I had intended to publish this essay several days ago, but I have been consumed by the Kyle Rittenhouse trial (and other things) and so I had to push it back in the queue. It’s still timely since the popular movement that has put the Democrats on their back foot shows no sign of waning.
Terry McAuliffe, Democratic candidate for governor of Virginia, asserted that parents should not tell teachers how to teach. He also denied critical race theory is being taught in Virginia public schools. Denials have been commonplace in the months leading up to the election, but so have admissions and defenses of CRT teachings and expressions of concern that legislation against CRT could have a chilling effect on teacher’s lessons. (See State Media Defends Critical Theory; California Moves Ahead with Divisive Antiracism Curriculum; CNN’s Maegan Vazquez Defends Racially Divisive Curriculum)
It didn’t go well for McAuliffe. He lost to the Republican contender, Glenn Youngkin. And not by a little considering the politics of the state (there are approximately a million more Democratic voters in Virginia than Republican voters). The party rode his coattails into defeat. Democrats had a lot riding on that election. They confess that 2022 depended on it. They understood how significant a loss in Virginia would be. Especially to a Trump-endorsed candidate.
There is a big lie being told about critical race theory. You’ve heard it. It goes like this: “Critical race theory is an esoteric legal theory only taught in elite law schools.” I’m an educator. I am surrounded by educators. I’m an also an expert on critical race theory (CRT). I have a PhD with a specialization in law and society. I was in graduate school in the 1990s when they rolled out the “theory.” I know what’s being taught and I grasp the contradictions (see, e.g., Committing the Crime it Condemns).
CRT sometimes goes under the name of “antiracism.” But this is code for racism. Race-neutrality—or colorblindness, as MLK, Jr.’s dream had it (which Nikole Hannah Jones is now denying)—is the only true antiracism. The antiracism CRT preaches is opposed to teaching children not to think in racial terms; the point of antiracist education from the CRT standpoint is to make sure children do (see Colorblindness versus Colorfulness: The Big Trick). It’s all about raising race consciousness and not at all about promoting colorblindness and individualism. In fact, antiracists believe colorblindness is racist. Think about that. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream is racist. We mustn’t allow Nikole Hannah Jones to have her cake and eat it, too.
Critical race theory is a doctrine that programs young minds to believe that whites are as a class race oppressors who, however objectively deprived they are (remember, there are many more poor whites than poor blacks), enjoy unearned privilege and that blacks are oppressed and as a class kept underprivileged for the sake of systemic white advantage.
Not only is this false and hateful doctrine being taught to children, but it is also being deeply embedded in professional training across the country. Indeed, indoctrinating professionals is a crucial step in preparing educational and the other institutions that administer our lives for the practice of indoctrinating children not only in race consciousness, but in the preachment that the white race is the worst race to be. (See The Origins and Purpose of Racial Diversity Training Programs. It’s Not What you Think).
Perhaps you have been following the protests at school board meetings and legislation passed or working its way through the process at states across the nation (Awakening to the Problem of the Awokening: Unreasonableness and Quasi-religious Standard). If you listened carefully, you heard the same people who deny that critical race theory is being taught to children decrying restrictions on its teaching on the grounds of the First Amendment.
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Anti-racism is a “religion in all but name” that indoctrinates black people to believe they are “eternally victimized,” argues John McWhorter in his new book Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America. Like Christianity, CRT advances such religious constructs as intergenerational guilt and collective punishment—judging individuals for what their ancestors or those with the same skin color may have done (See God is Everywhere—On the Ontology of Systemic Racism and the Faith-Belief of the Progressive; The Metaphysics of the Antiracist Inquisition; The Irrational Cognitive Style of Woke Progressivism).
It is amazing that such small thinkers as Ibram X Kendi, Nicole Hannah Jones, and Robin DiAngelo can have such big impacts on our society. But this is the way it is with religious ideology and its analogs. If it were science, they would operationalize their term and study the impact of the phenomenon they abstract according the demands of reason. Observers should declare policies racist because they are associated with racial disparities. That gets the causal order backwards. Racial disparities do not in themselves prove racism. Ask the question: what is racist about the policies? This must first be established, and that requires defining racism in a way that opens claims about it to falsification. Kendi won’t answer the question. What he says is not an answer. It is, as McWhorter has pointed out, a circular argument. This is where we are in our public discourse. This is the nonsense being taught to children in public schools. First they lie about teaching it (they’re still denying it), then they smear critics as racist.
Kendi, Jones, and DiAngelo are not original thinkers. They are small minds repeating big ideas. The big ideas are drawn from CRT. (For a sampling of my writings on this, see Crenshaw Confesses: Critical Race Theory is About Racial Reckoning; The New Left’s War on Imaginary Structures of Oppression in Order to Hide the Real Ones; see also Debunking a Sacred Text in the Church of Identitarianism). Administrators and teachers are carrying out an agenda that is designed generate antagonisms and sow racial division.
This is the explicit design of CRT. Kendi, Jones, and DiAngelo are public-facing operatives. Instructional materials drawn from CRT directs teachers to indoctrinate students with the following notions: the permanence of racism, the endemic nature of white supremacy in American society, whiteness as property, interest convergence, and a critique of liberalism. Read my blog—deep dives abound there, but I discuss these ideas in this blog and provide additional insights given developments of late.
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The rhetoric of antiracism hides religion behind secular jargon to avoid the demands of the Separation Clause of the First Amendment. There is no First Amendment right to indoctrinate children in religious faith in public schools. So they insist that antiracist indoctrination is the teaching of history. Not only is antiracism religious thinking, but it’s also racist thinking. How did so many educators become brainwashed to believe that it is imperative to teach racist doctrine to children? Because not only are children brainwashed; their teachers are brainwashed, too. (See Are Teachers Really All In on Critical Race Theory?)
The deep method works through the transformed consciousness of the educator and the administrator. The language of antiracism hides racism by its very name and too few people have the critical thinking skills necessary for understanding what’s happening. That so few people have the necessarily critical thinking skills is a result of public education. The deeply indoctrinated don’t believe what they’re teaching is racist, even while it denigrates entire races of people, mainly white people, but also Asians (see The Rise in Anti-Asian Hate Crimes. Trump-inspired? Not Quite.), and blames them for the problems of another race, black people, who are in turn taught to blame their problems and situation on whites (and Asians). Replace “whites” with “Jews” and “blacks” with “Germans” and you will see it for what it is (see Reparations and Blood Guilt).
The deep method can also be found in the actions of those teachers who, suspecting or knowing CRT is racist, are pressured by administrators and colleagues to carry out the agenda nonetheless for the sake of keeping the job to which they’ve devoted their lives. This is social coercion, sometimes downplayed as peer pressure, a powerfully influential force in the lives of people whose existence is spent primarily in one institutional activity. Indeed, the ubiquity of CRT in the lives of educators amounts to life in what sociologists call a “total institution.” If you know teachers, k-12 and in higher education, even social life is largely spent around other teachers. It’s a lot like the experience of police officers and other occupations that tend to demand the near totality of the employee’s life. Social life thus revolves around occupational and professional identity.
The deep method involves dissimulating the central teaching (dissimulation is the process of hiding or masking the actual existence or purpose of some thing), which is the destruction of what CRT doctrine presents as “white culture” or “whiteness,” e.g., attacking those attributes that require no talent (admittedly difficult for some people for reasons that have nothing to do with race) but that increase the likelihood of success across the life course, attributes such as such as attitude, body language, energy, organization, passion, preparedness, receptive to and appreciative of feedback.
This is what diversity, equity, and inclusion training is designed to do: render problematic (a postmodernist move) those expectations that treat humans as persons (individualism) and judge them based on a common standard of conduct (equality). The assumption is that so-called “white” standards and values constitute a racist strategy that reproduces “white privilege” and holds down members of others races whose cultures do not value the traditional standards. The goal is to make the objective explanation for failures in life appear as a racist ideology and then use this deceit to explode the prevailing norms of success in order to bring the successful down to the level of the fruits of alleged systemic failure.
I just learned that my university is conducting a workshop on “white emotionality, a woke term defined as a “complex set of emotional responses to race-focused discussions,” a complex set of emotional responses “that maintain or support racial dominance.” The workshop will “consider the role of white emotionality in teaching and learning.” In these workshop, BIPOCs and their allies condescend to teach their white colleagues how to think and behave, their authority to do so deriving from “historical trauma” and “lived experience” that grant them privileged access to a truth. This is the “epistemic privilege of the marginalized and oppressed.” White people don’t have access to this truth because they see the world through the “perpetrator’s gaze.” White supremacy has blunted their sensibilities. The workshop is designed to interrupt whiteness to refocus the white lens, adjusting the gaze to reflect that of the victim.
The workshop is a struggle session that redefines resistance to the abstract claims social justice types make that center race in conversations about inequality in a manner that valorizes notions of white privilege and systemic racism as explanations for disparities as illegitimate expressions of white supremacy. This is what critical race theory looks like in action. If a BIPOC says white people are racist and a white person disagrees (which he should, since the vast majority of white people are not in fact racist), then the disagreement is not worthy of consideration but rather is an emotional reaction to his white fragility. White fragility is defined as white people’s inability to accept that they are racially privileged, that their achievements are due to the prevailing system of racial dominance, i.e., white supremacy, and that those achievements came at the expense of black and brown suffering.
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Critical race theory centers race in theorizing history and social relations. Race becomes the pivot upon which relevant history turns. The primacy of race is axiomatic. Social structures in the United States and during the period of British colonization of North America—really, throughout the world, since whites are the colonial masters (hence the affinity with Third-Worldism)—are constituted to manifest and perpetuate white rule and white privilege. Not were—are. In other words, the prevailing social system throughout the period of the European world-system to the present, whatever its appearance, operates intrinsically on the foundation of white supremacy—even if you can’t detect it! Denying it on empirical grounds is an indicator of its presence (that old psychological trick)!
Whiteness (i.e.. white identity) is a “possessive investment” (the thesis in a crude dialectic). White supremacy is in the interests of all white people, and those who define themselves as white or who whites allow to define themselves as such (except blacks who are the perpetual “other” as the negation of whiteness—see Fanon). Blacks can only rise if and only if their interests coincide with whites (“interest convergence”—see Bell) which is always limited and ultimately impossible to sustain because of possessive investment in whiteness, white subjectivity (race obsession projected onto whites), and the political economy of racialized bodies (see postcolonial thinking—Said, for instance).
Since race is centered and not social class, allowing for the jettisoning of historical materialism, all whites regardless of social class standing are privileged by the system. Likewise, all blacks, regardless of their social class standing, are oppressed. It may be that black capitalist exploit white workers, but the latter still enjoy the “wages of whiteness.” By the way, this puts the lie to the conservative argument that CRT is Marxist or neo-Marxist theory. In Marxism, racism, like religion, is an ideology functioning to maintain social class relations by obscuring the material foundation of the social order, found in the mode of production.
Change in social structure across time and space is conceptualized as mere system adjustments functioning to maintain racial hierarchies that systematically advantage whites. In other words, progress in race relations is only apparent, which is why 1619 is purported to be the founding date of relevant history. “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose” is the principle in operation. Any group that enjoys the same status or higher status as whites becomes “white adjacent” or “honorary white.” Nonwhite races that do not suffer systematic disadvantage—reckoned demographically—are rationalized so as to not contradict the premise of white supremacy. Any blacks and other “people of color” theorized to be systemically disadvantaged who also reject CRT are rationalized as “colonial collaborators,” i.e., “Uncle Toms” (or worse). All contrary evidence is negated by the axiom, a self-sealing fallacy.
Since all progress in race relations is only apparent, system reconfiguration occurs in such a way as to make the alleged source of racial hierarchy more difficult to detect, pushed ever further beneath the surface appearance, hence the need for “critical theory” (Freudian psychodynamics) to uncover it. Eventually, the cause of becomes so hidden that it need not be detected at all but assumed. This is why it is so crucial to get kids CRT early in their cognitive and character development—to build into their foundational worldview the (il)logic that the absence of racism proves the presence of racism. This is also understood by the Chambers of Commerce who build into young minds pro-capitalist assumptions, including even greenwashing, starting in the second grade by hijacking public school curriculum. Same with gender ideology. Racism is moved to an abstract plane to save the accusation from negation and children are taught that is the correct way to think critically about the world.
That whites and the collaborators would say this is all unscientific and illogical just reflect the ideology of white supremacy. But this is quite obviously indoctrination. And it serves the ruling class since it obscures the class relations that will govern the lives and life chances of most public school children in adulthood, destined to become members of the proletariat, if they’re lucky, serfs if things keep moving in the present direction. This is how CRT can appear as part of corporatist hegemony. If it were really radical it wouldn’t appear at all, just as exploitative capitalist relations and the problem of false class consciousness do not appear.
Enlightenment and Western standards of ethics, individualism, justice, law, etc., are all but projections of the ideology of white supremacy, designed or functioning to perpetuate white privilege and rule under cover of normality. Being on time is a white supremacist value. Diligence in one’s work, award and promotion based on meritorious activities, peaceful conflict resolution, grammar, punctuation, spelling, style—all values of white supremacy. They advantage whites. The proof is racial disparity. The test discriminate because they are based on white standards. Even math is a white construct. Racism works this way—without any racist motive. Racism operates in the open as not-racism by acting normal.
You can play every ethic and principle this way. Here’s perhaps the biggest of them all: colorblindness. Colorblindness is not really about equality of persons before the law regardless of race, but an ideology under cover of which racism works undetected. You cannot treat everybody the same on racial grounds—that’s unjustly discriminatory. Justice requires privileging blacks to negate the unseen and undetectable force of white supremacy. The workings of the system of individualism perpetuate white privilege. CRT is an Orwellian mindfuck. Everything is its opposite.
Affirmative action, i.e., reparations, are clearly not enough. Racial disparity remains. And that must be a manifestation of white supremacy (you are blaming the victim if you say otherwise). Ultimately, Enlightenment and Western standards must be overthrown and replaced with an entirely different, non-Western social logic, one based on group-level justice, groups defined by race essentialism. In the new system, individuals will be treated not as individuals but as concrete personifications of abstract demographic categories—the fallacy of reification or misplaced concreteness. All whites regardless of merit are to be limited to make room for blacks who would otherwise be excluded on grounds of merit, any gaps explained by the master explanation of white supremacy. From cradle to grave.
Crucially, the hierarchy remains but flipped. Blacks can say whatever about whites. But can whites? No, that would be racist. Blacks can appropriate white culture. But whites? That’s cultural appropriation. Equality of opportunity not equality of outcomes. Racist. We must have equity not equality. We need not diversity of talents but diversity of skin color. We need to be inclusive by being exclusive. And so on. As Ibram X Kendi says, “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.” Sounds eerily like George Wallace’s “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”
Of course, my argument is hopelessly racist because it defends white power, at least from CRT standpoint. By definition, of course. Whites view the world through the lens of the “perpetrator’s perspective,” and this is the governing social logic, manifest in individual justice, legal innocence, burden of proof, rational adjudication of fact, presentation of evidence, etc. The liberal and rational system of individual justice is thus an instantiation—the instrument of racial oppression (which affirmative action rightly contradicts but doesn’t abolish). The correct standpoint of blacks (disagreement among blacks notwithstanding) is the “victim’s perspective,” manifest in group-level justice and intergenerational reckoning. This is the ancient religious doctrine of blood guilt and collective punishment. And blacks who advocate CRT are the clerics of a new religion that blacks who oppose it just don’t get.
Because abstracts groups replace concrete individuals on the plane of justice, justice is reckoned in group terms means using disparities between groups primarily based on race (allowing for intersectionality absent class—see Crenshaw). This means that any disparity between the races is not explained by racism but is racism-by-definition. The persistence of racial disparity is thus used to prove that white supremacy persists—and will persist as long as the prevailing social logic governing the status quo persists. Thus, liberalism is replaced by illiberalism, participatory democracy by the administrative management of things, and the America republic goes away. This is the antithesis of that crude dialectic sans any higher unity.
As John McWhorter recently noted, this is at best sociologically interesting, because we have a front row seat to witnessing a new religion being born. Of course, things won’t end well at the end of this path. And not just because of the racism of CRT. Mostly because our corporate masters will have a most excellent tool to keep the people—white, black, and everything else—the hell away from power.
Is all this what kids are taught directly? Do they read articles by Bell and Crenshaw? No. It’s more insidious than that. CRT informs curricula and orients teachers epistemologically. The kids get various crude versions appropriate to their stage of development. It’s the Junior Achievement version of CRT—which also shouldn’t be in schools. These items are not the same thing as teaching history and social studies. It’s ideological indoctrination. Aren’t teachers opposed to this? They flip it and claim that not teaching CRT is indoctrination—just as not taking into account somebody’s race, not reducing their personality to inherited phenotypic traits, etc., is now racism. Again, in a vulgar dialectic, everything is its opposite.
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Jones’ 1619 Project seeks to frame the nation’s history in terms of chattel slavery. Slavery was inherited by the United States. It was a ubiquitous practice across world-systems for thousands of years. It was already part of the nascent European world-system that emerged in the wake of the declining Islamic world-system that had established the global trade in African slaves. When the United States was established, nowhere in the founding documents does any mention of race or color appear. Moreover, the author of that document, James Madison, declared it wrong for men to own other men.
Nation-building after winning independence from a monarchy required compromise. To appease the former southern colonies, the Constitution had a clause stating that the slave trade may not be abolished prior to the year 1808. This kicked open the door to abolition. Within only a couple of years after that clause sunset the trans-Atlantic slave trade was abolished and no state was allowed to import slaves. Half a century after that, the domestic system of chattel slavery was abolished altogether and the society in which it had persisted reorganized. Before the 1960s where finished, race segregation had abolished and discrimination declared illegal across the nation. We now live in a society where blacks are found across the class and occupational structure, as well as at every level of political power.
CRT and 1619 deny that progress and preach a mythology about America, namely that all this earth-shaking change is merely the reorganization of racism in order to sustain an increasingly undetectable white supremacy. It is a religious move that casts whites as sinners in a doctrine of original sin who must repent the transgression of their ancestors and assume their position as allies. CRT and 1619 are not simply bad history; this is a racist ideology that demonizes whites and attacks the Enlightenment.
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A Facebook friend of mine vigorously defending critical race theory and testified to the everyday experience of racism. I explained that individual and overt acts of race prejudice should be beside the point for CRT because CRT contends that racism is systemic and invisible until revealed by CRT formulas. However, because CRT is not scientific but religious in character, “lived experience” is a frequent appeal, as we see with the testimonial in religious discourse. The reason why we hear about “personal struggles” with “everyday racism” is because the anecdotal stands in place of the actual when facts fail the argument.
This is especially ironic given that CRT claims that racism works through race neutrality or colorblindness. CRT will admit that social science finds little evidence of racism in society. So, they resort to abstractions that do not depend on empirical generalizations (it’s hard to say they are abstractions at all—more accurately they’re simulacra, idols representing ghosts of things long disappeared). At the same time, they define racial disparities as systemic racism itself (a false tautology). But the “lived experience” or “everyday experience” (personal subjectivity, impressions, assumptions) is always waiting in the pocket as the trump card, as if being black somehow makes one’s “personal truth” uniquely true. This is like the Christian who tells me that God is real because he knows it in his heart and experiences Jesus in his life.
Let’s steel man the thing by using CRT’s strongest argument: the criminal justice system. We hear the claim that systemic racism governs the criminal justice system. This is one of my areas of expertise. I have reviewed the scientific literature that has been accumulated over the decades. This is no longer an open question. The evidence exonerates the criminal justice system of the charge of racial bias. Racial disparities in crimes reported to the police, arrests, prosecutions, convictions, and sentencing reflect the overrepresentation of blacks in serious and violent crime. Black men are six percent of the US population yet more than half of all homicides in the United States are perpetrated by black men (most of their victims are other black men). More than half of all robberies in the US are committed by black men. Taking all serious violent crime combined (aggravated assault, homicide, rape, and robbery) black men account for 36-38 percent of perpetrators. Half of those in US prisons are there for these offenses. Black men account for more than a third of burglaries. That’s half of those imprisoned for serious non-violence offenses, or one-quarter of prisoners.
Confronted with the evidence, CRT makes three moves: (1) It blames overrepresentation of black men in serious crime on white privilege. Structural inequality based on white supremacy is the cause. This argument fails immediately because there are three times more poor whites than blacks and whites are underrepresented in serious crime. Not only are they underrepresented proportionally, but despite being approximately 67-73 percent of the population, they commit fewer homicides and robberies than blacks.
(2) CRT moves to redefine the disparities as systemic racism itself and calls for depolicing and the abolition of prisons. The police are slave patrols. Prisons are plantations. And so on. Here we move straight into fake history in support of delusional policies that make black-majority neighborhoods more dangerous to black people.
(3) The final move is to testify to personal experience in dealing with the police, as if the police are somehow able to systematically harass a race of people while escaping empirical evidence of it. But we know, for example in traffic stops, that even when the police treat black and white civilians in a polite and race neutral fashion, a much larger percentage of black drivers will report feeling humiliated and subject to implicit race bias (implicit because there is no evidence for it). This is a perception. The ideology of systemic racism prepares blacks (not everybody falls for it) to perceive normal interactions to be discriminatory.
This is why this is so poisonous in public schools. It trains children to see what is not there. Just like religion does. We see this also in the experience of blacks walking down the street. To be sure, they are disproportionately subjected to Terry stops. But that’s because of neighborhood disorganization and the disproportionate location of blacks in disorganized neighborhoods. These neighborhoods are disorganized because of family breakdown, dropout, idleness, and high rates of crime—actual social facts. The most notorious claim is that of racial bias in lethal civilian-officer encounters. Science debunks this. It’s a myth.
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I have never denied the coexistence of class and race. I have published analyses and arguments about their interactions (see, e.g., Mapping the Junctures of Social Class and Racial Caste). The problem is the centering of race, which is an ideological move in light of the fact that class is the primary force shaping life and life chances for both the capitalist class and the proletariat (They Do You This Way; Equity and Social Justice: Rationalizing Unjust Enrichment). Most people in the United States are working people, black and white. A handful of families, black and white, enjoy an actual privilege, economic and legal privilege, the privilege of private ownership in a form of property, namely capital.
There are other factors, to be sure (see Explaining Demographic Disparities Requires a Multifactorial Approach). Family disintegration, capitalist development, and public policy all play a role. For example, globalization, i.e., offshoring and mass immigration, and the overdevelopment of the welfare state in managing their effects (neighborhood disorganization, idleness, and so forth), have disadvantaged blacks (Know Your Anti-Worker Propaganda). But these policies were not and are not pursued on white supremacist grounds. On the contrary, these policies are deceitfully couched in language of “civil rights,” and progressives and the Democratic Party (and their counterparts in Europe, the social democrats, labor, and socialist parties) have long been the chief organizers of transnationalism and the managed decline of the nation-state and dismantling of democratic republicanism.
Here’s what happened in the United States (and we see this developing in Europe to some degree). When systemic racism was abolished where it persisted in the 1960s, with the civil rights and voting rights, the capitalist class lost one of its most effective forms of ideological control. An alternative system or race thinking was soon stood up, one that rejected the traditional civil rights politics rooted in the American Creed (most notably represented by MLK, Jr.) and pushed instead Black Power politics and critical theory (and postmodernism in time), with its rejection of liberal values, etc., perfected in CRT, picked up by the administrative state and pushed out by the culture industry and establishment media, and it is in the process of being installed everywhere.
McWhorter argues that the antiracism of today is not the antiracism of the 1950s-60s. There was a shift in the discourse of race relations over the 1970s-80s that yielded, to quote from the Publisher’s Weekly review of the book, “a militant ‘Third Wave’ that condemns white people whether they’re leaving Black neighborhoods (‘white flight’) or moving into them (’gentrification’), among other contradictions, and demands the ‘suspension of standards of achievement and conduct’ for Blacks.” Diversity, equity, and inclusion struggle sessions are now occurring across the private and public sectors. Children are being programmed in race thinking in CRT-shaped curricula. All this is backed by corporate power. It is imposed outside of the democratic systems by the corporate state technocracy.
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In a thread about CRT, another Facebook friend objected: “The so-called looming threat of CRT was used quite a bit in the Virginia Governor’s race even though it hasn’t been introduced in that state.” But isn’t the best time to stop racist teaching is before it starts? It may be the best way to prevent the appearance of a new fundamentalism to kill it in the crib.
However, as I noted at the outset, the claim that CRT is not in Virginia schools is false. One gets this impression from the establishment media. It’s a lie and they know it’s a lie. The Virginia Department of Education repeatedly and explicitly refers to CRT in its documents (see the work of Christopher Rufo). Moreover, there are news stories covering teacher training in CRT by the firms installing this ideology in public schools.
That CRT is a corporate front is well-understood by those who study this. Those who constructed CRT are elite academic functionaries for the corporate order. Even the activists are corporate backed. Black Lives Matter is a front for corporate power (see Corporations Own the Left. Black Lives Matter Proves it; Corporations Own the Left. Black Lives Matter Proves it; What’s Really Going On with #BlackLivesMatter). When the establishment media voice tells its audience that CRT isn’t real, this is propaganda designed to stop thought.
In 2015 the education department under then-governor McAuliffe instructed Virginia public schools to “embrace critical race theory” explicitly to “re-engineer attitudes and belief systems.” Under Northam (Governor Blackface but that’s okay because he’s a Democrat Northam, the superintendent of public instruction, a man ironically named James Law, sent a memo to the system endorsing “Foundations of Critical Race Theory in Education.” He called it an “important analytical tool.” Analytical is the wrong word of course. He meant “ideological.” Northam ties the deployment of CRT to the development of public education generally.
Let it be clear: they mean to reorganize public education in a system of reeducation camps. Keep in mind that the Democratic Party in Virginia represents corporate power in that state. These are Clinton’s “New Democrats.” In other words, neoliberals, corporatists. The worst sort of capitalist. Woke functionaries for woke corporate power. The people of Virginia became aware of what is going on and put a stop to it. At least they have begun to fight. Virginia is hopefully a significant moment in what may be the reclamation of liberalism and democratic-republicanism in America. Wokeness is on the ropes. Now we have find that killer instinct.
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Everything I say about this matter is not only understood but desired by those in positions of power. CRT itself claims that blacks are allowed things whites aren’t because racism = prejudice + power and blacks are powerless—a claim contradicted by the fact that the CRT agenda is everywhere. (I just published an essay Calling Their Bluff—Who Has the Power?) I am objecting to the formula, not inventing it. Indeed, much of what I do is simply describe what others are saying and doing. The agenda reaches all the way back to the 1960s. That’s the Black Power formula. It’s been operating in plain sight for decades.
There’s a greater agenda that dates all the way back to the early twentieth century. It’s been Democrats pretty much all the way. Democrats were the party of the slavocracy. Then the party of Jim Crow. And now the party of antiracism. At the core of this is the transnational corporate project to dismantle the Westphalian system (The Elite Obsession with Race Reveals a Project to Divide the Working Class and Dismantle the American Republic). From Wilson to Biden. It’s a largely unbroken and relatively undisturbed agenda: the managed decline of the American republic.
Trump was the biggest monkey wrench ever thrown into the machinery. This explains the hysteria, the impeachments, the color revolution (Antifa, BLM, etc.), the work to thwart election integrity, mass immigration, lockdowns, mandates, and all the rest of it. The elite are determined to get the project back on course. And CRT is a major element of the project.
Again, just describing history. It’s a history too complex for K-12 students. I wouldn’t teach them about the demographic profile of serious crime in America, either, for this very same reason. That’s another problem with CRT. Sure, teach it in college (I do). But K-12 is not the place for complex arguments like this. People feel shamed by such things. Even adults. But we mustn’t risk this with children.
We are talking about what CRT is and what it wants—what those who are using CRT want. To achieve it, and to keep expanding on what they have won (which is a whole lot), they are installing CRT in public school in the same way they installed other pro-capitalist propaganda in public schools. CRT is rapidly becoming hegemonic in public schools on the teaching of the subject of race.
The universities have trained up an army of cultural programmers, controlled by the administrative apparatus, to install on the wetware of our children’s brains an ideology that functions to advance the interests of the capitalist a professional-managerial classes, black and white, that manufactures racial grievances to disrupt proletarian consciousness. Whether it has had no effect or a huge effect, this agenda represents a deleterious mind virus (if we care about liberty and democracy) that should not be allowed to continue infecting our public and private institutions. Parents are waking up. People are waking up. Virginia is an inflection point. Hopefully 2022 will allow us to chart a path out of progressive ideology and technocratic control of our lives.
All this is in the service of progressive Democratic politics. It’s slick the way the Democratic Party keeps an ideology functional to capitalist hegemony going all these decades. First the party of the slavocracy, basing the practice on the myth of black inferiority, then the party of apartheid, draping segregation in the falsehood of “separate but equal,” forced to make this move by the Republicans who defeated the South in war and occupied southern states for years to reconstruct their institutions. Forced to reconstruct racial ideology in the face of the Civil Rights movement and legislation overwhelmingly supported by the Republican Party, the Democrats are today the party of antiracism, an Orwellian recoding of racism to preserve it.
freedom and reason 