Most of us have heard of “critical race theory” (CRT) and know that it’s a bad thing, but few know exactly what it is. It’s imperative that we understand this grave danger, and what I would like to do in this week’s column is to make readers thoroughly acquainted with it and to set forward some objections to it.
The basic tenet of CRT is that “it’s all about race.” There is no such thing as a biological race. “Race” is purely a social construct, designed to oppress blacks. Almost all laws oppress blacks, even civil rights laws that claim to “help” them. Sound ridiculous? There’s even more. Women are also oppressed, especially black women. If someone is a black woman, she is doubly oppressed. This is called “intersectionality.”
As you would expect, CRT isn’t supported by evidence. To ask for evidence would also be oppressive. Instead, advocates of CRT tell stories in which their account of things turns out true. Fiction becomes fact.
CRT’s reduction of everything to “race” parallels the Marxist reduction of history to class oppression. In an excellent article, David Brady, Jr. explains this parallel. He analyzes in particular the work of Ibrahim X. Kendi, a leading contemporary defender of CRT:“Kendi is not an original thinker so much as a wannabe-philosopher who repaints bunk ideas to drum up societal conflict. Kendi’s general philosophical thesis could be summed up simply as “Everyone is racist, and that extends to all of society. History can be understood as a white supremacist culture getting better at hiding its underlying racism.”
Kendi and other critical race theorists theorize that, throughout history, so-called advancements in the welfare of racial minorities are merely a white supremacist culture’s success at better hiding its racism. One can summarize it best with a quote from the thriller The Usual Suspects: “The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.”
The devil, for Kendi, would be “white supremacy” in culture. Every so-called advancement—from the outlawing of slavery to the end of Jim Crow laws—is simply this devil getting better at hiding itself.
This is not an original idea on Kendi’s part in any respect. One can trace these ideas back to the philosophical ancestor to critical race theory: Karl Marx. When one analyzes critical race theory, it becomes abundantly clear that it is a portrayal of Marxist conflict and power theory but with the dimensions of race applied rather than class. Rather than the bourgeoise class oppressing the proletariat, it is the white class oppressing the nonwhite classes of society.
A fundamental aspect of Marxist theory is that of the substructure, or base, and the superstructures of society. Marx posited that the fundamental relations in society are economic ones, between the working class and the exploitive capitalist class. The base creates the superstructure, which includes art, politics, religion, and other social relations that supposedly exist to reinforce the base. This is where Marx’s famed line “Religion is the opiate of the masses” comes from. Religion, as an aspect of the superstructure, exists to draw eyes away from the social relations that matter in the minds of Marxists.
The critical race theory about the “white supremacy inherent in culture” is much the same. The base for the theorists is race relations. These theorists believe that the oppressive white class has constructed society to necessarily maintain a power dynamic over the nonwhite classes. Political achievements, no matter how much they may benefit racial minorities, belong as part of the superstructure, and thus they must be some protective shell over the true social dynamics.
The Emancipation Proclamation, for example, would be seen as a means of preserving the base of society. Any and all political results short of revolution against the base are simply adaptations of the superstructure to protect the base. Kendi’s ideology ultimately becomes a revolutionary one. There cannot be a true advancement against “white supremacist culture” unless there is a true revolution, according to the critical race theorists.
