Tag Archives: American Values

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 X 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?

What Do Critical Race Theorists Believe?

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Today we continue our review and dialogue with James Lindsay, Race Marxism: The Truth About Critical Race Theory. In Chapter Two, Lindsay lays out CRT’s core beliefs under twelve headings. The precise wording is not as important as the picture they paint of the CRT worldview and agenda.

The Twelve-Part CRT Creed

Racism is the ordinary and permanent state of society. The whole system of society has been constructed to benefit white people and disadvantage people of color. In examining any situation “The question [under CRT] is not ‘did racism take place”? but ‘how did racism manifest in that situation” (Delgado and Stefancic, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, p. 7; quoted on p. 32). Racism is so woven into the system that it cannot be rooted out apart from a complete transformation of society.

White people do not act to benefit people of color unless it is in their interest. This thesis was popularized by Dereck Bell in 1970 and is known as the “Interest-Convergence Thesis.” Under this thesis, school desegregation (Brown v. Board of Education, 1954) and other civil rights “advances” were enacted primarily to serve the purposes of whites. The system cannot act otherwise than to benefit those in charge of the system. The effect of this thesis is to cast a pall of suspicion over every interaction between whites and non-whites no matter how innocent it appears to those not sensitized.

Material conditions determine one’s character, values, and choices. The problems that beset minoritized communities today—crime, poverty, illiteracy, etc.— are the legacy of past racism. They are not the result of character flaws.

Race is socially constructed—not biologically given—and imposed by white people to maintain white dominance. Though CRT denies “race essentialism,” it nevertheless affirms that imposed race categories create a “structurally real” racial identity in a way that determines the lived reality and identity of minoritized groups.

Social structures—law, customs, policies, values—determine the positions of different groups within the power dynamics of a society. Lindsay explains, “While there is nothing [biologically] essential to being black or white, there is something structurally essential to being black or white in a white-dominant system” (p. 47; emphasis added). That is to say, “Whiteness” and “Blackness,” though features of an artificially constructed social order, determine the feelings, place, and identity of every black or white individual within this order as unavoidably as if they were written into the biology of each. As Lindsay points out, this belief grounds the logic of identity politics.

People of color—the oppressed, the minoritized—possess privileged access to knowledge white people do not have. One’s oppressed position within the power structure of society “brings with it a presumed competence to speak about race and racism” not possessed by whites (Delgado and Stefancic, p. 9; quoted in Lindsay, p. 49). This positionality within the system gives minorities a “unique voice of color” that “is deemed to be authoritative and beyond contradiction” (p. 49). It is impossible for a white person to disagree with CRT, because CRT claims to be the authoritative source for the authentic “voice of color.”

CRT privileges storytelling, narrative-weaving, and counterstorytelling above rational argument and fact-based reasoning. CRT uses fictional stories, allegories, and parables to create narrative realities that “challenge prevailing narratives, stereotypes, and expectations…about race” (p. 52). Though such a storytelling approach can be persuasive to a receptive audience, it can be abused. Lindsay observes, “As a result of leaning upon storytelling…Critical Race Theory often presents claims of racism in situations where the evidence doesn’t support it and then considers requests for evidence to be evidence of further racism” (p. 56).

Standard narratives of American history are written from the perspective of the dominant group and must be subverted and revised to favor minority perspectives. Quoting Critical Race Theory: An Introduction: “Revisionist history examines America’s historical record, replacing comforting majoritarian interpretations of events with ones that square more accurately with minorities’ experiences. It also offers evidence, sometimes suppressed, in that very record, to support those interpretations” (Delgado and Stefancic, p. 20; Lindsay, p. 57). This belief is clearly a subcategory of the one above. CRT constructs revised historical narratives that subvert the legitimating narratives of the dominant (white) order whether they are plausible by the standard methods developed by professional historians or not.

Such liberal principles as color blindness, individual rights, equality under law, economic freedom, freedom of speech, reinforce and perpetuate the status quo of white supremacy. In their critique of liberalism, Sensoy and DiAngelo assert that “The logic of individual autonomy that underlies liberal humanism…[keeps] the marginalized in their place by obscuring the larger structural systems of inequality. In other words, it fooled people into believing that they had more freedom and choice than societal structures actually allow” (Is Every one Really Free? p 5; quoted in Lindsay, p. 60). Liberalism provides excuses for white people to benefit from the racist system with a clear conscience and constructs convenient explanations for why inequality among racial groups persists. As long as the liberal order remains, white people will never freely give up their privileges to create racial equity. Hence CRT favors socialism above liberalism.

In CRT, whiteness is a kind of property—equivalent to “private property” in Marxism—which must be abolished if true equality is to be achieved. Whiteness—a rather diffuse concept—is the sum total of the exclusive privileges white people give to themselves along with their justifications and the mechanisms for their preservation. Whiteness is held as a kind of property justified in law by a right of exclusive use. Whiteness must be abolished. According to Lindsay,

“Critical Race Theory regards ‘whiteness as a property’ because it enables them to transition the Communist Revolution out of the economic sphere and into the racial-cultural sphere—with race made the central construct for understanding inequality. To become ‘less white’ and to ‘disrupt whiteness’ is to attempt to fulfill Marx’s Communist vision of the abolition of bourgeois private property in a new domain to which the American culture is more sensitive” (p. 67).

Intersectionality: people within oppressed groups must not be identified primarily as unique individuals but as members of intersecting groups. A person may be black and female or black, male, and gay, etc. and be oppressed from more than one angle. The point of intersectionality is to open the eyes of all oppressed groups—so different in many respects—to their common identity as oppressed and generate a common front against systemic oppression.

Antiracism is the practical strategy for implementing CRT. The first thing to get clear is that “antiracism” does not mean color blindness or race neutrality. It means replacing policies that promote inequality with policies that institute equity among groups. Ibram X Kendi proposes enacting a constitutional amendment establishing a Department of Antiracism. He describes its work as being:

…preclearing all local, state and federal public policies to ensure that they won’t yield racial inequity, monitor those policies, investigate private racist policies when racial inequity surfaces, and monitor public officials for expressions of racist ideas (Interview with Politico Magazine, 2019).

The Department of Antiracism would be independent of Executive, Judicial, and Legislative oversight and would be staffed by “formally trained experts on racism” (Interview with Politico Magazine, 2019).

Kendi says elsewhere,

The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination (How to Be an Antiracist, p. 19; quoted in Lindsay, p. 75).

Two-Sentence Summary

CRT’s belief system can be summarized in three words:

White America stinks!

Summarizing its agenda takes thirteen words:

Burn it to the ground and build a Socialist order ruled by Antiracists.