A few months ago, within the span of about a week, two separate people texted me and asked me what my opinion of Critical Race Theory (CRT) was and if I would ever consider writing a few blog posts on it. My answer was simple: I don’t really know enough about it to spout my opinion on social media (enough people are doing that already), and even if I had researched it a bit to form an educated opinion, I don’t know if I would want to chance sharing my opinion on it on social media. I think I specifically said, “That one is just too hot to handle right now.”
But dag-nabit, that seed was now planted in my brain, and the more I watched people on the political Left and political Right shout at each other over CRT, the more I found myself thinking, “Maybe I should try to read up on it a bit.” After all, I just had a hard time believing the blanket claims of both sides of the aisle were wholly accurate. Surely, whether or not you are a Communist or white supremacist does not solely depend on your conclusions regarding CRT.
So, I ended up buying and reading three books on CRT: (1) Critical Race Theory by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, (2) White Fragility by Robin DeAngelo, and (3) How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi. Now that I’ve read them, marked up, and taken some notes on each book, and because I suffer from this odd debilitating tendency to try to address really controversial issues, I thought I’d throw caution to the wind and write a blog series on the topic of CRT, focusing on what I’ve learned in these three books.
Whenever I do a book analysis series, I don’t know up front how many posts I will end up writing. To be honest, I don’t know if I am really going to want to spend that much time on this topic. Like I said earlier, the very topic is “hot to the touch,” so I’m a bit apprehensive to do it. Nevertheless, at this point, I imagine I might write three posts on Critical Race Theory, and then two posts each on White Fragility and How to Be an Antiracist. Now, Critical Race Theory really is an explanation of what critical race theory is and what its main tenets are. Therefore, these first three posts will be largely explanatory, although I will obviously give some of my observations on the way. If you want to form an opinion of CRT, you have to first know what it actually is—hopefully these first three posts will help in that department.
With that said, let’s jump right into the book Critical Race Theory and hope the water isn’t too scalding!
Chapter 1: Introduction
The introductory chapter of Critical Race Theory spells out in broad terms what CRT is: It is the study of “the relationships among race, racism, and power” (3). Or more specifically, it studies how political, legal, and cultural power affects different racial groups and promotes racism. Now, to be clear, if your first reaction to that is to say, “Well, sure, we still have racism in our society and we need to continue to try address it when it crops up in our society,” I would say I agree with you, but CRT (as we will see) goes much further than that.
Right off the bat in this chapter, the authors note a number of things they are either critical of or outright reject. They are critical of the traditional civil rights movement of Martin Luther King Jr., for example, because it sought to bring about slow, incremental change—that is not good enough for CRT. They are also highly critical of things like equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and the neutral principles of Constitutional law. In short, CRT rejects the very foundations of Western democracy. They believe these things are really just tools in the “white system” that are used to ensure the patriarchal domination of whites and the oppression of minority groups.
If I can put it this way, CRT is not saying that America has had a racist past and still suffers from the fallout of that racist past, therefore we need to work to make sure we continue to form that “more perfect union” and live up to those original, Constitutional ideals and values that everyone is created equal. Rather, CRT is saying that the very American system—the Constitution, the legal system, everything—is racist to its core. It was constructed by racist white men to ensure their power. Therefore, that very system needs to be changed. That is why CRT is critical of the original civil rights movement—it tried to bring about change from within that racist system. CRT says that is a fool’s errand because the system will always find a way to co-opt any reform movement to further ensure its own power.
Critical Race Theory lays out five basic tenets of CRT:
(1) Racism is ordinary—It isn’t the exception, but rather the rule in society. It is at the root of the way everything is done in everyday business.
(2) The system itself is fundamentally a system of “white over color”—This is perhaps the biggest point of contention most people have with CRT. For it sees racism not so much as racist acts that individual people might do, but rather as the basis for the very American system we all live in. Therefore, if you are white, you may feel you are individually not racist, the fact is you are living within a racist system, and you are therefore complicit in the racism of the system.
(3) Race isn’t biological—Rather, the concept of races is based on societal relations, sometimes determined by labor markets. For example, back in the 1600s, settlers in the “new world” needed laborers to work in the fields, so they got slaves from Africa and justified it by saying Africans were “blacks” who were of a different biological race, were therefore less human than white people.
(4) Intersectionality/Antiessentialism—No human being has a single, easily stated, unitary identity. This actually is pretty obvious: I am a man, I am of European descent, I am heterosexual—there’s three right there.
(5) The unique voice of color—This basically means that when it comes to the topic of racism, the people of color who have actually experienced racism are in a better, more informed position to speak about it.
Chapter 2: Hallmark CRT Themes
The second chapter further spells out, as the subtitle states, some of the “hallmark themes” of CRT. The first thing the chapter points out, though, is that there are essentially two different groups of critical race theorists. The first group is the idealists, who seek to change the systems of images and attitudes. I understand this to mean that they seek ways to portray minorities and people of color in a more positive light in things like advertising, marketing, social media, movies, etc. The thinking is that since people tend to respond to other groups based on how they’ve seen those groups portrayed, make sure those other groups are portrayed in a more positive light.
The second group is the realists, or economic determinists, who seek to change the very economic system of capitalism. They see capitalism as an inherently racist and oppressive system that needs to be overturned. When critics of CRT accuse it of being Marxist or Communist, it is this subgroup to which they are referring. On that point, when it comes to the “realists,” I don’t see how one can avoid that conclusion that they are Marxists.
As for the hallmarks of CRT, the first one is the push for revisionist history. CRT openly advocates for revisionist history because it claims that the prevailing presentation of history in our society really is a “comforting majoritarian interpretation” that helps the white majority feel better about itself. To put it another way, CRT says that the way history is taught in America is really just a biased interpretative narrative of white people. Therefore, history needs to be revised and reinterpreted to reflect the experiences of minorities. Two examples of this should suffice. First, there is Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. (Zinn isn’t an actual critical race theorist, but his work certainly reflects the same concept of the need for revisionist history). Second, there is the recent 1619 Project. Both works are rooted in the assumption that American history as it is usually presented comes from a patriarchal, white, colonialist perspective that seeks to downplay and ignore America’s racist and oppressive past.
Quite frankly, this is something I deeply question. First of all, Zinn really was a self-avowed Marxist, and his book has been pilloried by many historians for its inaccuracies and distortions. Second, the 1619 Project claims that the American Revolution was fought in order to preserve slavery. That is just historically nonsensical. In 1776, the British Empire was immersed in the slave trade and didn’t abolish it until 50 years later. Therefore, to claim that the colonies wanted to break away from England, a slave-trading empire, in order to prevent slavery from being abolished in the colonies is just absurd. Also, as a side note, the main author of the 1619 Project, Nikole Hannah-Jones, has gone on record stating that Cuba has the least racial inequality between black and white people in the western hemisphere, and that is largely due to the fact that, instead of being a capitalist country, it is socialist. That statement reflects the perspective of a CRT realist/economic determinist.
A third reason I question this particular hallmark of CRT is that when I look back at my schooling, in particular in regard to American History, the “racist sins” of America were openly addressed and taught. Simply put, the American history I was taught certainly didn’t try to downplay America’s past sins.
A second “hallmark” of CRT is its critique of liberalism—not just “liberals” or Democrats—but the overall American system of liberalism that champions the ideals of a colorblind society and neutral principles of Constitutional law. CRT doesn’t feel liberalism is able to adequately address America’s racial problems precisely because liberals “believe in equality, especially equal treatment for all persons, regardless of their different histories or current situations” (26). By contrast, CRT believes that “only aggressive, color-conscious efforts to change the way things are will do much to ameliorate misery” (27).
Thirdly, CRT is also suspicious of the concept of individual rights. Critical race theorists complain that “rights” in America have to do with procedural things (i.e. right to a fair trial), and not substantive things (i.e. right to food, housing, or education). They say that the problem with the system is that although it “applauds affording everyone equality of opportunity,” it “resists programs that assure equality of results” (29). This is a key thing to note: the difference between equality of opportunity and equity (equality of results). Equality of opportunity has been a traditional American value, and that is why America has been known as the “land of opportunity.” It says, “Come to America, the government will largely get out of your way and give you the opportunity for you to make what you want out of your life.” What CRT wants, though, is for the government to guarantee equal outcomes and results for all people.
Fourthly, CRT is critical of the very legal language used in our justice system. It claims that the very legal categories used are “capitalist” and thus are blind to concepts like intersectionality, interest convergence, microaggressions, antiessentialism, hegemony, hate speech, language rights, black-white binary, and jury nullification.
Fifthly, CRT is critical of the right to free speech when that speech is determined to be “hate speech” directed at minorities. Thus, it advocates for hate speech legislation. It doesn’t believe in the concept that one should combat hate speech with more speech because, it says that sometimes “it may be physically dangerous to talk back” (33). Besides, “much hate speech is simply not perceived as such at the time” (34). Therefore, CRT asks the question, “How can one talk back to messages, scripts, and stereotypes that are embedded in the minds of one’s fellow citizens and, indeed, the national psyche?” (34). Although this Critical Race Theory book doesn’t overtly say that CRT wants the government to deem certain kinds of speech as illegal hate speech, that certainly is the strong implication.
Conclusion Thus Far
As I said at the beginning of this post, the book Critical Race Theory seeks to simply explain what CRT is. Thus, my posts on the book will largely try to just distill the book’s main points and explanations. Although I will occasionally offer an opinion here and there, I am largely going to just make sure you, the reader, will be able to more clearly see what CRT actually is and what it actually advocates.
I’m certainly no expert but have only read a tiny bit on the subject of CRT.
Dr. Tom Osborne, formerly of the University of North Alabama History Department and also an ordained deacon in the Episcopal Church, presented a series of lectures in 2019 at the Florence-Lauderdale Public Library on the origins of the concept of race, in which he basically argued that modern ideas of race are a fairly recent development, dating back to the late 16th/early 17th centuries. They were based esp. in the 18th and 19th centuries on popular ideas taken as scientific fact which have since been proven to be nothing but pseudo-scientific nonsense.
The Eugenics Movement, pushed in Europe and the US by educated white liberals such as Francis Galton and Margaret Sanger, capitalized on these foundational ideas to argue for the supremacy of the WASP race and the sterilization (voluntarily if possible, by force if necessary) of.minorities, the poor, the mentally ill, etc. Several US states still have mandatory sterilization laws on their books. Even more sinister, at least to me, is the fact that liberal clergy in the US and Britain also championed these ideas. In the 1930s and 1940s the Nazis then took them to their extremes.
Certainly in antiquity, one might for example be a Greek, a Roman, a Persian or a Jew, but not an “African-Roman” or “Celtic-Roman:” or “Persian-Roman”
As for Zinn and 1619, both have been roundly condemned by professional, mainstream, academic historians, including many who would self-identify as liberal.
If memory serves, 1619 was primarily written by journalists at the New York Times.
Pax.
Lee.
Thank you for digging in and, as always, make it more palatable for the rest of us.