Monthly Archives: April 2026

How Critical Race Theory Operates And How To Defeat It

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Today we continue our conversation with James Lindsay, Race Marxism: The Truth About Critical Race Theory. In the three previous essays we defined CRT, discussed its twelve central beliefs, and documented its immediate sources. My intention at the beginning of this series was to devote an essay to each chapter of the book and end the series with a Christian assessment of CRT. However, as I grappled with the fourth chapter [“The Deep Ideological Origins of Critical Race Theory” (pp. 159-220)], I realized that I could not summarize this chapter in a way that would benefit my target audience. It deals with the thought of Karl Marx (1818-83), G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831), and J.J. Rousseau (1712-78)—some of the most obscure thinkers and difficult concepts in the history of thought. Compounding the chapter’s difficulty, Lindsay leaves many of these difficult concepts underdeveloped.

Also, Lindsay’s goal and mine differ. He wishes to demonstrate that CRT is Marxist to its core. This goal is important to him because advocates of CRT are subversive and slippery; they will deny that they are really Marxists. He wants to make their denials completely implausible. My goals for the series are (1) to get clear on what CRT is, what it believes, how it operates, and how to respond to it, and (2) subject it to a theological critique. I think my first three essays go a long way toward accomplishing the first goal. I believe I can skip reference to chapter four without detriment to the series. In this essay we will examine CRT’s agenda for taking over institutions and develop strategies for defeating it.

How Critical Race Theory Operates

What does CRT do? According to Lindsay, it does only one thing: it cranks out more Critical Race Theorists (p. 224). In classrooms, government agencies, boardrooms, media, and in churches, it carries on its own form of evangelism. It prefers soft persuasion but is not above using coercion and extortion. It assumes that once enough Critical Race Theorists hold positions of power, a new era of “racial justice” will dawn.

Lindsay describes several CRT strategies. (1) “Divide, Scoop Up and Conquer.” An entity—a university, academic department, or government agency—will in good faith or in hopes of warding off charges of racism, invite a CRT activist to join the team. Some supposedly “racist” event will occur. The CRT activist will generalize the event as a sign of “systemic racism.” Those who do not immediately jump on the CRT bandwagon will be labeled racists and silenced. The organization has been effectively commandeered by CRT. Its original purpose—education, profit, witness to the gospel—will be replaced by its new purpose: creating more Critical Race Theorists.

(2) CRT focuses almost entirely on “systems” of power. When they cannot point to a specific incident of injustice or abuse attributable to racism, they point to group disparities and cry systemic racism. Such systems are vague and diffuse. It is impossible to understand how they work to produce a particular incident of injustice. If ordinary people don’t get it, Critical Race Theorists “accuse them of not understanding systemic thought, or, more simply of being stupid and intellectually unsophisticated” (p. 233). Lindsay replies that “when a Critical Race Theory calls something “systemic,” what it really means is that it has an all-encompassing Marxian conspiracy theory about that thing” (p. 233).

(3) “The Critical Inversion of Language.” Critical Race Theories adopt “highly specialized and contextual definitions of otherwise familiar words. In fact, it inverts the meaning of everyday words” (pp. 240-41). Such words as racism, justice, antiracism, democracy, belonging, diversity, inclusion, and many others are used to mean the opposite of what they mean in ordinary usage. Once these words have been enshrined in policy by naive policy makers, CRT activists begin to exploit their specialized meanings to “gain institutional and personal power” (p. 245). Anyone who objects is accused of racism.

(4) Theory trumps fact. One of CRT’s twelve beliefs declares that “Racism is the ordinary and permanent state of society.” Whatever word, state of affairs, characteristic, or practice that Critical Race Theorists think hinders their quest for power arises from and embodies racism. Defending yourself against a charge of racism is racist. Asking for evidence of racism to support CRT’s assertions is racist. CRT wisdom in a nutshell: “Of course you would claim to be innocent. That is what guilty people do.” Or, as Ibram Kendi observes, “Denial is the heartbeat of racism” (How to Be an Antiracist, p. 9; quoted in Lindsay, p. 247). In interactions with CRT, it’s always a “lose-lose” proposition (p. 250).

How to Defeat CRT

In his last chapter Lindsay lays out a strategy for defeating the cynical and manipulative Critical Race Theorists (“What Can We Do About Critical Race Theory,” pp.253-86).

(1) Stop assuming that CRT has good intentions. It does not. “It has only one intention: seize as much institutional authority as possible to raise enough “racial consciousness” to establish a Dictatorship of the Antiracists that will enforce Critical Race Theory on everybody” (p. 254). Lindsay advises, “Do not attempt to compromise with Critical Race Theorists. Just tell them no” (p. 254). If you try to meet their demands halfway or admit any truth to their Theory, you will “lose every single time” (p. 255).

(2) Do not play CRT’s language games. Make them define their terms. And don’t get into a fine-grained debate about the meaning of words. Instead, call their definitions “absurd,” “Orwellian,” or “conspiratorial,” because that is what they are. Don’t set foot in their linguistic world where nothing is as it seems. It’s a word game only insiders can play. Each distortion supports and is supported by all the other distortions. Your only options are to submit to the “superior” gnosis of the CRT specialist or to exit the game into the real world. Let them know you are not playing their game.

(3) “Stop being afraid of the consequences of speaking up and pushing back” (p. 255). There are only two alternatives: total surrender or total resistance. Until they gain total control, their power rests in their threat to label you a racist, which makes sense only in their made-up world.

(4) At an institutional level, Critical Race Theorists must not be promoted to positions of power and influence and must be fired from those positions if they occupy them. Lindsay makes this point clearly:

“They must be fired, forced to resign, voted out of office, sued, defunded, and limited in their ability to abuse power for Critical means by both law and institutional policy…The thing about people who abuse their power is they abuse their power and don’t tend to care too much what anyone thinks of that so long as it doesn’t impact their ability to keep abusing their power” (pp. 258-59).

(5) At the cultural level, we must energetically assert common sense, beauty, objective truth, unambiguous facts, and our common humanity against group-based, identity politics. Most people will reject divisive and race conscious identity politics as soon as they understand what it is. For most Americans, the liberal order of individual freedom, work, individual competence, individual rights, and equality under law, still seems superior to socialist theories of utopia. Assert these truths without compromise.

Next time: Is CRT compatible with Christian faith?

The Ideological Origins of Critical Race Theory

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Today we continue our review and dialogue with James Lindsay, Race Marxism: The Truth About Critical Race Theory. In the two previous essays we defined and set forth CRT’s twelve central beliefs. In this essay, we will turn to the story of its origins. In Chapter Three, Lindsay uncovers “The Proximate Ideological Origins of Critical Race Theory” (pp. 87-158). The sheer number of authors, books, papers, and different movements covered in this long chapter is overwhelming. I will do my best to summarize it concisely, accurately and fairly. But I cannot help but oversimplify. There is another complicating factor I must mention. Attempting to discover and describe the origins of any historical phenomenon is fraught with many dangers. Among the most obvious are (1) the past is too complicated to describe completely and (2) historians, despite their best efforts, harbor their own prejudices.

The Two Main Sources

According to Lindsay, “Critical Social Justice Theories, including Critical Race Theory, arise from a deliberate fusion of Critical Theory (neo-Marxism) with postmodern Theory” (p. 89; emphasis original). This fusion was accomplished in the 1980s and 1990s, mostly in academia. At a minimum we need to understand the essential features of three things: Critical Theory, postmodernism, and the process of their fusion.

Critical Theory, Or Neo-Marxism

Karl Marx (1818-83) claimed to have discovered the true science of history. History began with the communism of tribal society and pass through two other forms of society until it arrived at capitalism. The capitalist system will inevitably reach a crisis point wherein the exploited workers will revolt and take over the means of production to institute socialism. Socialism will naturally transform itself into communism similar in form to tribal communism but now worldwide. That was the theory.

But by the 1910s and 1920s it had become apparent that something was wrong with Marx’s theory. Capitalism had raised the standard of living in Europe to the point that workers no longer felt themselves miserable and exploited. The workers had adopted what Hungarian Marxist György Lukács (1885-1971) called a “false consciousness,” that is, they thought they were free and happy when in truth they were enslaved and miserable. The neo-Marxists realized that the socialist revolution was not inevitable. They held on to the Marxist belief that capitalism was unstable, but experience had taught them its advance toward socialism was but one possibility. It could also slide into fascism. Hence, the neo-Marxists developed an agenda of “consciousness raising;” that is, a program to convinced people who are relatively satisfied with their condition that they were oppressed in ways of which they were not conscious.  Marxist theorist Max Horkheimer (1895-1973) named this new approach to revolution “Critical Theory” in his 1937 essay “Traditional and Critical Theory.”

For the process of consciousness raising to succeed, the “cultural hegemony” of capitalist society must be challenged. Marxists must pay attention to the places in culture where identity, consciousness, and values are formed. Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) named five cultural institutions that Marxists need to infiltrate to cultivate a “counter-hegemony,” that is, an alternative narrative favorable to Marxist revolution: religion, family, education, media, and law. Critical theorist Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979), in the 1950s and 1960s, despaired of awakening the satisfied American middle class to revolutionary consciousness. He looked instead to urban blacks, the unemployed, and university students to form the vanguard of a revolutionary coalition. In his books, A Critique of Pure Tolerance, Counterrevolution and Revolt, An Essay on Liberation, and One-Dimensional Man, Marcuse outlines an ideological strategy for completing the Gramscian project of creating a Marxian consciousness as a challenge to the dominant culture. Brazilian educational theorist Paulo Freire (1921-97), in his highly influential book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, packages Critical Theory in a form designed to liberate students from their “false consciousness” and create in them a revolutionary consciousness.

Critical Social Justice theories, including CRT, incorporated neo-Marxism’s critique of capitalism and liberalism, its theory of false consciousness, its strategies of institutional infiltration and consciousness raising, and its ideal of communism—all while re-centering its social critique on race.

Postmodern Theory

Whereas Marxism and neo-Marxism critique the values and knowledge claims of liberal capitalist society in view of their own truth-claims about a truly just society (Communism), postmodernism debunks all truth claims and grand narratives—including Marxist—as expressions of power. They are in effect post-Marxist as well as postmodern. The most famous postmodern thinker Michel Foucault (1926-84) underlined the ideological nature of all knowledge claims by using the term “knowledge-power” whenever speaking about assertions of truth (p. 127).

Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) considered language a prison from which we cannot escape into truth. Words refer only to other words and can never take us to real things. For postmodern thought, linguistic expressions, culture, social order, and law are “constructions” created consciously or unconsciously to acquire or retain power. To the unknowing, these constructions have the appearance of truth, fact, and reality. Hence the task of postmodern criticism is to unmask, to “deconstruct,” these deceptive structures. All of them! Those trained to think in postmodern terms see a power play, a conspiracy, in every assertion of truth, value, or fact. In Lindsay’s words, “It isn’t clear that postmodernists had much interest in doing anything further than taking things apart and playing in the wreckage, however” (p. 132).

At this point we are left asking how CRT can benefit by incorporating postmodernism. For in postmodernism, CRT’s central concepts—“race,” “systemic racism,” “Blackness,” “Whiteness,” “justice,” “equity” “diversity,” “inclusion,” etc.—are just as much power constructions as are rights, free markets, merit, and other liberal values, facts, and truth claims. They too must be deconstructed to reveal cynical masks for power, which would empty CRT’s rhetoric of its moral force.

Fusing Neo-Marxism and Postmodernism

Lindsay takes Kemberlé Crenshaw’s 1991 paper “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color” to be a pivotal text in the creation of CRT. As Crenshaw sees it, postmodernism’s assertion that all group identities, values, and cultures are socially constructed—a view called antiessentialism or constructivism—can be useful to critical social justice movements such as CRT. Incorporating postmodernism into CRT enables it to expose and deconstruct hidden systemic racism. But Crenshaw also sees the need for marginalized groups to maintain a strong sense of group identity. She says, “At this point in history, a strong case can be made that the most critical resistance strategy for disempowered groups is to occupy and defend a politics of social location rather than to vacate and destroy it” (“Mapping the Margins,” quoted in Lindsay, p. 139).

The dominant group (white people) intends the categories “black,” “woman,” “queer,” etc. to be negative and disempowering. Crenshaw welcomes the postmodern insight that these labels are pure power constructs with no basis in the essence of the people to whom they are attached. Nevertheless, these categories possess a sort of reality that must be acknowledged. Crenshaw observes, “But to say that a category such as race or gender is socially constructed is not to say that that category has no significance in the world” (“Mapping the Margins,” quoted in Lindsay, p. 137). Identity categories “are imposed, thus made meaningful and real, by systemic power and those who hold and wield it” (“Mapping the Margins,” quoted in Lindsay, pp. 139-40; emphasis original). In this way, Crenshaw can embrace postmodern constructivism as useful in critiquing the dominant group’s justifications for maintaining its privileges without giving up the reality of marginalized group identities useful in the quest for liberation. There is a huge difference, says Crenshaw, between saying “I am a person who happens to be black” and saying “I am Black.” To say “I am Black” accepts the imposed identity but transforms it into “an anchor of subjectivity…a positive discourse of self-identification’ (“Mapping the Margins,” quoted in Lindsay, p. 138). Think of the way certain gay people have embraced the insult “queer” and turned it into “Queer,” a proud assertion of identity. For Critical Race Theory, Black identity is a “matter of lived experience no one has standing to challenge” (“Mapping the Margins,” quoted in Lindsay, p. 137).

According to Lindsay, Crenshaw’s contribution to CRT was to figure out a way to incorporate the advantages of postmodern constructivism while making the category of race-identity immune from deconstruction. The assertion “I am Black” is irrefutable. Thanks to Crenshaw and others, CRT is Critical and Constructivist, that is, neo-Marxist and postmodern. It can exempt itself from the critique it makes of others. Liberal accusations of racism in CRT or postmodern attempts to deconstruct it will be interpreted as manifestations of systemic racism and white supremacy.