Going Critical
Civil War. Great Depression. Nazis. Communist Block. Pandemics. 1970s men’s fashion. The United States has survived them all, though the last was a near thing.
But Critical Race Theory (CRT) may finally bring the grand American Experiment to an end.
I’m not prone to hyperbole – predictions of glorious success or apocalyptic doom rarely play out as expected in the political realm. From Y2K to peak oil to Japan Inc to global cooling, our recent history is littered with the remnants of prophecies that fell far short of the hype.
CRT, however, represents something new – challenging the very idea of America; a self-directed weapon whose potency the old Soviet Union could only envy. If CRT completes its current journey as the dominant driver of our cultural zeitgeist, it’s difficult to see how the United States survives.
We should begin with a definition of CRT, already a lively debate across the internet.
Detractors view CRT as a deliberately divisive program of propaganda - indicting white people, America and all of Western civilization as irredeemably racist; while advocates promote CRT as an academic exercise, a modest legal strategy intended to rectify the remnants of bigotry holding back people of color.
While I am firmly in the first camp, it is only fair to acknowledge CRT’s origins in the university.
CRT is a descendant of Critical Theory, promoted by the Frankfurt School nearly a century ago. Critical Theory, inspired by the Italian political philosopher Antonio Gramsci, argues that all social structures are a function of power; argues that traditions and institutions are designed to protect those with power, and exclude those without. Critical Theory promotes the questioning - the deconstruction - of culture to identify the beneficiaries of power, so that they can then be countered on behalf of the powerless.
As such, Critical Theory posits societies as riven by constant competition between groups, groups endlessly vying for status and dominance. Critical Theory says all social activity can, indeed must, be viewed in this context – there can be no anodyne or mutually beneficial interaction – everyone is either exploited or an exploiter in all walks of life.
Historically, Critical Theory defined these contending groups in Marxian terms of class: the rich and their bourgeoisie lackeys versus the poor.
Modern CRT updates the model by substituting race for economics. CRT’s view? American history, culture and institutions were carefully crafted, deliberately designed to preserve the power of the dominant Caucasian race and marginalize all others.
The origin of CRT makes for an interesting classroom discussion, but is ultimately a distinction without a difference. For whether we call it CRT or DEI or anti-racist training or the 1619 Project, the dialogue of race in America has mutated into a new and malevolent form.
The death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police last June drove an unprecedented catalyst of national contrition. Government, universities, grade schools, Fortune 500 companies, Hollywood - all adopted positions of self-flagellation, voluntarily indicting themselves as unwitting promoters of white supremacy and pledging to “do better”. There seemed to be a race between many institutions to outwoke each other in a desperate attempt to stave off the mobs - mobs both cyber and street.
Doing better required consultation with the CRT activists, primed and ready to diagnose the problem and offer the solution - for an appropriate renumeration, of course. CEOs and chancellors across the land generated press releases touting commitments to combating their unconcsious bias through a rich program of anti-racist training and DEI HR.
If the murder of George Floyd had inspired true soul-searching as to the tragedies afflicting the African-American underclass; if it had led to a real conversation about how we could ensure all black lives matter, some good might have come from an innocent man’s death.
Instead, CRT and its peers brought us this:
- The Smithsonian Museum defining punctuality, politeness, objectivity, rational thinking, hard work, planing for the future, and decision-making as aspects of whiteness.
- The Coca-Cola Corporation admonishing their Caucasian employees: “try to be less white.”
- Classrooms across America engaging in exercises to stratify children as young as 4 into privileged white groups and marginalized black ones.
- White federal employees told to write letters of abnegation to people of color they had wronged in their lives.
- The State of Oregon positing white supremacy in the teaching of math, saying students of color should not be expected to strive for the “one correct answer”, or to show their work along the way.
- Magnet schools and universities from Harvard to California deemphasizing academic criteria to solve the ‘problem’ of too many Asians.
- Portland educators undergoing anti-whiteness and self-shaming seminars to better prepare children for activism.
As any good scientist will say, data is not the plural of anecdote – citing a handful of incidents proves nothing. But there are thousands of these examples across the country today, a tide of woke that cannot be dismissed as outliers.
This should not come as a surprise – all of these initiatives are of a kind, arising from what I call the Trilogy of Tribulation, the three texts now on every corporate, academic, government and military reading list in the country:
Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility; Ta-Nehesi Coates’ Between The World And Me; and Ibram Kendi’s How To Be An Anti-Racist.
At the links above, I’ve posted on all three texts – their common theme is easy to discern: America is a dark, afflicted, hopeless land filled with oppressive whites and victimized blacks. American history is merely a catalogue of crimes. American institutions are steeped in structural racism. American values are nothing but rationalizations of oppression.
The trilogy’s nihilism is undeniable: none of us have any real agency in our lives – we whites can never transcend our racism, and blacks can never escape it.
This sets the stage for CRT’s vision of an America dominated by competing racial groups, where progress and status is measured only by how the groups stack up against one another. Any imbalance between the groups is ipso facto proof of racism – no further examination is needed.
CRT makes no distinction between the white wealthy stockbroker in Manhattan and the white unemployed steelworker in Pittsburgh – both are privileged, both are complicit in American bigotry, and thus both responsible for the plight of people of color.
CRT perverts the grand legacy of America’s civil rights movement, where Martin Luther King perfected what is perhaps Western Civilization’s greatest accomplishment – the centering of each human, regardless of race, as a unique entity; every person infused with rights that must be secured politically, because such rights were already conferred naturally - by a higher power.
CRT would end America’s two-century-long quest to elevate and extend these rights, would deny the painstaking, breathtaking progress we’ve made towards a more perfect Union.
It was no accident that Dr. King's most iconic quote "...judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character..." was excluded from his memorial in Washington; CRT explicitly rejects the aspirations of a color-blind society.
Instead, CRT sadly mimics the worst practices of racism – it strips us of that which makes us human: our individuality. CRT assigns each of us into groups - and like racism before it, applies the most crude of stereotypes to every member of the group.
If successful, the result will be a Hobbesian war of all against all, a zero-sum game where progress for some can only be achieved at the expense of others. Equality of opportunity would be subordinated to equality of results, based solely upon one's immutable physical characteristics. What you are will forever outweigh who you are.
Which of course is how we got into this mess in the first place.
No nation could hope to withstand the resulting schisms, as ten thousand years of human civilization on every inhabited continent demonstrates.
Worse yet, CRT utterly fails to achieve its purported mission of helping people of color, for it explicitly tells African-Americans that they cannot succeed in life unless white people let them.
Could there be a more enervating theme - especially for children?
As CRT diverts America from the critical conversations we so desparately need to have about our society, impoverished African-Americans remain mired in lost opportunity - no closer to taking their long-overdue place at the table.
The practices of CRT and its peers are gaining currency in the nation’s schools with the enthusiastic endorsement of the Biden administration – though GOP pushback through many state legislatures is underway. Defenders argue CRT is just an honest teaching of how to deal with America's history, racial warts and all.
If that were true, I would be an ardent advocate. But the crudity of CRT proves otherwise – as evinced by its inherent message, its conclusion as ironic as it is inevitable:
That message?
The best way to identify a racist……is by the color of his skin.