To understand, we need to understand Critical Race Theory. This theoretical, not evidenced, approach proceeds on a number of mostly bad assumptions. First, it insists racism is ordinary in society, sometimes also said to be permanent. If racism is ordinary and permanent, it cannot be fixed. How can such a Theory offer a solution, then? It can’t, and it wouldn’t want to because that would render it useless.
Second, Critical Race Theory accepts a thesis known as “interest convergence.” This idea comes from the forefather of Critical Race Theory, the late Derrick Bell of Harvard Law. Bell, for all his insights and contributions, was remarkably pessimistic and cynical, if not downright paranoid. His interest convergence thesis insists that white people only care about and help other races out of their own self-interest. If you’re white and feel moved by the appeals of Critical Race Theory or the real (and/or narrativized) circumstances we face and want to be an ally, then, you’re only doing it because it makes you a better white person, a “good white” who is ultimately the biggest part of the problem of systemic racism. How are we supposed to build a better world when people aren’t allowed to help?
Third, Critical Race Theory believes that liberalism is a force that upholds racism. It allegedly does so by making “minoritized” races believe they’re more enfranchised than they actually are and thus unjustly disinterested in agitating for further radical change. We shouldn’t believe this or that we need radical change when liberal change is and has been working. Liberalism is an unparalleled means of resolving conflicts between citizens and ideas, and it, better than anything else, can resolve the conflicts of racism. That the societies that have called themselves liberal and have espoused liberal principles up until now have not done this perfectly or maybe even satisfactorily doesn’t mean that the method itself needs to be destroyed. They are, in fact, the least racist societies the world has ever seen. For all it’s imperfection, no other method has come close to doing as well as liberalism, and this is for good reasons (which are documented in the book Kindly Inquisitors, which everyone alive should read, twice).
Fourth, Critical Race Theory is actively disinterested in evidence and even reality, which it identifies through a gross (but academically established) reference to slavery that frames rigorous methodologies and civil society (really) as a part of the “master’s” toolkit, which will never dismantle oppression. Instead, it prefers to forward storytelling as a form of knowledge. It calls these, when activist in nature, “counterstories,” and they’re meant to disrupt and deconstruct the “dominant narratives,” which are believed to be white and thus white supremacist. (That’s insanely hyperbolic, but it’s also now standard belief across much of the left half of the political spectrum and a core belief of Critical Race Theory, from which it arose.) If we want to solve our real problems, though, we have to know what those real problems are, in reality. We know this, and we can do better than hot-takes and highly emotional stories. Highly interpretive takes that we know are intentionally biased will not work, and, of course, the people who will get hurt most by getting this wrong are the people Critical Race Theory pretends to speak for, especially black people. Being hostile to science, evidence, reason, and truth will not advance anyone’s interests very far, unless we just meant the short-term political interests of the Theory-masters pushing this garbage.
Instead, Critical Race Theory says that “real” knowledge resides in the lived experience of oppression, but only when this experience is interpreted through, you guessed it, Critical Race Theory. So, if the statistics don’t support the narrative spun by Critical Race Theory, the statistic were produced by a “white” method that wanted to keep black people down, even if all the researchers aren’t white (they might be “acting white,” or “seeking white approval,” or “white-adjacent”). Worse, if a black person speaks up and says something Critical Race Theory doesn’t agree with, then he’s a “race traitor, or “not politically Black,” or “not Black,” as Ta-Nehisi Coates said about Kanye West. In other words, Critical Race Theory believes that if you aren’t black according to how Critical Race Theory says you have to be black, then you’re not authentically black. There is no individual in Critical Race Theory. You are an emissary of your race, and you have to speak on its behalf the way Critical Race Theory says you have to. How is this supposed to help anybody except the grifters pushing it?
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Lest you think I exaggerate, let me quote them on it:
"CRT rests on several foundational pillars: First, racism is a relentless daily fact of life in American society, and the ideology of racism and white supremacy are ingrained in the political and legal structures so as to be nearly unrecognizable. Racism is a constant, not aberrant, occurrence in American society. “Because racism is an ingrained feature of our landscape, it appears ordinary and natural to persons in the culture.” Second, “as a form of oppositional scholarship, CRT challenges the experience of White European Americans as the normative standard” against which societal norms are measured. “CRT grounds its conceptual framework in the distinctive . . . experiences of people of color and racial oppression through the use of literary narrative knowledge and storytelling to challenge the existing social construction of race.” Third, CRT questions liberalism and the ability of a system of law built on it to create a just society. An interest convergence critique posits that white elites will tolerate or encourage racial advances for blacks only when such advances also promote white self-interest. Fourth, CRT seeks to expose the flaws in the color-blind view of everyday social relations and the administration of law by positing that ending discrimination and racism through legal means has not occurred because of the contradiction between a professed belief in equality and justice and a societal willingness to tolerate and accept racial inequality and inequity." (Source: Cummings, André Douglas Pond. “A Furious Kinship: Critical Race Theory and the Hip-Hop Nation,” in Delgado, Richard and Stefancic, Jean (eds). Critical Race Theory: The Cutting Edge, Third Edition. NYU Press. Kindle Edition, p. 108.)