Once the exclusive domain of university professors, critical race theory (also known as CRT) is now part of our national conversation. Workplace training based on critical race theory is pervasive and growing. Some pundits and politicians argue that the theory of CRT is not taught in the public schools because it is an obscure academic discipline, but it cannot be legitimately disputed that CRT as pedagogy in indeed practiced in the public schools. As it is in the institutions of most Democratic Party controlled states and the military service academies. The training is divisive and destructive political indoctrination, and if our national motto – e pluribus unum, out of the many, one – is to survive then the public ought to know what it is and why it should be resisted.
What is CRT? It is a theory used to describe one approach to social relations. Critical theory sprung largely from the Marxist scholars of the Frankfurt School in 1930’s Germany. The industrial revolution was well underway, workers moved from rural to urban centers and factory work had become a dominant economic model of production. In 1848 Karl Marx introduced the world to an analysis of social relations characterized by economic oppression when he argued in The Communist Manifesto and later in Capital that working class laborers whom he called the proletariat were oppressed by those in power, whom he called the bourgeoisie. Marx argued for class consciousness and, in advocating radical and violent revolution, he famously argued the workers had nothing to lose but their chains.
Marx’s world view was an early form of identity politics that divides all of us into two groups. In The Communist Manifesto he wrote, “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another.” This binary of status prevails in today’s discussion of CRT.
The dilemma facing the Frankfurt School scholars was why after the Russian Revolution and the wide dissemination of Marx’s invitation to a workers’ paradise was it not being realized? Industrial organization and mass communications seemed to divert the oppressed workers from their liberation. Wolfram Eilenberger refers to this phenomenon as “mass stupidity fostered by the mass media” in his recently translated work Time of the Magicians. Max Horkheimer of the Frankfurt School is credited with arguing a theory is critical if it seeks “to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them”, and critical theory was applied to interrogate how the bourgeoisie used the levers of power to perpetuate the alleged oppression of the proletariat.
Critical theory’s origin in Continental philosophy reveals a fundamental flaw. Traditional liberalism grew out of the 18th-century Enlightenment in Britain, which gave rise to liberty within the law, pluralism and tolerance of dissent, and was firmly grounded in Biblical values. A quite different set of values came out of the Enlightenment in France. These aimed to destroy Biblical religion and morality and replace it by a manmade definition of liberty, which was not coincidentally behind the façade all about power and led to the French revolutionary terror and, in due course, to communism and fascism.
The critical theory analysis of social relations goes to the heart of the relation of citizen to the state. Are rights natural, self-evident and therefore God given as Thomas Jefferson declared, or are they granted and defined by the state? A society in which the government decides what is allowed and demands obedience to its mandates is totalitarian. Totalitarian control exercised by private economic actors, the academy, mass media, bar associations and other corners of civil society crushes freedom and liberty no less and perhaps more insidiously than state control.
Critical race theory is a variant of what began in the 1970’s in the US academy as critical legal studies. Critical legal studies applied the binary of oppressed and oppressors to examine our laws starting with the assumption that law serves the interests of the capitalist classes and oppresses everybody else, especially minorities, and examined how power was used to create and enforce the law. Restrictive racial covenants in property deeds was a classic example of the use of law to perpetuate racial oppression. Denying women the right to vote and then prosecuting women like Susan B. Anthony in 1872 when she defied the law and cast a vote was a classic example of the use of law to perpetuate the oppression of women.
Women gained the right to vote in Washington in 1910, in Wyoming before that, US women were enfranchised – by men it should be noted – in 1919, and the US Supreme Court declared restrictive racial covenants were illegal and unenforceable everywhere in 1948. In the face of continued discrimination against Blacks (and women), Martin Luther King, Jr. optimistically declared, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” As a Christian, he recognized that mankind is flawed, redemption is possible and good will in the end prevail over the bad. His was a hopeful worldview.
Nonetheless, and not withstanding adoption of the 13th, 14th, 15th and 19th Amendments to the Constitution and a web of state and federal legislation outlawing discrimination based solely on race or gender, critical legal theorists refuse to abandon the binary of oppressed and oppressors. In this dystopia, there is no arc of justice or hope, instead, they insist US history is irredeemably rotten to the core, and always was so and will remain.
I implore you to reject this extreme pessimism and, instead interrogate who advances the argument that each of us is either the oppressed or the oppressors. What is the end game of their objection to how our society is ordered? I submit they seek power in order to create a new order, and the reordered society is explicitly described as anti-capitalist in the work of the high priest of anti-racism, Ibram X. Kendi.
The anti-capitalists sought to impose that new world order many times in the twentieth century and the bodies of tens of millions of their victims in the Soviet Union and China, and the impoverishment of millions more in Eastern Europe, Venezuela and Cuba should give fair warning of CRT’s threat.
While accepting the proposition that race is a social construct, which would suggest that what can be constructed can be reconstructed and improved, critical race theory proceeds from the fallacy that a binary of white and black, or white and everybody else, is immutable and the only possible frame of reference for a discussion of race. Applying Ockham’s Razor to inconvenient facts, this binary ignores the history of apparent racial-like bias against the Irish, Italian, Poles, Catholic and Jewish people and many others ordinarily thought of as white. Starting with this false assumed racial binary, the critical theorists contend racial bias is embedded not only in our laws, but also our language, media, political structures and culture and, like explorers entering a wilderness, they set out to look for what they believed was there.
Ignoring all the steps we have taken to eliminate racial prejudice from our laws and institutions, practitioners of critical race theory rebranded it as systemic racism. They ignore the particular facts and deploy statistics to identity groups organized by skin tone to explain allegedly disparate results. Its corollary theory holds that implicit bias exists even among those who deny any bias at all. Indeed, they argue denial of bias is strong proof one is in fact sick with bias. This demand to override a person’s reluctance to accept the fact that she is in fact racially biased is one of the most pernicious, totalitarian, and dangerous features of critical race theory. These are not mere thought crimes, they are unthought crimes detectable only by the anti-racist high priests. And ominously, the unrepentant should be treated for their mental illness like the dissidents in the former Soviet Union or the unruly psychiatric patients in the film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
The CRT advocates dismiss the ideal of “colorblindness.” That is the main point of Kendi’s milestone work, How to Be an Antiracist: “One either allows racial inequalities to persevere, as a racist, or confronts racial inequities, as an antiracist.” Therefore, if you are merely “not racist” you are in fact “racist.” In order to be “antiracist,” you must fight to reverse “racial inequities” through racial “equity.” And what does that require?
It requires recognizing the inherent racism of whiteness. It requires recognizing that you can’t be “racist” against white people, given their oppressive history and current power status. It requires treating people differently according to their race. In short, this new ideology of antiracism requires you to behave like a racist.
Aside from the totalitarian impulse to control what people think and the words they speak, which is bad enough and, in the workplace, may violate state and federal laws prohibiting discrimination based solely on race, three other fundamental issues should make us wary of this ideology. First, critical theory arises from the postmodern belief that there is no such thing as objective knowledge because all language is a construction of hierarchy by those in power to oppress those without power. If that were true – which it is not – then authentic communication would be impossible. Ordinary words would have no common meaning. In this world view, Descartes was misled when he claimed, cogito ergo sum. And human agency would be a chimera – we would not be free to choose whether we wish to be or remain a victim.
Second, it is no accident these theorists too often are White academics and politicians. Robin Diangelo is a White academic who’s popular 2018 book, “White Fragility,” is a lecture to White people about how they got race all wrong and ignorantly so. All while ignoring the overt actions of a political class who consciously deployed and continue to deploy race as a tool.
White men legislated poverty programs in the 1960’s that further impoverished Black communities. So much so that in the 1990’s White men legislated welfare and criminal justice reform that was directed against the Black community. The reform ended “welfare as we know it” and incarcerated large numbers of Black men who were called predators. There was nothing implicit about the bias of the men who enacted these policies.
It still happens and the same people are doing it. Candidate Biden argued a Black man who didn’t vote for him “ain’t Black”. Fanning the flames of racial resentment, President Biden falsely claimed the state of Georgia’s election law reform was “Jim Crow on steroids” and he suggested that Major League Baseball’s 2021 All Star Game consequently should be removed from Atlanta. The MLB Commissioner, a White man, agreed and moved the game to Denver, Colorado. Atlanta business, which is 30% Black owned, will lose $100 million in anticipated revenue which will be delivered to the Denver business community, which is 75% White.
White people telling Black people what they need is a not-so-subtle form of oppression. Isn’t it time for White people to stop telling Black people what they need?
Third, the critical race ideology claims all White people are infected with the racism disease regardless of who they are, where they grew up or what they were taught as children. In Diangelo’s world there are no individuals, and no person is unique; instead, she argues as a “race” white people produce and reproduce racism in lockstep marching shoulder to shoulder in every aspect of their daily lives whether they know it or not. All notions of freedom or liberty are illusory. To paraphrase Marx’s metaphor, the chains that bind us are no longer mere economic shackles to be cast off in search of liberty from oppression, they define our very being which is, not coincidentally, not capable of redemption. Led into this ideological cul-de-sac by the assumption that one is either slave or master as no other possibility exists, she is wrong on all counts.
George Orwell predicted this loss of freedom in 1940 in an essay titled, Inside the Whale, where he wrote, “almost certainly we are moving into an age of totalitarian dictatorships—an age in which freedom of thought will be at first a deadly sin and later on a meaningless abstraction.” He also predicted that the “autonomous individual is going to be stamped out of existence.” That is precisely what a cancel culture that brooks no dissent seeks to accomplish.
Critical race theory is by definition a racist ideology, it divides our communities, and gives cover to those who want to destroy our history and institutions. No leap of imagination is required to draw a direct line from the claim that systemic racism infects our institutions and must be pulled out by its roots to the destruction of civic monuments, attacks on the police, looting of stores and burning buildings in our cities today.
We are in fact one people who came from many places and stations in life. We favor liberty and freedom, and that is why so many immigrants – who are mostly persons of color – flee tyranny and swim or walk across the Rio Grande River, jump fences, dig tunnels and hide in trucks to seek asylum in our country. The invitation to see and form judgments about people based upon their skin tone, which is precisely what critical race theory implores us to do, tears at the fabric of our national ethos, e pluribus unum. That invitation must be refused.
Edmund Burke is reputed to have said, “the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” Nothing good will come from critical race theory or its progeny, and it should be rejected in favor of the proposition that all people are created equal and endowed with certain unalienable rights including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
As a child of immigrants, I agree. My parents left a totalitarian country, just for me to go to college and see people peddle a totalitarian ideology that sorts everyone into binaries of oppressors and oppressed.