraged. https://twitter.com/wokal_distance/status/1297133874271707136

Wokal was right about the Theoretical reason why Critical Race Theory doesn't allow the existence of transracial categories: it conceives of racial categories wholly as they exist in relationship to the lived experience of systems of power it Theorizes to pervade all of society.

There's a deeper reason why transracial categories are forbidden in Critical Race Theory, however: it understands power.

In general, those who have social power and don't want to lose it are the ones who exclude access to whatever grants that exclusive power. CRT knows this.

Think of how white supremacists back in the day (and even the few that remain now) didn't allow black people to be considered white because they had the power and knew it. They wanted that power to remain stable and exclusive, so black people were kept out of it, vigorously.

Critical Race Theory obviously knows all about this and understands how it works very clearly. It barely investigates or talks about anything else to the point of assuming the past is still the present through weird Theoretical arguments and hunting vestiges of it in everything.

As we've recently seen, white supremacy can apparently be found in grammar, spelling, math, punctuality, productivity, loyalty, reliability, civility, science, doing your job, and believing in (provisionally) objective truth. Some of this has real white supremacist antecedents.

Now what about forbidding transracialism? White people cannot be allowed to be black because advocates of Critical Race Theory (drawing off Black Power and their own success) know that they have access to a kind of social power now and need that to remain stable and exclusive.

They will, of course, deny that they have this power, but everybody knows (they do, and I contend that by policing things like transracialism, *they* know they do too. If anyone could claim the (politically) Black experience, that power wouldn't be exclusive anymore.

Critical Race Theory, as Wokal rightly pointed out, ultimately derives this claim to power from what amounts to standpoint epistemology and racial knowledges. The experience of an oppressed positionality confers knowledge (thus power) and wisdom; racial knowledges are exclusive.

This amounts to two essential power-laden claims: oppressed, marginalized, minoritized, or subordinated racial categories have exclusive access to the moral power of victimhood and they can know things (racial/cultural knowledges) others can't know (so must be empowered to share)

Guaranteeing this exclusive access to power is also why white privilege effectively works to negate more or less any claim to hardship or victimhood in white people and why white "cultural knowledges" are classified as "having been heard." ("Your story has been told!")

Whether the people doing Critical Race Theory know they're working to maintain specialized access to power (the movement even calls to "Black Power," e.g.) is unclear because Theory does little better than confuse people who believe it into thinking they can do nothing wrong.

Theory is wholly fixated on a self-absorbed, navel-gazing obsession with its victims' own victimhood, so it is actually extremely plausible that it doesn't actually realize it is playing this power game. Its behavior tells the story quite clearly, however.

Again, I don't think CRT would realize this about its own game theory (CRT isn't famous for game theory knowledge LOL). It sees itself as asserting minoritized racial cultures against cultural hegemony that it believes is wholly possessed by another racial culture.

At bottom, the big failure of Critical Race Theory is this idea of "racial cultures," though, which blown out to the bigger picture is multiculturalism versus pluralism. Multiculturalism doesn't work. Pluralism does. CRT demands multiculturalism for weird Theoretical reasons.

Those Theoretical reasons are, more or less, that if minoritized racial cultures don't do everything to assert themselves on their own terms, they'll just get swept up and mostly subsumed into the more dominant (mostly numerical majority) culture. Kinda true. Not a good hill.