A very well written piece, albeit there are some words the left may need a dictionary to understand what he saying. LOL. A mostly retired trial lawyer who began as a Marine JAG Officer 1975-1982.
He poses a great question we all should be asking today, and does a great job answering it. Worth the read! Thank you Michael for sending it to me.
“What is wrong with critical race theory?”
Once the exclusive domain of deep thinking university professors, critical race theory became a part of our national conversation when the Trump administration ordered federal agencies to stop conducting workplace training based on critical race theory and opened an inquiry into the City of Seattle’s use of it. The training is in fact political indoctrination and the public ought to know what it is and why it should be resisted.
Critical theory sprung largely from the Marxist scholars of the Frankfurt School in 1930’s Germany. In 1848 Karl Marx had introduced the world to an analysis of social relations characterized by oppression when he argued in The Communist Manifesto and Capital that working class laborers were oppressed by those in power, the owners of capital. He argued for class consciousness, and in advocating radical change, he famously argued the workers had nothing to lose but their chains. 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. 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 power was used to perpetuate oppression.
Critical race theory is a variant of what began in the 1970’s as critical legal studies. Critical legal studies looked at our laws with the assumption that law oppresses people, especially minorities, and examined how power was used to create and enforce the law. Restrictive racial covenants in property deeds was an example of the use of law to perpetuate racial oppression. Denying women the right to vote and prosecuting women like Susan B. Anthony in 1872 when she defied the law and cast a vote was an example of the use of law to perpetuate gender oppression.
Women gained the right to vote in Washington in 1910, Wyoming before that, and the US Supreme Court declared restrictive racial covenants were illegal and unenforceable everywhere in 1948. Nonetheless, and not withstanding adoption of the 14th, 15th and 19th Amendments and a web of state and federal legislation outlawing discrimination based solely on race or gender, critical legal theorists concluded that the power of the oppressors was embedded in our political structures and infects our laws today to perpetuate bias and discrimination against minorities and other marginalized communities. As Samuel Gregg puts it in “Liberalism’s Civilization Problem,” Law and Liberty, September 7, 2020, the left’s “insistence that most of the West’s achievements are primarily masks for endless oppression largely flows from the left’s generally negative view of Western civilization” (emphasis mine). In this dystopia there is no arc of justice, instead, US history is irredeemably rotten to the core.
Critical race theory proceeds from the fallacy that a binary of white and black, or white and everybody else, is the only appropriate frame of reference for a discussion of race. Applying Ockham’s Razor to inconvenient facts, this binary ignores the history of racial bias against the Irish, Italian, Jewish people and many others ordinarily thought of as white. Starting with this 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 they set out to look for it. Ignoring all the steps we have taken to eliminate racial prejudice from our laws and institutions, practitioners of critical race theory rediscovered what Stokely Carmichael described as “institutional racism” in his 1967 book, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation.
It’s called systemic racism today, and its corollary theory holds that implicit bias exists even among those who deny any bias at all. Indeed, 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 and dangerous features of critical race theory. These are not mere thought crimes, they are unthought crimes. And the unrepentant ominously resemble dissidents in the former Soviet Union or the unruly psychiatric patients in the film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
The Trump administration’s recent Executive Order and inquiry into Seattle’s work place training alleges that only White employees are required to admit to and denounce their racist impulses. At first blush the required training appears to violate state and federal laws prohibiting discrimination based solely on race.
Aside from the totalitarian impulse to control what people think and the words people speak, two fundamental issues should make us wary of the growth of this ideology. First, it is no accident these theorists too often are White academics and legislators. Robin Diangelo is a White academic whose popular 2018 book, “White Fragility,” is a lecture to White people about how they got race all wrong and ignorantly so.
White men legislated poverty programs in the 1960’s that in the end further impoverished Black communities. So much so that White men led by President Bill Clinton and then Senator Joe Biden legislated welfare and criminal justice reform that was directed against the Black community. The reform ended “welfare as we know it” as Clinton put it and incarcerated large numbers of Black men, “super-predators” who needed to be brought to heel as Ms. Clinton put it to an all White audience in New Hampshire. White folks telling Black folks what they need is a not so subtle form of oppression. White folks telling White folks what they shouldn’t think or say is almost as bad. Isn’t it time for White folk to stop telling Black folk what they need?
Second, the critical race ideology claims all White people are infected with the racism disease and need help regardless of who they are or where they grew up. In Diangelos’ world there are no individuals, no person is unique; instead, as a “race” we produce and reproduce racism in lockstep in every aspect of our daily lives whether we know it or not. All notions of freedom are illusory. The chains that bind us are no longer mere economic shackles, they define our very being which is, not coincidentally, not capable of redemption.
It 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.
As Galatians 6:7 taught us, “whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.”
Michael J. Bond
Copyright 2020
Postscript: I’ll be off the net for a week, going fishing. Need a break. Meanwhile,let’s all pray for President Trump and his bride!!!
Originally posted 2020-10-03 15:51:40.
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By Rabbi Roland Gittelsohn
