Teacher Caleb Wells’ TikTok video has become unavailable. Wells had said in that video that it is racist to oppose critical race theory in the classroom. “When you don’t want to teach about how these systems were designed to oppress people,” he said, “you’re taking the side of the oppressor and being racist.”
Nonsense. To the extent that the system is designed to oppress people, it’s not designed to oppress black people; it’s designed to oppress working class people. Even when there were systems designed to manage populations on the basis of race in a manner that relatively privileged whites—e.g. Jim Crow, which was dismantled more than fifty years ago—those systems were so designed to maintain class power by dividing the proletariat.
One of Wells’ example was the prison-industrial complex. He claimed that mass incarceration is “used to oppress people groups.” Since this was said in the context of a rant about racism, he means black people. As I have explained on Freedom and Reason, more than half of all homicides and robberies, and a third of aggravated assaults and burglaries, are committed by black males. Taking all violent crimes combined, around 36-38 percent of it is committed by black males. Blacks males are only around six percent of the US population. So when we look at prisons, which exist to control crime by removing dangerous offenders from our streets (which mostly benefits working class people, and especially black and brown working class people), and we see that 36-38 percent of the population there is black male, we shouldn’t see a system designed to racially oppress black.
Moreover, looking at the matter historically, it is simply not true that prisons were created to oppress black people. Prisons largely developed outside of the US South and were used to control the white lumpenproletariat. Prisons were a northern phenomenon. Prisons came to the South well after the end of slavery (which this racist country is now celebrating as a national holiday—that’s right, Juneteenth has become official recognized) and became disproportionately black when blacks became overrepresented in serious crime and violence. (see The Line from Slave Patrols to Modern Policing and Other Myths.)
Wells’ other example was the military-industrial complex. This is a truly absurd example. The military apparatus is among the most racially-integrated systems in world history. The hierarchy in operation in the military is achieved rank. A black officer outranks those below him by the same degree as a white officer of the same rank.
I am sure these facts were not what caused Caleb Wells to take down his video.
* * *
Are white progressives racist? After all, they do admit they are. Have you heard them? But there’s an angle. Robin DiAngelo confesses her racism and then soothes her guilt by arguing that all white people are racist like her. When another white person says, “No, Robin, I’m not,” she accuses them of “white fragility” (apparently she coined that term), which becomes proof that they are, like DiAngelo, really racist.
Do people not see the psychology at work here? White progressives suspect that black people are not up to the task of life and so they blame whites for the situation of blacks. Progressives cannot bring themselves to ask why, if Asians and Latinos have overcome historic oppression and disadvantage to become successful minority groups in America, blacks as a group still struggle?
One reason they cannot ask this is because they have a suspicion that this situation may be because of progressive social policies—the ones they used to dress themselves as saviors—that idled the black proletariat, generated urban crime and other pathologies, and disintegrated the black family. The correlation of progressive politics and bad outcomes for black people is rather noticeable (see Progressives, Poverty, and Police: The Left Blames the Wrong Actors). Another reason is that critiquing the subculture associated with impoverished black-majority areas has been used to attack conservatives who ask frank questions about it. Progressives can’t take up that line. Instead, they embrace degrading and destructive elements of subculture, pushing these out as popular culture.
To sooth their guilt over viewing blacks as inferior and over their role in (re)producing the conditions in which black suffer, progressives look at other white people and say, “All of you are racist.” No, sorry, we’re not. You’re going to have to handle this one on your own.
* * *
When you and I look at the world and see few white supremacists in it, the antiracist can’t scold us for not seeing the forest for the trees. There are few trees. But he doesn’t let that stop him. This is because he works as the supernaturalists do, where a different style of truth prevails, the truth-style of positing forces that operate behind the seen/scene. In the antiracist worldview, as Brother Eduardo Bonilla-Silva tells us, racism can and does exist without racists. Racism is in the system. It is the system.
The language of “systemic racism” allows the antiracists to grow a forest without trees. No wonder we can’t see it. We are looking for trees! Just as the antiracist forest does not require trees, the system of white supremacy needs no human agency to oppress. White supremacy works like the devil and his demons, making bad things happen in the world. This is supernatural agency.
Of course, for the sophisticated, demons are merely personifications of evil. So how do we see the evil? We need a specialized language. We need doctrine and scripture. We need a testament. We need clerics and institutions in which the clerics may preach and indoctrinate. We need missionaries to take to the streets and bring people to the faith. We need a rhetoric to shame and scold the infidel and punish the apostate. We need to stifle and marginalize the heretic.
Rigid religion works this way: Either you are a believer (antiracist) or a disbeliever and therefore an enemy of the righteous (racist). Nobody is allowed to stand outside doctrine. As Brother Ibram X Kendi tells us, there is no such thing as a non-racist. Those who say otherwise are one with the deceiver.
* * *
We are told by Liz Wheeler in Newsweek that “Critical race theory is repacked Marxism.” Wrong. It’s Hegelian, not Marxist. If it were Marxist it would be about class and capitalism. If it were really Marxist, it would not be promoted and funded by corporations. No authentic Marxist struggle would reject scientific truth or put racism central to its politics.
Critical theory types are calling this Marxism (or neo-Marxism) to trick the left into advancing the corporate takeover of society. Republicans are calling this Marxism because (a) they don’t understand what Marxism actually looks like or (b) they know that the truth—that CRT is the manifestation of transnational corporate power—is too destabilizing to capitalism. They cannot thread that needle. It’s too late for that. What everybody needs to recognize is that democratic-republicanism and the modern nation-state and the interstate system are being dismantled and replaced by global corporate government.
* * *
There’s is massive difference between teaching history honestly (which includes accomplishment and progress) and telling white children they’re racially privileged and black children they’re all victims of racism and that their white classmates are the perpetrators. It’s the difference between social studies and propaganda, between education and indoctrination, between seeking truth and spreading mythology for political-ideological purposes. Progressive educators know what they’re doing. Stop doing it and stop lying about it. (See Awakening to the Problem of the Awokening: Unreasonableness and Quasi-religious Standards.)
* * *
The corporate media line in response to evidence that the FBI had infiltrated groups associated with the January 6 riots is to charge investigative journalists at National Pulse, Revolver News, and other outlets with “conspiracism.” But if you know the history of the FBI, it would be far more unusual if the FBI had not infiltrated these groups.
Indeed, if you know the FBI’s history, it’s not far-fetched to consider whether there was a covert operation at the Capitol that day. For sure the riot ensured a Biden victory and pushed the reckoning over election fraud and irregularities into the future where correcting the error becomes ever more unlikely.
A false flag only sounds far fetched if you are ignorant of the long history of FBI operations against working class Americans, for example, COINTELPRO, or of the findings of the Church Committee Hearings. You should get up to speed on the depths and lengths to which the FBI will go to shape outcomes favorable to the power elite.
You should also invest some time in developing the critical cognitive capacity necessary to analyze the character of the power elite at a given point of time. As the power elite change, so do the targets and tactics of the FBI. The NSA and the CIA are are also part of the permanent administrative apparatus.
There really is a deep state, Virginia. Patriots are not the greatest threat to the internal security of the United States. Patriots are the greatest threat to transnational corporate power.
* * *
In light of Glenn Greenwald’s recent tweet, I can’t go without pointing out that I called out progressives on June 22, 2016 for their reluctance to name the evil behind the Pulse nightclub shooting. I wrote then, “Please tell me about the time a Christian man walked into a gay bar in the United States and killed 49 people while shouting ‘God is great!’”?
freedom and reason 