In USA Today‘s print edition (7/6/21), this op-ed was headlined, “Teaching Critical Race Theory Is Patriotic, Not Anti-American.”
After working the right up into a lather over Black Lives Matter (FAIR.org, 5/27/21), Fox News and its conservative media allies have turned white rage onto a more actionable target: critical race theory. Though the theory is a longstanding and specific academic lens for understanding systemic racism, the right has transformed it into a catchall for anything that encourages talking about and addressing racism.
It’s textbook backlash politics: Racist police violence sparked a movement demanding a re-examination of racism in America and systemic reform that might challenge white privilege, so the right launched its own movement to shut down conversations about race and white privilege in any and all institutional arenas, most prominently schools, government offices (including the military) and corporations, that could possibly make that happen.
It’s unsurprising that the right would turn the focus to white victimhood rather than anti-Black violence and discrimination. But mainstream corporate media have also given far too much space and legitimacy to the tactic. In June, 424 articles could be found in major US newspapers that mentioned “critical race theory,” according to a Nexis search–compared to four articles in August 2020, the month before the right-wing attack on critical race theory was rolled out on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show (9/2/20).
A July 6 USA Today editorial page dedicated to the CRT “debate” exemplified the wrong way to cover the issue. The editorial board’s own opinion was accompanied by not one but two opposing views: For the left, it tapped Kevin Cokley (7/5/21), a professor of African studies at the University of Texas, whose subhead argued, “I Always Challenge My Students and Never Place Racial Guilt on Them.“
USA Today (7/5/21) provided space to the critic who said he wanted to “recodify” critical race theory to “annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.”
For the right, the paper invited Christopher Rufo (7/5/21), the right-wing provocateur (and Fox News regular) from the Manhattan Institute who invented the CRT-as-anything-conservatives-hate rallying cry. Rufo has explicitly stated that his
goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think “critical race theory.” We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.
Rufo’s op-ed, “What I Discovered About Critical Race Theory in Public Schools and Why It Shouldn’t Be Taught,” carried the subhead: “State Legislatures Are Wise to Ban Schools From Promoting Race Essentialism, Collective Guilt and Racial Superiority Theory.”
Note the emphasis on white guilt in both subheads. The debate centers on whether CRT should be taught, but the question is hinged on whether white students might be made to feel any responsibility for historical and contemporary racism and white privilege—the implicit assumption being that they should not. It’s quite a victory for the right, which just a year earlier was uncomfortably forced to debate whether police are killing too many Black people.
The paper’s editorial board (7/5/21), for its part, staked out a “middle” ground: “Critical Race Theory Fear a Mix of the Predictable, the Outlandish and the Justified.” While some criticism is explicitly “justified,” at times critics have gone too far, it suggested: “Responding to all these concerns by policing classroom discussions about race with a state law is like using a shotgun to drive mosquitoes out of a bedroom.”
The mosquito simile suggests that existing culturally responsive curricula in schools aren’t exactly dangerous, but certainly annoying, and worth getting rid of—presumably with a flyswatter rather than a shotgun. The board prefers that “school board members, principals and teachers themselves” make curriculum decisions.
Of course, the right is working that angle, too, trying to take over school boards with activists, which would render USA Today‘s position even more untenable. This isn’t an issue that can be both-sidesed or depoliticized. Media need to treat it as it is: an attempt to shut down speech across institutions when power is being challenged.
Kimberlé Crenshaw (MSNBC, 7/6/21): “When we start dictating what can be taught, what can be said, and what is unsayable, we are well, well down the road towards an authoritarian regime.”
As Kimberlé Crenshaw, one of critical race theory’s earliest exponents, told MSNBC (7/6/21):
Understand what risk we all face if they are allowed to dictate what can be said, what can be taught, what can be learned, who can vote, and who can protest. This is a recurrence of Redemption. All of these things are exactly what happened at the end of Reconstruction….
When we start dictating what can be taught, what can be said, and what is unsayable, we are well, well down the road towards an authoritarian regime. People keep asking, “Can it happen here?” If you look at Black history, it has happened here.
Racism will be the vehicle through which authoritarianism rises in this country. That’s what we’re seeing happening right now. And the only question is whether people who believe in this country, if they recognize that they have a dog in this fight. Only if people wake up and see that this implicates all of us can we have hope that this is not going to be a replay of Redemption in the 19th century.
Crenshaw may have been talking about the public generally, but major media, with their key role in framing narratives and legitimizing political positions, are certainly implicated as well. Too many in the media came to realize too late the danger of covering Trump as just another politician (FAIR.org, 12/1/16); it is urgent they don’t make the same mistake again.
It seems like only yesterday that the same corporate media pushing this Collective Guilt Theory was telling us that anyone who spoke about race in America was “obviously” a “Russian troll” trying to “undermine ‘Our Democracy.'”
Now FAIR.org has gotten into the act.
Nevermind inconvenient facts such as the fact that one of the most violent, brutal and deadly criminal police rings – that of the LAPD’s ‘Ramparts’ Division consisted of non-white cops who murdered POC. According to the New Orthodoxy, “white people” bear collective guilt for “police violence” and have played on positive role in American history whatsoever. All of those Union soldiers who gave life and/or limb so that black slaves might be freed be damned!
All of this ‘critical’ theory serves one purpose: to shift the narrative away from the 1% (remember Occupy?) and create the circumstances for attacks on ‘white’ people as a whole, while the rich, (mostly white – Hi Oprah!, Hi Obama!) privileged class actually responsible for society’s ills are given a “ghetto pass” and poor-white “trash” are blamed for all of society’s ills.
If you want to radicalize poor whites and create an army of neo-nazi fascists, the best way to do so is to continue with this collective guilt BS. If you want to create a foundation for multi-racial efforts to challenge the rule of capitalist malefactors, you can start by questioning your own assumptions, not buying into the ‘critical’ theories of Academicians who are driven by the circumstances of their ‘profession’ to come up with ever more outlandish ‘theses’ in order to make a name for themselves and achieve tenure.
Exactly! Reducing all social conflicts to matters of skin color distracts from economic oppression and inequality to preserve the hegemony of the oligarchy. It guarantees that black workers and white workers will never unite to promote their mutual interests—health care, education, safety, nutrition, dignified employment, infrastructure, public transportation, housing, green spaces, and the like. The oligarchy practices “divide and rule” through its corporate media, so that we will allow the government to spend trillions on “modernizing” thermonuclear weapons and slaughtering children all over the planet, while only children of the (predominantly white) bourgeoisie have access to university education.
Well John Brown’s Body does lie a -decomposing in his grave—– but Black Americans have been treated horribly, along with Indigenous Americans and Asian Americans and Latinx people — for forever. Of course, now the Russians and Chinese have been added to that list too. If you read actual American history, you would not be able to ignore the hundreds of years of awfulness that this nation has sponsored.
But then, all nations have been horrid at some time in their history.Hey, here’s another one to read up on,The Irish ( white people) came here and were treated horribly too . As indentured slaves they often were never freed.
I am glad that the Statue of Liberty stands in New York Harbor—as it reminds us what America wanted to be—and it still could—-but as the corporate lords become stronger and stronger and politicians become more and more self interested —things could get much worse than another Jan. 6th. “United we stand, Divided we fall, ” is not an idle phrase.
You think “white” people haven’t been treated horribly? Go drive through Appalachia some time.
BTW: The Statue of Liberty was a gift from the French. You may remember the French from such colonialist projects as Algeria and Vietnam.
Ho Chi Minh observed the following about the ‘enlightened French’ in 1922:
A certain Pourcignon furiously rushed upon an Annamese who was so curious and bold as to look at this European’s house for a few seconds. He beat him and finally shot him down with a bullet in the head.
A railway official beat a Tonkinese village mayor with a cane.
M. Beck broke his car driver’s skull with a blow from his fist.
M. Bres, building contractor, kicked an Annamese to death after binding his arms and letting him be bitten by his dog.
M. Deffis, receiver, killed his Annamese servant with a powerful kick in the kidneys.
M. Henry, a mechanic at Haiphong, heard a noise in the street; the door of his house opened, an Annamese woman came in, pursued by a man. Henry, thinking that it was a native chasing after a ‘con-gai’ snatched up his hunting rifle and shot him. The man fell, stone dead: it was a European. Questioned, Henry replied, ‘I thought it was a native.’
A Frenchman lodged his horse in a stable in which there was a mare belonging to a native. The horse pranced, throwing the Frenchman into a furious rage. He beat the native, who began to bleed from the mouth and ears; after which he bound his hands and hung him from them under his staircase.
A missionary (oh yes, a gentle apostle!), suspecting a native seminarist of having stolen 1,000 piastres from him,, suspended him from a beam and beat him. The poor fellow lost consciousness. He was taken down. When he came to it began again. He was dying, and is perhaps dead already… etc.
Has justice punished these individuals, these civilizers? Some have been acquitted and others were not troubled by the law at all. That’s that. And now.
Source; Ho Chi Minh
‘Racial Hatred’
First Published: Le Paria, July 1, 1922
Source: Selected Works of Ho Chi Minh Vol. 1
Publisher: Foreign Languages Publishing House
Transcription/Markup: Roland Ferguson and Christian Liebl
Online Version: Ho Chi Minh Internet Archive (marxists(dot)org) 2003
All this ridiculous histrionics over a subject matter only taught in selected law schools!
I might suggest , that you read up on a quick and easy, and enlightening history book: Howard Zinn’s ” Peoples’ History of the United States.”
It’s amazing what so many different nations have done to their own people and with indigenous people through US and world history. Reading up on Columbus was a real eye opener—and of course many of the European nations were quite heavy handed towards much of humanity too.
Don’t forget about what the Japanese did to the Chinese and what they did to the Americans. Don’t forget about what the Indians did to other Indians. How about the Tutsi and the Hutu? Black Zimbabweans against the Whites? Man’s inhumanity to man is not limited to the US. Somehow, Wondering only speaks of the US. Does she hate the US? Why does she consistently talk bad about the US and no other country?
Why do Africans keep coming here if this place is so racist? There were no Jews trying to enter Nazi Germany. Are Africans just plain stupid or do they know something you don’t?
Wondering, we on the right try to close our borders to prevent people from coming in. You are always free to leave this wretched country.
I might suggest that you read up on a simple essay by Karl Marx, titled “The Duchess of Sutherland and Slavery“.
It’s amazing that Liberals seem to imagine that “white people” have not been equally oppressed as part of the capitalist project.
You might then also begin to look into the history of so-called Enclosure Acts and the way in which rich “lords” of the land were able to use “Law” to strip people of their ages old property and rights and then “transport” them to the colonies (as slave labor).
Finally, you might be ready for Theodore Allen’s (a white working class historian) opus magnus, “The invention of the White Race,” wherein he uncovers the history of “race” in this country and shows how ‘race’ was socially constructed by rich [English] Plantation owners to divide and conquer the working castes – both dark-skinned as well as European.
You might also look into the concept of “primitive accumulation”. If you do these things, you may even come to realize that “racism” is not an inherently “white” characteristic, but rather, a product of the material interests of capitalists who needed a means to bind poor white people to their cause once they had gotten enough chattel labor to dispense with the labor of poor whites.
This is the same class that turned free peasants into “vagrants” by virtue of legalistic legerdemain. These “vagrants” who had farmed the lands for generations, were turned out with the advent of the ‘Acts of Enclosure’ – more legalistic legerdemain created by the class of land-owning parasites/lawyers for their own aggrandizement.
With the discovery of the so called “new world” these newly minted “criminals” (criminal by virtue of unjust and self-serving laws penned by criminals!) would then form the basis of the nascent slave labor of plantations owned by – you guessed it! – the same class of lawyer/landlord/capitalists.
Shakespeare had one good idea: Hang the lawyers.
This article is just woke tribalism masquerading as media watchdogging.
So it would seem that what calls itself “the left” is isn’t sufficiently irrelevant yet; it’s working on achieving even higher levels of purity by alienating anyone who doesn’t feel personally aggrieved over race or gender, or who isn’t convinced that expressions of remorse for what you didn’t do, or who you happen to be, are socially useful.
Keep this up and you’ll be left with nothing but aspirational Robin D’Angelos and recent NYT hires, flagellating themselves in cross-carrying processions. All twenty-five participants.
What a terribly biased article. It’s a real shame
Show where the Right is making an actual definition of what CRT is, other than hand waving about “white kids feeling bad about themselves”.
Go for it.
My guess, you just want to be outraged, like most Right-wingers. Which means you have already drunk the Kool-aid.
You are fine with Republicans who have an ax to grind, restricting people’s ability to teach/discuss a difficult subject.
Authoritarian much?
For anyone concerned about outcomes — you know, who gets elected and who doesn’t, sometimes referred to as the “real world” — what the right says about CRT won’t be of great concern. It’s what we know from its proponents that’s so disturbing, this vision of (on the one hand) infantile incapacity (I’m responsible for absolutely nothing which happens to me and the “hurtful” must be banned at once, because I’m so sensitive) and demands for boundless love and respect based again and solely on identity.
If you think only right-wingers despise the whole CRT/DEI shtick, it’s because others around you are afraid to speak out or maybe you’re not listening.
Speaking of “Authoritarian much” — well, who’s promoting punishment, including lifetime indigence, for thought crimes?
The “right” has just as much interest (if not more so!) than the “left” in promoting this racialist mis-conception of history, insofar as ‘critical race(ist) theory’ obscures the materialist foundations of racism and its roots in capitalist production and primitive accumulation of capital.
Journalist Ben Norton has rightly characterized the liberal misconceptions in this regard as ‘racecraft’ – a play on the word ‘witch-craft’ which denotes the idealistic (in the Marxian sense) nature of liberal ideas of ‘race’ as something inherent and immutable.
As a previous poster noted, violent expropriation, exploitation and primitive accumulation of capital is by no means exclusive to ‘white’ people – one need only look to the brutal Japanese empire and its treatment of Chinese peoples in the 20th century for a fine example of the universal nature of this form of capital accumulation.
Show me where the (fake) “left” is illustrating the class-nature of racism and how it intersects with capitalism. Show me where the (fake) “left” is building inter-racial solidarity with their thesis that all white people (and even white babies now!) are ‘inherently’ racist.
And I’ll show you where ‘ethnic studies’ can and has been used to Balkanize and destroy nations.
CRT is, imo, the Left’s version of Culture War. Pit working class black and white people against each other. The fact that much of the CRT concepts that are the focus of criticism are being promoted by Fortune 500 companies is revealing. Is FAIR going to argue Corporate America are new arbiters of Social Justice?
“No Chinese ever called me a white supremacist.”
— Lester Maddox
“Me too!”
— Jimmy Carter