Critical Race Theory (CRT) is a theory that holds that every society is divided into two absolute and unbridgeable, racially determined groups. The first is the black group. Its members are permanently disadvantaged victims of a society which is set up to enforce black poverty and underdevelopment. The second is the white group. Its members are permanently privileged and perpetrate various crimes against the black group in order to secure their unearned privilege and maintain black poverty.
According to CRT thinkers, modern societies are structured to maintain white privilege and black disadvantage. The trappings of modern liberal democracies, including capitalism, the free market, freedom of speech, private enterprise, and the rule of law, must therefore be dismantled by the state to liberate the black group from poverty and relieve the white group of its unearned privilege.
CRT thinkers also argue that individuals in society have very little agency or moral responsibility. Their character and role in society is assigned to them at birth by their race.
The conclusion that CRT thinkers arrive at is that until modern liberal democracies are broken down, with all economic and social power handed to the state, no black person can hope to become better off through their own efforts, while no white person can do anything that cleanses them of their guilt and crimes against black people.
The origins of Critical Race Theory
Dr Anthea Jeffery
Contents
CRT traces its origins back to the ‘critical legal studies’ that began in the US in the mid-1970s. In this initial phase, CRT’s main task was to question and discredit the sea-change in the legal rights of black Americans that the civil rights movement of the 1960s had helped to bring about. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and various other laws and executive orders had terminated Jim Crow segregation, prohibited racial discrimination, and instituted wide-ranging affirmative action programmes for black people in employment, federal (and state) procurement, and university admissions.
So comprehensive were these gains that CRT at first had little choice but to acknowledge and applaud them. Soon, however, CRT began to play down the importance of these policy shifts by claiming they had never made much difference in practice and were now being reversed. In keeping with this thesis, Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic – authors of a CRT primer entitled Critical Race Theory: An Introduction – described the 1970s as a decade of disillusionment. It was becoming increasingly apparent, they claimed, that ‘the heady advances of the civil rights era had stalled and, in many respects, were being rolled back’. Overt forms of racism might have been curbed, but ‘subtler’ varieties were on the rise and could not be left unchecked.
Since those early days, CRT has greatly developed its ideas and vastly strengthened its clout. It has become part of the curriculum in many law schools, giving it significant influence over the legal profession and the judiciary. It has expanded its ambit too, spreading from the legal field into education, political science, and ethnic studies, where it has helped develop a new focus on the evils of ‘whiteness’, as further outlined below.
Though CRT’s initial focus was on race, its offshoots now deal with many other groups regarded as similarly ‘marginalised and oppressed’: including those identified by gender, sexual orientation, ethnic origin, and disability. Overall, write Delgado and Stefancic, CRT has developed extensive influence over the ‘national discourse’ in the US and is changing the way that people think about affirmative action, poverty, class, crime, and hate speech. It is also helping to unveil the many evils in the ‘rampaging capitalism’ that the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 helped to unleash.
Schools will follow a particular strategy to indoctrinate children with CRT. The best exposition of that strategy was penned by Mike Young whose explanation we have summarised below.
“School Indoctrination Theory” (SIT) uses education to spread the CRT political ideology and worldview.
The goal is not to prepare them for life in the world, but to use education as a “site of political struggle” and a “vehicle for radical social change”.
The teaching theory is called “Critical Pedagogy”, which arose through the radicals of the 1960s in academia and became the ‘Academic Left’. Their intellectual foundation was ‘Western Marxism’ or ‘neo-Marxism’.
Brazilian Marxist, Paulo Freire, developed the SIT concept: education is inherently political and that education must be used as part of a programme of radical social change.
Freire claimed that the teacher’s goal is for students to become ‘critically aware’ of the political situation so they can create the revolutionary change the Marxists want.
This is indoctrination, not education.
A shortlist of words that smuggle the CRT ideology into naïve and well-meaning communities.
Two people, one black and the other white, walk into a shop at the same time. If the shopkeeper serves the black person first that is an example of racism as it implies that the shopkeeper believes the black person is a threat to them, cannot be left alone in the shop, and should be encouraged to leave as quicky as possible. If the shopkeeper serves the white person first that is also an example of racism as it shows that the shopkeeper values the white person and their importance ahead of the black person.
For CRT theorists, every outcome within a society is an example of racism and this can never change until the underpinnings of that society have been broken down and the state empowered to manage the distribution of resources within that society.
In the main, CRT shares many common elements with apartheid ideology and even Nazi ideology. It divides the world into races with mutually incompatible characteristics and cultures. It characterises those races as being morally superior or inferior. It scapegoats the morally inferior race as being responsible for all the disadvantages or setbacks faced by the other race.
