Critical Race Theory Is Not What You Think It Is

It’s time to talk about it

This is going to be uncomfortable, but what people need to do more than anything right now, is talk.

Brace yourself, the water’s cold.

· Introduction
· The Origins and Intentions of Critical Race Theory
· Critical of the Philosophical Roots
· The Specter of Implicit Bias
· Where Critical Race Theory Loses Its Mind
· The Conundrum of the Good Person
· Critical Race Theory in Practice
· On Martin Luther King Jr.
· People Fight Back
· Conclusion

Introduction

I grew up in the 1990s.

From an early age, it wasn’t hard to figure out that people who looked different than you were not so different.

I can only speak for myself, but my young impression of the world was that ignorance, although not totally banished, was the exception to the rule.

People were just people, and it would have been ridiculous, and archaic, to assume otherwise.

A friend of mine described our current social landscape as a tapestry that’s become knotted together with strange ideas and bad intentions.

Causes that were once righteous have been perverted into something ugly.

What is occurring now, is not Martin Luther King marching for civil rights; it is not protesting for women’s suffrage; it is not campaigning for gay marriage; it is not protecting members of the trans community; and it is not anything that leads to understanding, compassion, or salvation from ignorance.

We need to talk about Critical Race Theory.

The Origins and Intentions of Critical Race Theory

Critical Race Theory (CRT) is complex, multifaceted, and has deep philosophical roots. So let’s examine its core principles, honestly.

It was born out of a field of study from the late 1960s called Critical Legal Studies (CLS), which examined how legal institutions worked to benefit those in power at the expense of the poor and the marginalized.

According to Britannica:

CLS, an offshoot of Marxist-oriented critical theory, may also be viewed as a radicalization of early 20th-century legal realism, a school of legal philosophy according to which judicial decision making [sic] is influenced as much by nonlegal — political or ideological — factors as by precedent and principles of legal reasoning.

In short, it was the theory that legal decisions were unintentionally made with more than just the law in mind. Personal beliefs and biases toward the majority group could also have played a factor.

According to Cornell:

Proponents of CLS believe that the law supports the interests of those who create the law. As such, CLS states that the law supports a power dynamic which favors the historically privileged and disadvantages the historically underprivileged.

In 1989, the first official CRT workshop was founded. Richard Delgado, one of CRT's original proponents, laid out its core tenets. They are as follows:

• Race is a social construct, not biologically natural.
• Racism is the common everyday experience of people of color in the United States, not an aberration.
• Legal methods for eliminating racism, such as abolishing Jim Crow laws, only address racism on a grand scale. Things like microaggressions and other social indicators of oppression, such as incarceration rates, remain unaddressed. Delgado cites other factors:

Black families have, on the average, about one-tenth of the assets of their white counterparts. They pay more for many products and services, including cars. People of color lead shorter lives, receive worse medical care, complete fewer years of school, and occupy more menial jobs than do whites.

• Interest Convergence: This is the idea that advances for marginalized groups in the United States become “allowed” only when they secretly benefit the group in power.
• Differential racialization: At different times in American history, minority groups were used for a purpose that benefited the majority (e.g., Mexican agricultural workers, the Japanese being put in relocation camps during WWII). Stereotypes in media also shift based on the perceptions of the majority.
• Intersectionality: Aspects of a group member's identity (race, gender, sexual orientation) intersect. This means that the group member becomes subject to both the struggles and advantages, of each.
• The Voice of Color: This is the belief that due to a collective history of oppression, any person of color in the US has the ability to speak for the experiences of all members of their race, and they can tell white people things they couldn’t possibly know. In short, minority status makes you an authority on racism.

CRT posits that modern liberalism, which promotes freedom, justice, equality, and neutrality under the law, is not enough to halt racism or solve the racial disparities that still plague the United States.

Neutral law cannot eliminate racism between individuals, moments of disrespect, and negative stereotypes in culture and media.

Columbia Law Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, who coined the term intersectionality, sums up CRT like this:

…critical race theory is a way to talk openly about how America’s history has had an effect on our society and institutions today.

This is an important topic. I don’t disagree with exploring how America’s brutally racist past has led to the country we know today.

According to Notre Dame law professor Douglas E. Litowitz, the two greatest aspects of CRT are its ability to raise the consciousness of the experiences of minority groups in the United States, and to give lawmakers other perspectives to consider that would normally be ignored.

Poverty and racial disparities are still abundantly clear in the US, and we can’t pretend they don’t exist. But, calling attention to these problems is not the issue with Critical Race Theory. The issue is its solutions.

Critical of the Philosophical Roots

There was something telling in the Britannica quote from the previous section. Maybe you picked up on it. It said that CLS was an offshoot of “Marxist-oriented” critical theory.

Here’s a Stanford definition of Critical Theory:

A theory is critical to the extent that it seeks human “emancipation from slavery”, acts as a “liberating influence”, and works “to create a world which satisfies the needs and powers of” human beings.

Critical Race Theory is, obviously, this idea applied to race.

This is not to suggest that anyone who supports racial equality, elimination of poverty, or police reform, must be a Marxist. It’s the observation that those righteous causes have been subsumed by a particular way of thinking.

Conspiracy theorists yell about things like cultural marxism. But, with Critical Race Theory, it is demonstrably true that Marxism is its origin. It is the overarching theme and philosophy of this type of thing.

So what does a Marxist critical theorist believe?

• Everything is understandable as a power structure. There is a fixed system in place based around a dominant group and an oppressed group. This was originally the bourgeois and the proletariat, aka, the rich elites and the common workers doing all the labor. This now translates to whites and minority groups.
• Every aspect of personal experience can be viewed in a wider social context, and that context can be used to identify and dismantle forces of oppression.
• Class struggle is always present, just in different forms.
• Objective truth is a tool of power used by the ruling class.

A distinction has been made recently between equality and equity. Equality would be creating equal opportunity and fairness for all. Equity would ensure that everyone is given the same things, whether those things have to be redistributed from the domineering class via a revolution or not.

Absolute equity is the Marxist vision of utopia, and it has always sounded good on paper.

However, every honest attempt to make Marxism work in practice has ended in atrocity — a small group of oligarchs ruling and surveilling over everything while millions of “equal” of people end up starving to death and occasionally resorting to cannibalism. Because of this, Marxism became hard to take seriously in the United States, especially by the 1980s.

In the book The Madness of Crowds, journalist Douglas Murray points out that in 1985, two prominent Marxists wrote a book called Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. The authors were looking for a way to breathe new life into Marxism.

So, they looked at people who were historically oppressed in America (racial minorities, women, gay people, and others), and saw them as prime real estate for having Marxism make sense again. One could say they sought to take advantage of them.

CRT came along not soon after.

Murray makes another important point:

These thinkers absorbed their idea of society not as an infinitely complex system of trust and traditions that have evolved over time, but always in the unforgiving light cast when everything is viewed solely from the prism of ‘power’.

What kind of world does this thinking create?

The Specter of Implicit Bias

Let me lay out how this works.

If the underlying power structure in the United States exists, then white people must have it in the back of their minds that they are superior to other races, whether they know it or not.

Remember, behind every interaction there exists a racial power dynamic. This includes an interracial couple kissing for the first time, a mother rocking her mixed-race child, or two best friends who have never really thought twice about it.

Implicit bias refers to the unconscious thought patterns that drive your decision-making. The thinking is that when white recruiters look at candidates for jobs, their implicit bias toward their own race will cause fewer people of color to get hired.

So, this tendency must be trained out of people for the sake of ensuring diversity, because there is no possible way that diversity would occur on its own in American workplaces.

It is unlikely that a white person running a for-profit business would ever hire a black person, even if that candidate was most the most qualified, because of the white business owner's implicit bias.

The group supersedes and defines the individual.

People are chosen not on merit or character, but group status. And it's all in the name of leveling out a background power structure that hangs on the assumption of people’s thoughts.

I hope the validity of all this is speaking for itself.

Adults in 2022 don’t need to be taught how to not be racist.

Where Critical Race Theory Loses Its Mind

I’m all for trusting your gut, but things get muddled when you can reject objective truth, and claim that 2 +2 equaling 4 is a tool of oppression.

Every act to banish racism by the ruling class is secretly a way to benefit the ruling class.

Do you know what that means?

It means that any attempt to quell racism can be interpreted as an act of racism. That means that racism never has to end, outside of an outright revolution.

If everything is reduced to a power structure, then power is all you will see. Racism (or any form of ignorance) will fill every blank. Every event can be construed as racist because when you can deny objective truth, you can pretty much claim anything.

Some points:

• A person’s life experience is irreducibly complex. With every advantage, disadvantage, relationship, genetic trait, trauma, caregiver, and everything in between, an individual’s life cannot be defined by any single fixed feature or combination of features.
• The only thing critical theory leaves out is the individual.
• There should not be iron walls around culture. Culture should be shared so that it can be understood. The synthesis of cultures leads to new cultures (think creole). Differences should be viewed as a way for people to learn from one another.
• Critical Race Theory is creating a world where racism can never truly die, or to take another perspective, it could resurrect racism entirely.

I suppose there is no way to test this empirically, but I’ll say this: I do not believe that racism and ignorance grow over time, especially after the progress we’ve already made. It seems to get weaker with each passing generation.

The true racists that are around today — the neo-nazis, the alt-right forum dwellers, the KKK members — are not calling the shots. Their ideas are shoved to the fringes of society, and it might seem like there are a lot of them when these people gather, but there aren’t. We need to remember that.

What’s being put forward in the name of CRT is a top-down solution to what we believe are people's thoughts and assumptions about race. And it creates nothing but pain, ugliness, and tension.

It justifies a destructive and pathetic way of looking at the world. We’re living in someone’s attempt to make it to utopia.

This is not conspiracy. This is ideology. And ideology spreads.

The Conundrum of the Good Person

Before we continue, we need to address the average person caught up in all this. They could be white, or maybe not. It doesn’t matter.

In the past six years or so, what was once an implied assumption among any reasonable person that race didn’t matter, or shouldn’t matter, started to change.

Stories about police brutality lead to valid outrage. However, there was more to it.

Race and identity started taking center stage. You were reminded repeatedly about people’s life stories, privileges, and shared injustices. Maybe you had someone bark in your face about how you should care more, or educate yourself.

There is an uncomfortable feeling in the air now. It’s the feeling that race is a thing again, and that it shouldn’t be.

Maybe some good people are just confused and nervously going along with it, rationalizing to themselves, “Of course I’m not a racist. This is just…how you’re supposed to show it now.” Or maybe they go along with it for the sake of keeping their jobs.

Yet, secretly, they could be thinking, “Why are people doubling down on their group identities? In the name of antiracism, people seem to be bolding, highlighting, and underlining themselves based on their race.”

If you oppose Critical Race Theory, the claim would be that you did it out of racism. Anyone who opposes anti-racism, must be a racist, right? This is what I mean when I say that a righteous thing like anti-racism has been perverted.

If you have an uncomfortable feeling in your gut about all of this, you aren’t wrong. You’re just a person who believes that people are people, and people should be viewed as individuals. That is not an invalid way to look at things.

A white person could see a black person and feel that it’s their job to “help” them and be an “ally,” meanwhile that black person is wildly more successful and well adjusted than they are.

It is the exact assumption a racist would make, only with a helping bent instead of a hateful one. You’ve looped back around.

Standing against CRT is not standing against racial justice. It’s standing against insanity.

If you feel in your heart that this is wrong, it’s because it is.

Critical Race Theory in Practice

You’ve probably heard the conservative panic about CRT being taught in American schools, and that children are being indoctrinated to think a certain way.

Many have denied these claims, but it’s true. There is evidence that CRT is being introduced into elementary programs.

Christopher Rufo is a whistleblower journalist who has compiled over 1,000 incidents of CRT being taught in public schools. Here’s an excerpt from one of them:

…the teacher had the students deconstruct their own intersectional identities and “circle the identities that hold power and privilege” on their identity maps, ranking their traits according to the hierarchy.

Critical Race Theory is being taught to children. But why children? Why not save it for civics or history when they’re older? Why, when the ugly aspects of American history are already taught in school, is it necessary to teach children about racial privilege and intersectionality?

Other incidents cited by Rufo include:

• In California, an elementary school forced first-graders to deconstruct their sexual identities, and rank themselves according to their “power and privilege.”
• In Springfield, Missouri, a middle school forced teachers to locate themselves on an “oppression matrix,” based on the idea that straight, white, English-speaking, Christian males are members of the oppressor class and must atone for their privilege and “covert white supremacy.”
• In Seattle, a school district told white teachers that they are guilty of “spirit murder” against black children and must “bankrupt [their] privilege in acknowledgment of [their] thieved inheritance.”

This is all too elaborate to fabricate. If it’s true, and I believe it is, then this is the stuff of cults. And any parent, conservative or not, has a right to be furious.

Imagine pointing to two children and calling one an oppressor, and another oppressed. Bright kids will understand these labels. Race and gender will be defined in their mind as meaningful and significant.

Imagine telling a child that they are trapped in a system of oppression that they can never escape, as opposed to, “you can do anything you put your mind to.”

Kids could start mocking each other for their race, or bully each other for being evil oppressors, or feel degraded and bitter by being called oppressed.

Their fixed identities will poison their self-esteem, like being cursed with original sin.

Just like with Marxism, CRT has its share of fanatical true believers. And now they’re educating children.

On Martin Luther King Jr.

It’s become a cliché to quote the I Have a Dream Speech in response to Critical Race Theory, so I’m not going to do that. Although, the idea of judging someone by the content of their character will always ring a profound bell of truth. Few things in history have made more sense.

It has been said that Martin Luther King’s legacy has been sanitized to make it convenient for white people to use, and to present him as harmonious and peace-loving.

However, it is true that Dr. King was a fighter and a revolutionary, and he knew that only action in the form of peaceful protest would overcome oppression. King was a man of action.

To shame people who don’t go along with what constitutes “antiracism” now, people will invoke this quote from Letter From a Birmingham Jail:

First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

He was right to be frustrated with white moderates who didn’t like the chaos that sit-ins caused, or who thought direct action would only cause problems. You can’t be lukewarm when injustice is so egregious.

This is all meant to imply that MLK would be as up in arms about race now as anyone else. And that you should be too.

I think he would have a lot to say about the social landscape in 2022. He would without a doubt decry police brutality. But here's what we need to remember:

If there is a single word that describes MLK's vision, I believe that word would be Brotherhood.

His goal was to fight oppression and create a world of brotherhood among all people.

Let us all hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear drenched communities, and in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating beauty.

After seeing how far his dream has come, and witnessing children being made to feel separate from one another because of their race, and people taking the idea of antiracism and turning it into a homunculus of hate and suspicion, he would be appalled. I truly believe that.

Critical Race Theory is not a philosophy of brotherhood. It is a philosophy of bitterness, coercion, forced compliance, and perpetual unrest.

He didn't believe the United States was an irredeemable capitalistic monstrosity. He believed in what the founding fathers envisioned.

He would not support this.

People Fight Back

Here are a few old and new examples of people fighting against and mocking CRT ideas. If this article has made you worried, these videos will give you some hope.

Conclusion

It is truly insane how far this has gotten. Our social tapestry is still in knots, so how do we unravel it?

Here’s what I like to remember: most people know better. We’ve already befriended, intermingled, fallen in love with, immersed ourselves in, and discovered people different than us, and we’ve realized that despite differences, people are just people.

The reason this is so difficult to fight against, and the reason so many people fear speaking out, is that the problem is extremely complex. It has been set up as a trap where if someone opposes the ideas of CRT, they prove its claims. But, the cat is starting to come out of the bag.

That’s why, more than anything now, people need to speak up about this. People need to understand why this is an ugly cause masquerading as a just one. For many, sharing their opinion is painful, difficult, and even hazardous to their livelihood.

But if enough people did say something, then the zeitgeist could shift. We could all hit the world with a divine punch of truth and brotherhood.

To reiterate, if you think CRT and all this wokeness is wrong, you’re not alone, and you’re not a monster.

A final message for the true believer:

Fixed aspects of identity as the defining qualities of individuals is a sickening and absurd idea.

“If you care, you have to be an “‘antiracist’”. Bullshit.

The only thing you care about is your ideology. Your attempts to make the world a better place are asinine, childish, delusional, pathetic, and destructive.

You are not a revolutionary. You are not marching with Martin Luther King. Your cause is not progressive. It is regressive.

And, from the bottom of my American heart, keep your disgusting ideas away from children.