The Rebranding of America - From the ‘Land of the Free’ to ‘Systemically Racist’

An Objective Look at Critical Race Theory and Identity Politics in General

I’m guessing we’ve all had some awkward human interactions over the last few years (and yes I’m talking even pre-COVID).  It might have been someone telling you about a secret government cabal, talking about “decolonizing” something, explaining what “cisgender” or “cisnormativity” means or describing an inanimate object as racist, with a sort of casualness that leaves you feeling like you must have missed something in grade school.  We’ve all been there.  People have become breathtakingly sensitive too, so it’s not like you can just start asking people to explain this stuff.  Ask too many questions and you might be accused of questioning a person’s “lived experience”, or worse.  

There’s also no adjustment period whatsoever.  A new idea will be invented one day by some professor or journalist and then seemingly overnight, it will become the only socially acceptable position (at least until some college student or social media influencer thinks of something even more “progressive”).  A few weeks later (it feels like), people will speak of the new idea with this sanctimonious tone in their voice as if you are morally defunct if you don’t agree with them.  Beliefs which had previously stood for millennia will be declared primitive, ignorant or bigoted in the blink of an eye. 

At a time when people seem to be playing fast and loose with words that used to have meaning, calling America “racist” has become cliché.  For some context, the appearance of the term “white supremacy” in the New York Times and Washington Post has increased by 4,196% and 5,931% respectively between 2010 and 2019.  Usage of the term “racist” has similarly increased by 638% and 514% in the same papers during that period.  David Rozado published this data as part of a statistical analysis of the use of “prejudice-denoting words” in media, finding that all of the prejudice-denoting words they analyzed have gone viral in the last decade.  Can you imagine what the figures would have looked like if they had included 2020 and 2021?  Remarkably, they found that this phenomenon actually coincided with a decrease in “overt expression of prejudice” within our society.  This trend also predated the emergence of Donald Trump into politics.  While they found that public opinion is shifting towards the perception of racism, this shift has lagged behind the changes in media coverage- not the other way around.  In other words, the media isn’t simply covering a sudden proliferation of racism or even the public’s perception of it.  When New York Times Executive Editor Dean Bacquet famously gathered his troops in the newsroom in late 2019 to share his “belief” that “race in the next year is going to be a huge part of the American story”, he wasn’t making a prediction.  He was making a promise.  And the groundwork had already been laid.

Declaring America “systemically racist” or a “white supremacy culture” has evolved into a manner of pronouncing your own enlightenment (and also a lucrative business model as you will see).  If you aren’t familiar with these terms, just think of them as catch all terms invented to lump folks who show no signs of overt racism in with actual racists.  This is about the point in the analysis that a sane person trying to nail down a definition of racism realizes they are trying to hit a moving target.  The only logical conclusion is that the quest to label everything as racist leaves the term utterly devoid of meaning.  But if it was that simple and everyone spotted this fatal flaw, I wouldn’t have bothered writing this post. 

Where It All Came From…

Everything I just described is the progeny of a 50-year old academic theory called “Critical Race Theory” or “CRT” that emerged in law schools in the 1970’s and really started gaining steam in academia in the 1990’s.  At its core, CRT is based on the premise that racism is systemic or structural, as opposed to a mere collection of overtly racist acts or actors.  CRT finds racism in our laws, governing bodies, courts, schools and of course, the police.  The beauty of this claim is that it brushes off the need for evidence.  CRT simply assumes that racism is everywhere.  Its proponents argue that the system itself perpetuates racial inequalities, by emphasizing equal opportunity rather than equal results[1].  Disparate outcomes will only be explained by racism.  The only rational conclusion at that point is to burn the whole thing down.  In fact, if you hear the word “dismantle” used three or four times in a sentence, there’s a good chance you’re on the receiving end of a CRT-themed sermon.

Sadly, virtually all of the activists who worked within the system and advocated non-violent measures are necessary casualties of the CRT worldview.  They critique the Civil Rights movement and its leaders, such as Martin Luther King, Jr.  They mock Brown v. Board of Education (the case that desegregated American schools) as a ruse to perpetuate white supremacy.  Even the election of Barrack Obama, the first Black President, was described by a leading antiracist scholar as a stunt by Whites to move into a post-racial era where they’d never be held to account for past racism (which occurred mostly before they were even born).  Incremental progress is seen as failure.  Achievements of Black people are often written off as mere symbolic gestures.  This is not a safe place for feel-good stories.  Many enthusiasts of this ideology are in it more for the fight than the future of the country. 

Today, CRT permeates subjects beyond just race and can be applied to virtually any ideology rooted in victimhood or oppression.  CRT is also anti-capitalist.  CRT emphasizes ideas like intersectionality, which is the basis for analyzing oppression across identity groups such as race, gender, sexuality and religion.  It also addresses essentialism, which is the basis for intergroup competition between racial subgroups.  Another central tenet of CRT is this inherent deemphasis of truth or objectivity.  After all, if these concepts are mere biproducts of a system you reject as racist, it is easy to dismiss them as more rotten fruit.  A recurring theme of CRT in its real-world application is not subjecting these ideas to any real intellectual scrutiny.  In some cases, we are told we can’t challenge an idea because it is someone’s lived experience.  In other cases, disagreement will merely be cast aside as racist or even a “White man demand” if your White privilege is compounded by being biologically male.  If all else fails, deductive reasoning itself must be dismissed in order to preserve the central tenet of the CRT creed- all things in America are racist.  

Ideas rooted in this ideology have acquired a litany of new names (some more derisive than others) from people on both sides of the political spectrum- wokeness, antiracism, identity politics, cancel culture, or even liberalism and progressivism (although these latter two feel like misnomers to me).  The question I’m interested in is why are so many people falling for this stuff and why did it take many people so long to notice it or at least put a name on it?  Let’s start by taking a look at what’s going on in K-12 schools, since nobody paid much attention to CRT until the pandemic hit and parents around the country got a front row seat (on zoom) to what their children were learning.  After that, we’ll work our way back to looking at ways CRT has influenced our culture and the prevalent media narratives long before it was being taught to school children.

Back to the future- reintroducing race in schools.

Here are a few examples (out of hundreds) of things that are driving parents crazy around the country.  We now have third grade teachers requiring eight year old’s to acknowledge that they live in a “dominant culture” of “white, middle class, cisgender, educated, able-bodied, Christian[s]” and requiring them to rank the various aspects of their identity on an oppression scale (so-called “intersectionality” if you’re familiar with the vernacular).  We have schools requiring children to break out into groups based on their race, religion and gender with parents berating each other over which group their respective children belong in.  We even have schools going the extra yard and reportedly trying to force (as a condition of graduation) a biracial student to accept his white privilege (on account of his deceased father having been White) and instructing him to “unlearn his Black mother’s Judeo-Christian values”.  Materials with titles like “Decentering Whiteness at Home and In Your Family”, designed to aid children in sniffing out whiteness in their homes, have become commonplace.  There’s even a video titled “Woke Kindergarten” exposing kindergarteners to anti-police protests and the idea of feeling “safe when there are no police”.  Mobilizing young children and their parents against each other based on the color of their skin and their religious values feels like a mistake we already made once in this country and should have learned from.  

California ups the ante on racialized education.

California’s Ethnic Studies Curriculum is probably the most high-profile recent example of radical CRT-themed curriculum.  When you find terms like “hxtrstories”, “cisheteropatriarchy”, “hybridities” and “neplantas” sprinkled in with the incessant nods to white supremacy, racism and transphobia, you know you are wading chest deep in the dogma of Critical Race Theory.  Even the Los Angeles Times Editorial Board (not exactly a bastion of conservatism) joined the chorus in mocking it as “jargon-filled and all too PC”.  There is a certain type of “scholar” who believes that if you dress up a dumb idea with enough terms that no normal person is familiar with, the idea will somehow seem more profound.  My sense is that these pseudo intellectuals just gravitate towards this ideology.

The initial version of the California curriculum was heavily criticized for anti-Semitism, oscillating between omitting Jews from history and telling stories about them only from the perspective of Middle Eastern Muslims.  The message seemed to be that despite enduring a Holocaust in the last century and as much racism as any group on earth, Jews had somehow gained privilege and didn’t warrant consideration among other oppressed peoples.  Emily Benedek wrote a tremendous takedown of the curriculum titled “California is Cleansing Jews from History”.  

The initial version of the California curriculum also placed significant emphasis on revolutionaries who resorted to violence, including favorable descriptions of murderous dictators like Cambodia’s Pol Pot (who murdered a quarter of the Cambodian population in the 1970’s).  Fortunately, the final version of the curriculum adopted this year was revised to acknowledge the Cambodian genocide at the hands of the murderous dictator.  The revised 437 pages of sample lesson plans still include 18 pages of lesson plans on Cambodian oppression, but oddly the vast majority of these lessons focus on the oppression of Cambodians by the United States. The curriculum was also criticized from the beginning for downplaying and degrading the roles of peaceful activists, using terms like “docile” and “passive” to describe advocates of non-violent activism.  This could be excused as a coincidence until you realize that Martin Luther King, Jr. was excluded from a list of 154 most influential people of color. Clarence Jones, who was a speech writer for Dr. King wrote a compelling letter calling the curriculum a “perversion of history” and noting its complete failure to highlight the accomplishments of non-violent Black activists.  To back up his argument, I searched the adopted curriculum and only found a single reference to Martin Luther King, Jr. that isn’t even relevant to the lesson plan.  

While the final curriculum adopted in California is a vast improvement over the original version- having removed much of the anti-Semitism and emphasis on political violence- they reached this point only after a year of public outrage and a governor’s veto of the original curriculim. It is difficult not to wonder about the motives of the people who drafted the curriculum at this point.  Just to be clear, reasonably drafted ethnic studies curriculums could be an amazing teaching resource to highlight the achievements of Americans of all backgrounds and to bring students from different cultures together.  As it stands right now, you could probably learn more about Civil Rights and overcoming oppression by reading Martin Luther King, Jr’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail than you will by reading the entire California Ethnic Studies Curriculum.  Sadly, that document didn’t make the cut.

The Assault on Meritocracy (and Math)

While some educators are creating propaganda, others are turning their attention to eliminating academic programs that are actually working.  As CRT proponents wage war on the very idea of meritocracy, accelerated programs have found their way to the chopping block.  There is a growing belief that “tracking”, which is simply grouping children based on their academic abilities, merely perpetuates racism.    Never mind the countless studies showing that virtually all students perform better in this environment or the fact that the expansion of Advanced Placement programs led to a 370% increase in low-income children taking advanced classes.  Fawning over the notion of sorting children based on the color of their skin, while refusing to acknowledge differences in their academic abilities feels like regression- not progress.

Other states are simply eliminating academic standards altogether.  Oregon just suspended its proficiency requirements for reading, writing and math for the next five years.  Naturally, the governor’s communications director said this would benefit “Black, Latino, Latina, Latinx, Indigenous, Asian, Pacific Islander, Tribal and students of color”.  No programs to actually benefit these children were put into place in conjunction with removing the proficiency requirements for high school graduation.  In fact, Oregon Live notes that so far, the only consequence of this decision has been schools cancelling workshops intended to increase proficiency in these basic subjects.  How will these students benefit from being granted a high school diploma without the ability to read, write and do basic math at a 9th or 10th grade level?  Call me old-fashioned, but I still believe that lowering the bar is taking the easy way out.

The field of mathematics is especially facing increased scrutiny.  California’s Instructional Quality Commission pays homage to “A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction”, which shines a light on the racism they say flows from our “white supremacy culture”.  As evidence, they cite racist traditions like the concept of objectivity and getting the right answer to a math problem.  It is breathtaking how many times the terms “white supremacy”, “racism” and “antiracism” appear in a mathematics curriculum guide.  California isn’t alone here.  The city of Seattle actually has a framework for “Math Ethnic Studies”- two subjects I didn’t think anybody could blend together.  The school board instructs math teachers to “identify how math has been and continues to be used to oppress and marginalize people and communities of color” and “analyze the ways in which ancient mathematical knowledge has been appropriated by Western culture”.  This is supposed to be happening in a math class mind you.  How do we rationalize wasting valuable class time on this kind of thing when we are already falling behind many other countries in math? 

Critical Race Theory is a racket for consultants.

There are thousands of examples of CRT and other “woke” ideas being taught in K-12 schools (and you can find a good collection of them here), but I think you get the point.  The good news for racial equity and diversity consultants is that brainwashing kids has blossomed into a very lucrative industry.  A school district in Maryland paid a racial equity consultant $454,000 to conduct an anti-racism audit.  Louden County Virginia- a district better known for suspending a Christian teacher for expressing his preference for using biological gender to address elementary school students- paid a California-based firm $422,000 to perform a similar audit of their school district.  Many teachers would need to work for a decade to earn what a consultant gets paid for a single CRT audit.  You can see where these schools’ priorities lie.

Who’s confused about Critical Race Theory?  The Mainstream Media or educators?

I’ve read so many of these stories about schools lately (and heard just as many from friends around the country) and the phrase “Critical Race Theory” (or “CRT” for short) keeps popping up.  MSNBC’s Joy Reid has assured us that parents criticizing CRT in schools were imagining the whole controversy and dismissed them as QAnon supporters.  If Reid is telling the truth, then there are some confused teachers and school board officials out there, since many of them seem to believe they are in fact teaching CRT. 

The Teachers’ Unions seem to (mostly) believe teachers are teaching CRT…

The National Education Association, which is the largest teachers union in the country, vowed to teach CRT in the 14,000 school districts where the organization operates.  They even committed funding to conduct opposition research into opponents of CRT.  If this strikes you as being too political for a teachers’ organization, your instincts are probably correct.  Theirs are another story.  This piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education outlines decades of reports on elite higher education programs (i.e. the schools that educate our teachers) being inundated with CRT-themed concepts.  One report from as far back as 2004 found that:

“These schools are often trying to teach a particular ideology – that traditional knowledge is repressive by its very nature- without directing students to any substantial readings that question the educational implications of this view”. 

After reading that article, the villanization of mathematics made more sense.  As did the fact that the superintendent of San Diego schools- who paid a racial equity consultant to tell the city’s teachers they were “spirit murdering” Black students- was recently appointed to be the deputy secretary of education in the Biden Administration.  

California definitely thinks their teachers are teaching CRT…

In California, when one of the drafters of the aforementioned Ethnic Studies Curriculum was asked about CRT, he said:

“Ethnic studies without critical race theory is not ethnic studies. It would be like a science class without the scientific method then. There is no critical analysis of systems of power and experiences of these marginalized groups without critical race theory”. 

As an aside, his vision of a world without the scientific method is not as far-fetched as he might think.  Decades ago, CRT scholars raised alarms about the scientific method (as what they called “a specifically male criteria for evaluation”) on similar grounds to the modern objection to mathematics.  I’m not here to argue semantics with the guy though.  I’m going to take his word for it that they are teaching CRT in California. 

Some folks in Missouri don’t want parents to know they’re teaching CRT…

The media’s claims of CRT being a mere conspiracy theory seemed to ring hollow on the school board in a conservative district in Missouri, which reportedly paid a consultant $15,000 to counsel them on the finer points of teaching CRT to their students without raising any alarms with parents that they were in fact teaching CRT.  This of course came only after the school board dutifully proclaimed to parents (tongue in cheek I presume) at a public meeting that they were not in fact teaching CRT (you can watch the video of both here).  The board and some of their schools’ history teachers received nuggets of wisdom such as the following for their taxpayers’ hard-earned money:

“All of our wars was about freedom, violence,” he said. “But yet, when Black people say, ‘Hey … we need to take over, man. We need to burn this place down, we need to do this, we need to do that.’ ‘Oh no, you should do non-violence to achieve freedom.’ It’s silly. It’s prejudice.” 

While this statement is technically true I suppose, do we really want to raise our children to be violent revolutionaries? 

First it was math, now the advocacy of non-violence is racist.  This is almost as confusing as the recently coined phrase “silence is violence”.  I’m beginning to think some people are using the “racist” label overzealously (and the lost meaning of the word “violence” may be a casualty in its wake), but let’s take a step back.  Perhaps we should simply denounce violence no matter who commits it.  Now there’s a novel idea, if you can bring yourself to overlook its apparent “prejudice”.  Don’t you think it’s also possible that winning the American Revolution and defeating the Nazis in World War II called for more drastic measures of violence than the academic pursuit of a more racialized view of history and civics?

And this lady on the PTA in Virginia seems ready to go to war to protect CRT.

Indeed, nothing seems to trigger animosity quite like challenging CRT, which is remarkable for an idea we are said to be imagining.  The full breath and scope of the CRT ideology is summed up in the words of a member of the Virginia Parent-Teachers Association who wished actual death upon parents who oppose CRT:

“Let’s deny this off-key band of people that are anti-education, anti-teacher, anti-equity, anti-history, anti-racial reckoning, anti-opportunities, anti-help people, anti-diversity, anti-platform, anti-science, anti-change agent, anti-social justice, anti-health care, anti-worker, anti-LGBTQ+, anti-children, anti-health care, anti-worker, anti-environment, anti-admissions policy change, anti-inclusion, anti-live-and-let live people. Let them die. [emphasis added]”

Just look at the list of assumptions she is making about these people who merely question the merits of racially obsessed indoctrination of their children.  And wishing death upon them also feels like a bit much. 

“Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar” – Sigmund Freud

What is the source of this confusion?  You have educators all over the country believing they are at least applying CRT concepts to school curriculum and countless parents fighting against it.  At the same time, we have many media sources telling us this is just another conspiracy theory and racist right-wing dog whistle.  Are we to believe that these teachers and union reps are all confused about what CRT is?  I think some folks are overthinking this one.  Given the number of examples of strange school curriculum we are seeing right now, I personally find these arguments the media is making about CRT to be disingenuous and insulting to my intelligence. 

Look, I’ve read many of the original CRT materials and I am admittedly skeptical that many schools are literally including the foundational texts of Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Richard Delgado and the countless other law professors to third graders.  I’m a lawyer and this stuff is dense and dry even for me.  But that’s like arguing that a student who takes a physics course isn’t studying the work of Albert Einstein because she isn’t literally reading the notes from Einstein’s lab journal.  Anyone who thinks the ideology behind CRT is not at the heart of the race-obsessed school curriculums we keep hearing about is either being intentionally misleading or has not read any of these CRT materials.  The concepts being pushed in these law journal articles are the basis of nearly every conversation we are having about race (or identity politics in general) right now, whether its school curriculum, the 1619 Project, media narratives or many popular authors like Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo.  I would suggest that we simply take educators’ word for it when they tell us they are using CRT. 

It’s NOT just the schools.

Antiracism literature is like Critical Race Theory for grown ups

It should be evident that CRT’s influence doesn’t stop at the elementary school door.  Ibram X. Kendi has emerged as the modern face of the antiracist movement, with academics and most mainstream media sources seeming to cite his name with reverence reflexively any time the topic of race arises.  If you want to blame something on racism and you just can’t explain why, Kendi has mastered the art of calling it racist anyway.  Kendi’s best-selling book How to Be an Antiracist reads like an anthology of CRT concepts.  He is quick to diagnose systemic racism (and he legitimately raises some concerning points about the inequalities faced by Black communities), but we might want to be wary of his solutions.  When Kendi recently appeared on a New York Times podcast hosted by Ezra Klein, it was evident that Klein was trying to serve him up softball questions to make him look like the guy who has all the answers- but the task quickly proved to be impossible.  At one point, when Kendi was casually dismissing people’s beliefs that they needed police (and well-funded police), Klein pointed out some basic statistics about the well documented (positive) effect policing has on crime rates, particularly the reduction of murders in Black communities.  He noted that adding ten police officers to a community is proven to prevent roughly one homicide.  Klein then hit him with the question that turned his antiracist policies inside out: 

“in a lot of these communities now, if you reduce police officers, I think there is reason to think crime will go up and that that will have a disparate impact on Black Americans. And so if that then raises racial inequality in crime victims, where does that end up under your framework?”

This is the kind of dreaded question antiracists hate to answer, because it forces them to acknowledge the harmful impacts of their proposed policies (like defund the police) on real life Black people.  When Kendi failed to respond coherently, Klein asked the question again, worded slightly differently.  Kendi drifted off into an esoteric diatribe that demonstrated his tradecraft in Critical Race Theory:

“I don’t know if I necessarily agree with scholars who make the case that Black communities have criminogenic conditions. And the reason I’m saying this is because what is criminalized has historically been based on race and power and even how certain criminalized or decriminalized acts have also been racialized.”

The crime at issue in this conversation was literally murder.  I cannot think of a crime that is more universally accepted to be a crime than the act of murder.  Using sophisticated phrases like “criminogenic conditions” doesn’t obscure this reality.  The best comment I saw on this interview came from Rich Lowry, who quipped that “it’s a cliché that no battle plan survives contact with the enemy; Kendi’s premises are so deeply flawed that they can’t even survive contact with a mildly challenging progressive podcast host”.  Knowing that Fox News would be the only safe haven left for him in media if he exposed the absurdity of Kendi’s argument, Klein politely submitted.  Like bowing to the sensei, Klein conceded “I think it’s maybe like we disagree here, but I’m not fully sure we do given things you said earlier in our conversation”.  Crisis averted.  We’ll chalk this one up to an accidental take-down of Kendi.

What if elected officials are the problem?  Kendi has a solution for that.

For those who can’t bear the thought of being governed by the racist masses and their chosen leaders, Kendi proposes that we amend the Constitution to create a new federal agency known as the Department of Anti-Racism composed of appointed (rather than elected) experts in “antiracism”.  This department would be in charge of reviewing every law passed at the local, state or federal level to ensure it would not contribute to racial inequality.  They would also be in charge of surveilling the behavior of elected officials for racism.  This is the classic case of someone who believes democracy is sacred right up to the point where they realize most people disagree with them.  To envision how this proposed Department of Antiracism might work, just consider some of the things we already discussed that have been deemed racist, such as math.  We would be at the mercy of a handful of academics, who literally think everything is racist, to run the country.  But what might that vision look like? 

Trying to be objective here, let’s turn to Kendi’s own words.  He writes that “the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.”  On economics, he adds the obligatory tip of the cap to socialism when he writes “in order to truly be anti-racist, you also have to truly be anti-capitalist….and in order to truly be anti-capitalist, you have to be antiracist, because they’re interrelated”[2].  Amending the U.S. Constitution to literally mandate discrimination (but only as a few unelected academics deem fit of course) and abandoning capitalism feel like policy paradigms that won’t end well for anybody (although getting appointed to that board sounds like a good gig). 

Taking antiracism to the next level

Whereas Kendi prefers to simply diagnose racism in the abstract, another leading antiracist Robin DiAngelo takes the gloves off and takes the fight to White people in her best-selling book White Fragility.  DiAngelo, who is herself a White person, makes bold declarations such as “white identity is inherently racist” and that a “white supremacist worldview” is the “bedrock of our society and its institutions”.  She cites questioning these notions as a tell-tale sign of white supremacy.  She rejoices that “entering the conversation with this understanding is freeing because it allows us to focus on how—rather than if—our racism is manifest.”  Talk about skipping the proof and jumping straight to the conclusions.  I can see why she finds this type of reasoning convenient (who wouldn’t?), but what happened to giving people the benefit of the doubt and acknowledging their humanity?  These types of trials for identifying white supremacists don’t seem much more reliable than submerging people in water and seeing if they float.

When not being racist became (wait for it) … racist…

The push to find racism and white supremacy behind every door really dilutes the meaning of terms that used to be used to describe truly terrible actions.  When you see “colorblindness” listed as a form of white supremacy on an instructional material actually used in schools, it just feels like the concept of white supremacy has been diluted to the point where it has less meaning.  And of course, this is precisely the point.  Kendi makes it clear that neutrality is not an option when he refers to being “not racist” as a mere “mask for racism”.  We saw this reasoning first hand when Tom Hanks got caught in the cross-fire after writing an op-ed in the New York Timesadvocating for the Tulsa Massacre to be taught in schools (and it definitely should be by the way).   NPR immediately called Hanks out for not being an “antiracist” and shamed him for portraying “righteous white men” in films (as if he had any other choice).  There are clearly no half measures in antiracism.

Microaggressions- A new term for bigotry you can’t even see

Kendi’s antiracism isn’t the only method for straining to identify racism in every fabric of our society.  An academic paper on a concept known as “microaggressions” was published in 2007, identifying “slights and insults to people of color” that are so subtle that perpetrators are not even aware of their transgressions.  They identify three groups of microaggressions: “microassaults”, “microinsults” and “microinvalidations”.   Examples of racist microaggressions include sayings like “America is a melting pot”, “everyone can succeed in this society if they work hard enough” and “there is only one race, the human race”.  It’s tempting to laugh this off and just be shocked it was published in an academic journal, but a professor at the University of California reported a few years ago that many universities were making the push to stamp out microaggressions to avoid “hostile learning environments”.  And if you think these ideas aren’t influencing the way people teach, take a look at this report of a California medical school professor literally begging his class to forgive him.  Then he proceeded to confess his crime when he said: “I said ‘when a woman is pregnant,’ which implies that only women can get pregnant and I most sincerely apologize to all of you.”  And this professor’s fear may not be unwarranted.  Katie Herzog just wrote a chilling account of the purge at medical schools and residency programs of doctors who fall out of line with the “woke” identity politics obsessed orthodoxy that has consumed academia. 

Intersectionality and Essentialism- When groups turn against each other

It’s not just in our literature and college campuses that CRT is thriving.  We routinely see CRT’s fingerprint in our daily headlines.  We see the concept of “intersectionality” with schools compelling students to rank various parts of their identities in a sort of oppression hierarchy as mentioned earlier.  There is even an “Intersectional Diversity Flower” you can use to take an “equity inventory” of yourself across 13 different group identities (with race at the center naturally).  We saw the uglier side of intersectionality when lesbians who sewed a Star of David into their gay pride flag were thrown out of a gay pride rally out of fear that they would “trigger” people with their expression of Zionism.  You could probably say the same thing about the intense feud (or “TERF war” as she called it) between the author (and feminist) J.K. Rowling and the transgender community, which was ignited when Rowling shared (sarcastically perhaps) her preference for being called a “woman” rather than the new label of “person who menstruates”. 

Similarly, the concept of “essentialism” shows up in the form of intergroup conflicts.  We need look no further than a recent Washington Post op-ed criticizing Lin-Manuel Miranda (better known his epoch retelling of our country’s founding in the Broadway show Hamilton where he creatively cast many of our founders with Black and Hispanic actors) for “whitewashing” his recent film version of In the Heights by casting Latinos whose skin complexions weren’t dark enough.  Knowing he was already on thin ice after portraying America’s founding in a favorable light, Miranda was quick to issue an apology regarding the “hurt and frustration over colorism”.  Who could possibly survive this level of scrutiny?  What do you gain from cowering in fear of that one hyper-sensitive journalist desperate to dissect your life’s work?

The New York Times 1619 Project- CRT proponents build a time machine

We can’t have a conversation about CRT without covering the New York Times 1619 Project.The 1619 Project reframes America’s entire history as an effort to perpetuate slavery, even backdating America’s founding to 1619 when the first slaves arrived in Virginia.  When I first heard about this project, I was hoping it would have focused more on the contributions of Black Americans to our history, which is admittedly a deficiency of many history textbooks.  Instead, the 1619 Project is based on a lie, namely that the American Revolution was fought to preserve slavery.  Slavery was a global phenomenon in 1776 and England didn’t ban slavery in its Caribbean colonies for almost sixty years after the American Revolution.  None of this makes slavery any less reprehensible of course.  Then again, I know of no history teacher in the country who doesn’t already teach slavery as a reprehensible and racist stain on American history.  Exaggerating the importance of slavery to the American Revolution for the sake of undermining the ideals set forth in the Declaration of Independence and the legal authority of our Constitution serves no purpose other than to degrade America and its founding principles. 

Remarkably, one of the historians hired to fact check the 1619 Project warned them about this inaccuracy (and countless others) and she was simply ignored.  Not surprisingly, a group of preeminent historians wrote an open letter to the New York Times criticizing the project’s many inaccuracies and adding: “These errors, which concern major events, cannot be described as interpretation or ‘framing.’ They are matters of verifiable fact, which are the foundation of both honest scholarship and honest journalism.”  The project’s architect Nikole Hannah-Jones offered the usual explanations- that the historians were “old, white men” and other critics had revealed themselves to be “anti-black”.  After all, why would she engage them on the merits of their ideas when she can dismiss them for being males or racists?  Hannah-Jones continues to insist that challenges to the 1619 Project “have never been about an accurate rendering of history”.  Why have we allowed these types of evasive retorts to become persuasive?  Have we lost the ability to reason?

What happened to us and where is this all heading?

Let’s start with talking about who this benefits…

Coming up with a new vernacular of “woke” terms and phrases, rewriting our history to frame our ancestors as monsters and exploiting our differences to pit us against each other will solve nothing.  Only our enemies benefit from us being divided against each other.  I am reminded of a 1997 book “The Foundations of Geopolitics: The Geopolitical Future of Russia” by an influential Russian strategist named Aleksandr Dugin in which he laid out a vision for advancing Russian interests in nearly every country in the world.  His primary objective for Russia was to fuel instability and separatism within the United States.  He wrote that Russia should:

"introduce geopolitical disorder into internal American activity, encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements – extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus destabilizing internal political processes in the U.S. It would also make sense simultaneously to support isolationist tendencies in American politics”.

Now I’m not a conspiratorial person, so I’m not going to jump to conclusions about how we became so divided- and without question we deserve plenty of the blame.  Either way, the blue print laid out above sounds eerily familiar.  We need look no further than the streets of Portland, Oregon (which some people call the whitest city in America) to find well-organized militant teenagers chanting and tweeting things like “F**k Trump, F**k Biden, death to America!”, “We don’t want Biden, we want revenge”, “We are ungovernable” and “A new world from the ashes”.  Christopher Rufo’s account of these kids destroying property, assaulting police officers and being arrested by the dozens is flat out disturbing if you are interested in this country’s future.  With schools in the Portland suburbs pledging themselves to the cause of antiracism and using signs saying things like “AmeriKKKa”, “White Silence = Compliance,” and “Black Lives > Property” (as if protecting Black lives and property are mutually exclusive) as teaching tools, you wonder what other country on earth would do something like this (to itself anyway).  We are constantly reminded how badly Vladimir Putin wanted Donald Trump to win the 2016 election.  But isn’t it fair to say that Putin is likely equally pleased with the specter of “Death to America” chants in our streets?  I for one do not want to see the third act of this play.

Looking to Iran for insights

Predicting the outcome of glamorizing revolution and contempt for America in K-12 schools is one of the rare instances in life where you can turn to the nation of Iran for guidance.  Remarkably, the parents of one child in the Portland suburbs who immigrated here from Iran, where they grew up being forced to chant “Death to America” daily, had seen this kind of thing before.  They had the benefit of both common sense and experience.   In other words, they knew better and even wrote a letter to the school warning them of the risks.  The parents felt that the school’s objective was to “hyper-emotionalize the children in order to get them to be more receptive to . . . some sort of revolution.”  One of the advantages of America being a melting pot of sorts is we have many parents who have seen this act before.  We should listen to them.

Looking beyond Portland and Iran

In one sense, I fear that Portland is simply ahead of the curve here as they have been infusing their schools with CRT-themed messaging for longer than the rest of the country.  But perhaps other cities are employing more reasonable versions of this curriculum or simply aren’t as ‘weird’ (as Portland’s residents like to describe themselves) to begin with.  So let’s consider an alternate ending by taking a look at Providence, Rhode Island (just an ordinary progressive city) as another possible outcome.  Providence’s schools are reported to be inundated with CRT-themed materials, with one teacher going public with some of the required reading materials.  Even “Jack and the Bean Stock” got a makeover to portray Jack as a Black child and the bean stock as an evil White giant.  But the city’s plans are far more ambitious than just teaching CRT. 

Last summer, the mayor of Providence announced a “Truth-Telling, Reconciliation and Municipal Reparations Process”.  They started by hiring a group of academics to perform a truth-seeking process.  The city’s website indicated that “once the collection of Truth is completed, findings will be used to begin the process of Reconciliation”.  The city also hired Roger Williams College and the Providence Cultural Equity Initiative to design what a possible program might look like for reparations. After almost a year, the city (at great costs) has produced a 200-page report villainizing just about every historical figure in Rhode Island dating back to the 1600’s.  For what it’s worth, I fully agree with them that based on their report, Rhode Island treated Black and Indigenous populations horribly for centuries.  The city has no plan yet for what they will do with this report as far as I can tell and the local news station has no idea how such a cash-strapped city would ever pay for reparations even if it wanted to.

More importantly, people living in Providence in 2021 face some serious obstacles.  Murders and shootings sky-rocketed in 2020 (like most cities sadly) and the city was ravaged by the pandemic.  Providence’s schools are what really stand out though.  A report on the city’s public schools by the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy was so unflattering, the Wall Street Journal dubbed it an “Education Horror Show”.  At a whopping cost of $18,000 per student in 2017 (150% of the national average), just five percent of eighth graders are proficient in math and 8.5% of fifth graders are proficient in English. The report noted “very little visible student learning was going on in the majority of classrooms and schools we visited”.  The Wall Street Journal Op-ed reported students choking teachers and urinating on their desks, which typically goes unpunished due to policies that “discourage student discipline”.  To be fair, it’s not just the students who aren’t being held accountable.  Generous union contracts ensure that bad teachers (and even abusive teachers) are virtually impossible to get rid of no matter what they do.

Nobody is questioning the failures of elected officials in America’s inner cities

The point here isn’t to pick on Providence.  It probably has the same problems as other American cities.  I think without question some of these problems are systemic- the problems just don’t seem to have much to do with racism.  It is worth mentioning that the people promoting CRT in schools (or denying its existence altogether) and igniting racial tensions around the country are the same people who brought us the “defund the police” movements last summer.  If you subscribe to the CRT narrative that the system is racist and the root of all problems, it is obvious to you that the police have to go.  The shocking crime wave that swept through our inner cities this year is a topic for another post, but the point is that the people living in these cities aren’t stupid.  Law abiding citizens in those cities know that the crime in their cities is not merely a product of how you define crime.  To pick one example, a survey from the city of Detroit (which voted 95% Democratic in the 2020 election) shows that the two most important issues for residents of Detroit are education and public safety by a huge measure.  By a ratio of 9-to-1, residents said they would feel safer with more police on the streets, not less.  This doesn’t mean they agree with everything the police do of course.  But it highlights the growing gap between the focuses of progressive policy makers, journalists and academics on the one hand and the people on the ground on the other.  People are literally dying (in some cases) from the failed policies of these idealogues. 

Where do we go from here?

I believe with all my heart that America is the greatest and freest country in the history of the world.  It is still worth teaching children to love America and to be proud of it.  My children will learn these things and they will never attend a school that teaches them otherwise.  But, like any country, America isn’t perfect.  It has flaws.  We have plenty of room for improvement.  Since 1980, income levels for the top one percent of Americans have grown nearly five times as fast as the middle 60% of the population, with the top one percent holding over 39 percent of all of the wealth in the country.  We have 12 million children living in poverty and a slightly higher number living without sufficient food.  By many measures, our education system lags behind other developed countries.  Each school year, one high school student drops out of school every nine seconds in the United States.  We have five percent of the world’s population, but twenty percent of its prisoners.  There is also evidence of inequality.  Black people for instance have worse outcomes in every statistical measure I just mentioned.  Children of color represent 73% of those 12 million children living in poverty.  That includes one in every three Black children in the United States.  Children of color are also twice as likely to be arrested as White children.  Women make 82 cents on the dollar compared to men for doing the same job.  These are without question problems worth solving. Few people would deny this.

Critical Race Theory is not the solution

You can’t simply wish these problems away or throw fancy new made-up words at them.  There are two glaring problems with most of the identity politics narratives and left-wing academic fantasies like Critical Race Theory.  First, the ideology is more about theater than substance- a chance to bathe in self-affirmation and academic jargon that hardly anybody even understands and feign offense at every perceived slight.  Creating new labels for forms racism that aren’t actually racist, like “systemic racism”, “microaggressions” or “oppressive language” only serves to create more justifications for people to feel offended.  Expressing offense is evolving into a form of braggadocio in some circles.  Groups of people are being broken down and categorized by every conceivable perception of their identity (like a new perversion of taxonomy) for the purpose of pitting them against each other.  People were sensitive and bitter enough before this movement began.

The fact that identity politics has evolved into a thriving cottage industry for consultants and academics is also disturbing.  Why do struggling schools need to pay for outrageously expensive consultants to perform equity audits of school curriculum when we already know these consultants will perceive racism in every nook and cranny?  These are the people who found racism and cultural appropriation in mathematics.  They promise to “decolonize” American schools.  What does that even mean?  America never colonized any other country and there have not been colonies in America for 246 years (when some of our ancestors were colonized by England).  There is literally no feature of modern American society that bears resemblance to the era of colonization.  People using terms like this are simply preying on the reality that none of us have ever been colonized.  We have no frame of reference, so some people are prone to take this kind of thing seriously.  That does not make it true.

The second problem with this ideology is that it seeks to manufacture the illusion of progress by negating achievement and accepting failure.  Removing educational standards still leaves children (regardless of race) in bad schools who can’t read, write and do math, which still has consequences in the real world.  Giving them a diploma doesn’t change that.  Eliminating honors programs in the same schools might erase the gap between the students who are excelling and the ones who aren’t, but only by capping the achievement of the brightest students.  Defunding the police and decriminalizing crimes such as retail theft and property destruction won’t put an end to the crime surge in our inner cities.  Redefining crime to essentially normalize it might reduce crime rates on paper, but it won’t improve outcomes for people who live in dangerous neighborhoods.  If your business or home is set ablaze, semantics won’t stop it from burning.  Regardless of whether you call it a ‘fire’, a ‘crime’, an ‘incident’, or try to justify arson as a necessary response to some other injustice, the outcome will be the same for the victim (and the building).  That outcome won’t be improved merely by taking it off the ‘books’ by not arresting or prosecuting the arsonist.  Word games will never solve real world problems.  Eroding academic standards and crippling law enforcement in the name of social justice will only leave residents of inner cities holding the bag, with failing schools and more dangerous neighborhoods.  Too many wealthy elected officials are ready to give every kid a diploma, get rid of the police and then sing kumbaya.  Reality is more complicated.  More people should remind the people who endorse these policies that they would never tolerate the same outcomes in their own neighborhoods.

What will we be left with when they are done?

For me, the question is when the antiracists and critical race theorists are done “dismantling” (to use one of their favorite words) every system they deem racist, what will we be left with?  A system that mandates discrimination and categorizes people based on race, gender and sexuality won’t bear any resemblance to the U.S. Constitution, which affords greater freedoms of speech, press, assembly, practice of religion and protection from discrimination than any other legal document in the history of the world.  It also won’t look anything like the American legal system, which provides greater protections against illegal searches and seizures, unnecessary surveillance and wrongful conviction than any other set of courts the world has ever known.  Of equal importance, our legal system offers these protections to the accused while still safeguarding people’s lives and property against actual criminals- as long as there are police officers and prosecutors willing to implement it.  

Critical Race Theory, identity politics and the entire spectrum of woke politics presents us with these false choices.  That we have to choose between justice (enforcing our laws) and social justice; between honors programs and children being left behind; between proficiency standards in math, reading and writing and Black kids getting high school diplomas; behind whitewashed history and the 1619 Project.  Nearly every idea that emanates from this ideology frames your choice as one of good versus evil, right versus wrong.  There is no room for disagreement.  This type of reasoning gives many Americans a visceral reaction.  Even the idea that you must choose between antiracism and racism is known in logic as the fallacy of the excluded middle.  Choosing a term of art like “antiracist” was a clever ploy to label anyone who’s not an antiracist as not being against racism. This is of course an absurdity. You can also simply choose not to be racist and to abstain from judging and categorizing people based on race altogether.  I never thought this idea would become controversial in my lifetime.

We need to look beyond the dogma of this new political ideology to find actual solutions to our country’s problems.  Proposed solutions should be focused on the actual human beings impacted by the underlying problems, rather than merely using them as pawns.  Most importantly, people should feel free to criticize this ideology without fear of reprisals, derisive labels and the contempt of their peers.  False choices cloaked in pompous language with the threat of social shaming might prevent some people from speaking out, but it won’t change their minds.  Polls show that vast majorities of conservatives and moderates (and even a slight majority of mainstream liberals) are now afraid to share their political beliefs.  Only people who identify as “strong liberals” are overwhelmingly comfortable sharing their political views publicly.  While some “strong liberals” may wear this as a badge of honor, we shouldn’t confuse submission with success on the merits. 

Self-proclaimed experts speak with the certainty and sanctimony of someone who just spoke to the oracle at Delphi.  Ibram X. Kendi wrote a piece titled “There is No Debate Over Critical Race Theory” where he dismisses the entire debate over CRT and lumps Critical Race Theory critics in with anti-abolitionists and segregationists of the past. We should weigh these bold assumptions against observations rooted in reality.  Polls show that Critical Race Theory is wildly unpopular.  Politico reports that (according to Pew Research Center) most people who are actually familiar with CRT strongly oppose it, including 71% of independents (a group that heavily voted for Biden in 2020).  This may explain why anti-CRT protests in Virginia have mostly been in districts Joe Biden won by huge margins in 2020 (and local polling on the ground shows large majorities oppose CRT in those districts). 

I suspect that many of these ideas were much easier sells to broad swaths of academia and media (where there is less aversion to abstraction) than they will be to the general public (where people are more tethered to reality).  These ideas have clearly also permeated elite circles (especially in corporate America) where identity politics have become quite fashionable (profitable as well it seems).  Fortunately, we still live in a democracy that will put these ideas to the test in state and local elections for school boards and state legislatures.  Demonizing and projecting racist intentions onto well-intentioned dissenters is unlikely to be a winning strategy at the ballot box.  Telling parents they are imagining concerns about their children’s educations is also unlikely to bear fruit.  If we can stop talking past each other and simply find it in ourselves to hear each other out again, we may find that we aren’t as far apart as we have been lead to believe.  Here’s to hoping we haven’t lost the willingness to try.

[1] Delgado & Stefanic, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction.

[2] Ibram Kendi, How to be an Antiracist.