Critical Race Theory Quotes

by focusing so intently on race and by objecting to “color blindness”—the refusal to attach social significance to race—critical race Theory threatens to undo the social taboo against evaluating people by their race.

Critical race Theory’s hallmark paranoid mind-set, which assumes racism is everywhere, always, just waiting to be found, is extremely unlikely to be helpful or healthy for those who adopt it. Always believing that one will be or is being discriminated against, and trying to find out how, is unlikely to improve the outcome of any situation. It can also be self-defeating. In The Coddling of the American Mind, attorney Greg Lukianoff and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt describe this process as a kind of reverse cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), which makes its participants less mentally and emotionally healthy than before.60 The main purpose of CBT is to train oneself not to catastrophize and interpret every situation in the most negative light, and the goal is to develop a more positive and resilient attitude towards the world, so that one can engage with it as fully as possible.

It is bad psychology to tell people who do not believe that they are racist—who may even actively despise racism—that there is nothing they can do to stop themselves from being racist—and then ask them to help you. It is even less helpful to tell them that even their own good intentions are proof of their latent racism. Worst of all is to set up double-binds, like telling them that if they notice race it is because they are racist, but if they don’t notice race it’s because their privilege affords them the luxury of not noticing race, which is racist.

Critical Race Theory, n.: (1) Calling everything you want to control “racist” until it is fully under your control. (2) A Marxian conflict theory of race; i.e., Race Marxism (3) A belief that racism created by white people for their own benefit is the fundamental organizing principle of society.

Thinking is an action. For all aspiring intellectuals, thoughts are the laboratory where one goes to pose questions and find answers, and the place where visions of theory and praxis come together. The heartbeat of critical thinking is the longing to know—to understand how life works. Children are organically predisposed to be critical thinkers. Across the boundaries of race, class, gender, and circumstance, children come into the world of wonder and language consumed with a desire for knowledge. Sometimes they are so eager for knowledge that they become relentless interrogators—demanding

Faced with an inconvenient history, the first defense is silence.

In other words, Critical Race Theory, like all Critical Theories, like all Marxian Theories, is ultimately religious in nature.

Like other totalitarians in a long line preceding them, Critical Race Theorists are interested in ordering the world according to the vision contained in their Theory.

Critical Race Theory seeks to improve Marxism by making it deliberately racist.

Critical Race Theory is an institutional and conceptual virus.

Look around. Understand that the very people and civilization you are here to rescue from themselves are also, temporarily at least, and through no real fault of their own, our sworn enemies.

The critical race theorists and their allies have turned resentment into a governing principle. But this also a trap: resentment is a tool for obtaining power, not of wielding it successfully.

child sacrifice: (n.) crime of committing children to public education.

History is what we choose to remember.

Progress, when it has come for Black Americans, has typically come with equal or greater benefits for white Americans.

We may claim to judge someone by the content of their character rather than by the color of their skin, But our brains as hell note the color, real fast.

It’s tempting to hope that abandoning race as a descriptive category will lead to a post-racial utopia. But the belief that dropping racial categories will lead to transcending racial inequality relies on a basic misunderstanding of what social construction means.

Finally, the attempt to make all analyses of gender intersectional, to focus relentlessly on a simplistic concept of societal privilege, rooted overwhelmingly in identity (and not in economics) and to incorporate elements of critical race Theory and queer Theory, results in a highly muddled, Theoretical, and abstract analysis that makes it difficult—if not impossible—to reach any conclusions other than the oversimplification that straight white men are unfairly privileged and need to repent and get out of everyone else’s way.

Collective guilt, the damaging impact of cultural appropriation, our servility to amorphous power structures, the primacy of identity politics; all of these concepts and more are now uncritically accepted by many of those in positions of authority. When politicians use phrases such as 'white privilege' and 'systemic racism', for instance, they are deploying the language of Critical Race Theory without necessarily understanding the full implications of the ideas behind the buzzwords. They are the unsuspecting agents of applied postmodernism.

I have found much value in considering monster theory, color theory, and the history of racial analogies in speculative fiction. However, when we read literary and cultural texts from the perspective of the monster, not the protagonist, we find ourselves in a completely different ballgame. This is why taking a supposedly 'neutral' or 'objective' approach to theorizing the dark fantastic is problematic; the default position is to allow those who are used to seeing themselves as heroic and desired the power and privileged of naming, defining, and delimiting the entire world and everything that is in it. We never notice that monsters, fantastic beasts, and various Dark Others are silenced because we have never been taught the language they speak. Critical race counterstorytelling provides both translation and amplification for these subsumed narratives.

our system of race is like a two-headed hydra. One head consists of outright racism—the oppression of some people on grounds of who they are. The other head consists of white privilege—a system by which whites help and buoy each other up. If one lops off a single head, say, outright racism, but leaves the other intact, our system of white over black/brown will remain virtually unchanged. The predicament of social reform, as one writer pointed out, is that “everything must change at once.” Otherwise, change is swallowed up by the remaining elements, so that we remain roughly as we were before.

Words and terms are born out of a need to describe the world. But because the victors, who get to write the history, had little need to describe the fate of the conquered, the words did not exist soon enough to describe and ultimately prevent the wholesale destruction of black communities in America.

If we increase r [in a logistic map] even more, we will eventually force the system into a period-8 limit cycle, then a period-16 cycle, and so on. The amount that we have to increase r to get another period doubling gets smaller and smaller for each new bifurcation. This cascade of period doublings is reminiscent of the race between Achilles and the tortoise, in that an infinite number of bifurcations (or time steps in the race) can be confined to a local region of finite size. At a very special critical value, the dynamical system will fall into what is essentially an infinite-period limit cycle. This is chaos.

The post-anthropocentric shift away from the hierarchical relations that had privileged ‘Man’ requires a form of estrangement and a radical repositioning on the part of the subject. The best method to accomplish this is through the strategy of de-familiarization or critical distance from the dominant vision of the subject. Dis-identification involves the loss of familiar habits of thought and representation in order to pave the way for creative alternatives. Deleuze would call it an active ‘deterritorialization’. Race and post-colonial theories have also made important contributions to the methodology and the political strategy of de-familiarization (Gilroy, 2005).

So meaning is only a moment and a transition from absurdity to absurdity, and absurdity only a moment and a transition from meaning to meaning. Oh, that Siegfried, blond and blue-eyed, the German hero, had to fall by my hand, the most loyal and courageous! He had everything in himself that I treasured as the greater and more beautiful; he was my power, my boldness, my pride. I would have gone under in the same battle, and so only assassination was left to me. If I wanted to go on living, it could only be through trickery and cunning. Judge not! Think of the blond savage of the German forests, who had to betray the hammer-brandishing thunder to the pale Near Eastern god who was nailed to the wood like a chicken marten. The courageous were overcome by a certain contempt for themselves. But their life force bade them to go on living, and they betrayed their beautiful wild Gods, their holy trees and their awe of the German forests.

He knew his antenatal history, knew it in every detail, and it was a thing to keep causes well before him. What was his frank judgement of so much of its ugliness, he asked himself, but a part of the cultivation of his humility? What was this so important step he had just taken but the desire for some new history that should, so far as possible, contradict, and even if need be flatly dishonour, the old? If what had come to him wouldn't do he must make something different.

Critical Social Justice texts—which form a kind of Gospel of Critical Social Justice—express, with absolute certainty, that all white people are racist, all men are sexist, racism and sexism are systems that can exist and oppress without even a single person with racist or sexist intentions, sex is not biological and exists on a spectrum, language can be literal violence, denial of gender identity is killing people, the wish to remedy disability and obesity is hateful, and everything needs to be decolonized.

Similarly, a psychoanalytic reading of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970) might analyze the ways in which the novel reveals the debilitating psychological effects of racism, especially when these effects are internalized by its victims, which we see in the belief of many of the black characters that their race has the negative qualities ascribed to it by white America. These psychological effects are evident, for example, in the Breedloves’ conviction that they are ugly simply because they have African features;

in American history. Those who think this fact has no place in our schools would—intentionally or not—hasten a return to unquestioned white dominance. We should never forget that it took National Guard soldiers to get Black and white kids seated together in American schools, that abstract notions of a colorblind Constitution weren’t a shield against slavery’s horrors or the savagery of lynching, that Jim Crow was a legal regime codifying racial subordination, and that civil rights wrested from white supremacy’s stingy fingers could be snatched back.

Some studies have already shown that diversity courses, in which members of dominant groups are told that racism is everywhere and that they themselves perpetuate it, have resulted in increased hostility towards marginalized groups.65 It is bad psychology to tell people who do not believe that they are racist—who may even actively despise racism—that there is nothing they can do to stop themselves from being racist—and then ask them to help you. It is even less helpful to tell them that even their own good intentions are proof of their latent racism. Worst of all is to set up double-binds, like telling them that if they notice race it is because they are racist, but if they don’t notice race it’s because their privilege affords them the luxury of not noticing race, which is racist. Finally, by focusing so intently on race and by objecting to “color blindness”—the refusal to attach social significance to race—critical race Theory threatens to undo the social taboo against evaluating people by their race. Such an obsessive focus on race, combined with a critique of liberal universalism and individuality (which Theory sees as largely a myth that benefits white people and perpetuates the status quo), is not likely to end well—neither for minority groups nor for social cohesion more broadly. Such attitudes tear at the fabric that holds contemporary societies together.

Heritage dot org, May 5, 2021 Purging Whiteness To Purge Capitalism By Mike Gonzalez and Jonathan Butcher KEY TAKEAWAYS 1. CRT [Critical Race Theory] theorists see capitalism’s disparities as a function of race, not class. Capitalism, all the leading CRT proponents believe, is therefore “racist.” 2. CRT intellectuals are trying to change the view that racism is an individual issue, and insist it is systemic, in order to get society to change the entire system. 3. The purpose of the CRT training programs, and the curricula, is now to create enough bad associations with the white race. Race is suddenly all the rage. Employees, students, and parents are being inundated with “anti-racism” training programs and school curricula that insist America was built on white supremacy. Anyone who raises even the slightest objection is often deemed irredeemably racist. But what if the impetus behind a particular type of race-based training programs and curricula we see spreading at the moment is not exclusively, or even primarily, about skin color? What if race is just a façade for a particular strain of thought? What if what stands behind all this is the old, color-blind utopian dream of uniting the “workers of the world,” and eradicating capitalism? … If this all sounds very Marxist, it should. All the giants in whiteness studies, from Noel Ignatiev, to David Roediger, to their ideological lodestar, W.E.B. Du Bois—who first coined the term “whiteness” to begin with—were Marxist. In the cases of Ignatiev and Du Bois, they were actual Communist Party members.

In the spread of gender-identity ideology, developments in academia played a crucial role. This is not the place for an extended critique of the thinking that evolved on American campuses out of the 1960s French philosophy and literary criticism into gender studies, queer theory, critical race theory and the like. I will merely focus on what some have dubbed 'applied postmodernism' and the form of activism, known as 'social justice', that seeks to remake humanity along ideological lines. And I will lay out the key elements that have enable transsexuality, once understood as a rare anomaly, to be converted into an all-encompassing theory of sex and gender, and body and mind. Within applied postmodernism, objectivity is essentially impossible. Logic and reason are not ideals to be striven for, but attempts to shore up privilege. Language is taken to shape reality, not describe it. Oppression is brought into existence by discourse. Equality is no longer achieved by replacing unjust laws and practices with new ones that give everyone the chance to thrive, but by individuals defining their own identities, and 'troubling' or 'queering' the definitions of oppressed groups. A dualistic ideology can easily be accommodated within such a framework. Being a man or woman – or indeed non-binary or gender-fluid - becomes a matter of finding your own gender identity and revealing it to the world by the medium of preferred pronouns. It is a feeble form of dualism to be sure: the grandeur of Descartes' 'I think, therefore I am' replaced by 'they/them' on a pronoun badge.

3. Serving Two Masters Derrick Bell has pointed out a third structure that impedes reform, this time in law. To litigate a law-reform case, the lawyer needs a flesh-and-blood client. One might wish to establish the right of poor consumers to rescind a sales contract or to challenge the legal fiction that a school district is desegregated if the authorities have arranged that the makeup of certain schools is half black and half Chicano (as some of them did in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education). Suppose, however, that the client and his or her community do not want the very same remedy that the lawyer does. The lawyer, who may represent a civil rights or public interest organization, may want a sweeping decree that names a new evil and declares it contrary to constitutional principles. He or she may be willing to gamble and risk all. The client, however, may want something different—better schools or more money for the ones in his or her neighborhood.

In the early years of contemporary feminist movement, solidarity between women was often equated with the formation of "safe" spaces where groups of presumably like-minded women could come together, sharing ideas and experiences without fear of silencing or rigorous challenges. Groups sometimes disintegrated when the speaking of diverse opinion lead to contestation, confrontation, and out-and-out conflict. It was common for individual dissenting voices to be silenced by the collective demand for harmony. Those voices were at times punished by exclusion and ostracization. Before it became politically acceptable to discuss issues of race and racism within feminist circles, I was one of those "undesirable" voices. Always a devout advocate of feminist politics, I was, and am, also constantly interrogating and, if need be, harsh in my critique. I learned powerful lessons from hanging in there, continuing to engage in feminist movement even when that involvement was not welcomed. Significantly, I learned that any progressive political movement grows and matures only to the degree that it passionately welcomes and encourages, in theory and in practice, diversity of opinion, new ideas, critical exchange, and dissent.

Conditions in the wider political economy simultaneously shape Black women's subordination and foster activism. On some level, people who are oppressed usually know it. For African-American women, the knowledge gained at intersecting oppressions of race, class, and gender provides the stimulus for crafting and passing on the subjugated knowledge of Black women's critical social theory. As a historically oppressed group, U.S. Black women have produced social thought designed to oppose oppression. Not only does the form assumed by this thought diverge from standard academic theory - it can take the form of poetry, music, essays, and the like - but the purpose of Black women's collective thought is distinctly different. Social theories emerging from and/or on behalf of U.S. Black women and other historically oppressed groups aim to find ways to escape from, survive in, and/or oppose prevailing social and economic injustice. In the United States, for example, African-American social and political thought analyzes institutionalized racism, not to help it work more efficiently, but to resist it. Feminism advocates women's emancipation and empowerment, Marxist social thought aims for a more equitable society, while queer theory opposes heterosexism.

When tragedy established itself in England it did so in terms of plots and spectacle that had much more to do with medieval apocalypse than with the mythos and opsis of Aristotle. Later, tragedy itself succumbs to the pressure of 'demythologizing'; the End itself, in modern literary plotting loses its downbeat, tonic-and-dominant finality, and we think of it, as the theologians think of Apocalypse, as immanent rather than imminent. Thus, as we shall see, we think in terms of crisis rather than temporal ends; and make much of subtle disconfirmation and elaborate peripeteia. And we concern ourselves with the conflict between the deterministic pattern any plot suggests, and the freedom of persons within that plot to choose and so to alter the structure, the relation of beginning, middle, and end. Naïvely predictive apocalypses implied a strict concordance between beginning, middle, and end. Thus the opening of the seals had to correspond to recorded historical events. Such a concordance remains a deeply desired object, but it is hard to achieve when the beginning is lost in the dark backward and abysm of time, and the end is known to be unpredictable. This changes our views of the patterns of time, and in so far as our plots honour the increased complexity of these ways of making sense, it complicates them also. If we ask for comfort from our plots it will be a more difficult comfort than that which the archangel offered Adam: How soon hath thy prediction, Seer blest, Measur'd this transient World, the race of Time, Till time stands fix'd. But it will be a related comfort. In our world the material for an eschatology is more elusive, harder to handle. It may not be true, as the modern poet argues, that we must build it out of 'our loneliness and regret'; the past has left us stronger materials than these for our artifice of eternity. But the artifice of eternity exists only for the dying generations; and since they choose, alter the shape of time, and die, the eternal artifice must change. The golden bird will not always sing the same song, though a primeval pattern underlies its notes. In my next talk I shall be trying to explain some of the ways in which that song changes, and talking about the relationship between apocalypse and the changing fictions of men born and dead in the middest. It is a large subject, because the instrument of change is the human imagination. It changes not only the consoling plot, but the structure of time and the world. One of the most striking things about it was said by Stevens in one of his adages; and it is with this suggestive saying that I shall mark the transition from the first to the second part of my own pattern. 'The imagination,' said this student of changing fictions, 'the imagination is always at the end of an era.' Next time we shall try to see what this means in relation to our problem of making sense of the ways we make sense of the world.

This excerpt from When Race Becomes Real: Black and White Writers Confront Their Personal Histories, edited by Bernestine Singley, appeared in 2002 as part of Harvard Magazine’s coverage of recent books by Harvard affiliates. The excerpt concerns author Noel Ignatiev’s role in launching a journal “to chronicle and analyze the making, remaking, and unmaking of whiteness.” … The goal of abolishing the white race is on its face so desirable that some may find it hard to believe that it could incur any opposition other than from committed white supremacists. Of course, we expected bewilderment from people who still think of race as biology. We frequently get letters accusing us of being "racists," just like the KKK, and have even been called a "hate group." ... Our standard response is to draw an analogy with anti-royalism: to oppose monarchy does not mean killing the king; it means getting rid of crowns, thrones, royal titles, etc.... Every group within white America has at one time or another advanced its particular and narrowly defined interests at the expense of black people as a race. That applies to labor unionists, ethnic groups, college students, schoolteachers, taxpayers, and white women. Race Traitor will not abandon its focus on whiteness, no matter how vehement the pleas and how virtuously oppressed those doing the pleading. The editors meant it when they replied to a reader, "Make no mistake about it: we intend to keep bashing the dead white males, and the live ones, and the females too, until the social construct known as 'the white race' is destroyed—not 'deconstructed' but destroyed.

Fascism rested not upon the truth of its doctrine but upon the leader’s mystical union with the historic destiny of his people, a notion related to romanticist ideas of national historic flowering and of individual artistic or spiritual genius, though fascism otherwise denied romanticism’s exaltation of unfettered personal creativity. The fascist leader wanted to bring his people into a higher realm of politics that they would experience sensually: the warmth of belonging to a race now fully aware of its identity, historic destiny, and power; the excitement of participating in a vast collective enterprise; the gratification of submerging oneself in a wave of shared feelings, and of sacrificing one’s petty concerns for the group’s good; and the thrill of domination. Fascism’s deliberate replacement of reasoned debate with immediate sensual experience transformed politics, as the exiled German cultural critic Walter Benjamin was the first to point out, into aesthetics. And the ultimate fascist aesthetic experience, Benjamin warned in 1936, was war. Fascist leaders made no secret of having no program. Mussolini exulted in that absence. “The Fasci di Combattimento,” Mussolini wrote in the “Postulates of the Fascist Program” of May 1920, “. . . do not feel tied to any particular doctrinal form.” A few months before he became prime minister of Italy, he replied truculently to a critic who demanded to know what his program was: “The democrats of Il Mondo want to know our program? It is to break the bones of the democrats of Il Mondo. And the sooner the better.” “The fist,” asserted a Fascist militant in 1920, “is the synthesis of our theory.” Mussolini liked to declare that he himself was the definition of Fascism. The will and leadership of a Duce was what a modern people needed, not a doctrine. Only in 1932, after he had been in power for ten years, and when he wanted to “normalize” his regime, did Mussolini expound Fascist doctrine, in an article (partly ghostwritten by the philosopher Giovanni Gentile) for the new Enciclopedia italiana. Power came first, then doctrine. Hannah Arendt observed that Mussolini “was probably the first party leader who consciously rejected a formal program and replaced it with inspired leadership and action alone.” Hitler did present a program (the 25 Points of February 1920), but he pronounced it immutable while ignoring many of its provisions. Though its anniversaries were celebrated, it was less a guide to action than a signal that debate had ceased within the party. In his first public address as chancellor, Hitler ridiculed those who say “show us the details of your program. I have refused ever to step before this Volk and make cheap promises.” Several consequences flowed from fascism’s special relationship to doctrine. It was the unquestioning zeal of the faithful that counted, more than his or her reasoned assent. Programs were casually fluid. The relationship between intellectuals and a movement that despised thought was even more awkward than the notoriously prickly relationship of intellectual fellow travelers with communism. Many intellectuals associated with fascism’s early days dropped away or even went into opposition as successful fascist movements made the compromises necessary to gain allies and power, or, alternatively, revealed its brutal anti-intellectualism. We will meet some of these intellectual dropouts as we go along. Fascism’s radical instrumentalization of truth explains why fascists never bothered to write any casuistical literature when they changed their program, as they did often and without compunction. Stalin was forever writing to prove that his policies accorded somehow with the principles of Marx and Lenin; Hitler and Mussolini never bothered with any such theoretical justification. Das Blut or la razza would determine who was right.

[P]assing expresses a form of agency as well as a promise of restoration, which is to say that passing—as a limited durational performance—signals a “return” to a natural-cum-biological mode of being. This narratological strategy shaped how passing would be deployed as an interpretive frame for all manners of trans-identificatory practices—both contemporaneously and reiteratively into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. No less performative but lacking a clear biologized semiotic referent, fungibility in this chapter expresses how ungendered blackness provided the grounds for (trans) performances for freedom. By describing their acts as performances for rather than of freedom, I am suggesting that the figures under review here illustrate how the inhabitation of the un-gender-specific and fungible also mapped the affective grounds for imagining other qualities of life and being for those marked by and for captivity. Brent/Jacobs referred to this vexed affective geography as “some- thing akin to freedom” that, perhaps paradoxically, required a “deliberate calculation” of one’s fungible status. Rather than regarding Jones, Waters, Jacobs, and the Crafts as recoverable trans figures in the archive, this chapter examines how the ungendering of blackness became a site of fugitive maneuvers wherein the dichotomized and collapsed designations of male-man-masculine and female-woman-feminine remained open—that is fungible—and the black’s figurative capacity to change form as a commoditized being engendered flow.

Practically every radical cause in America today shows the influence of this postmodernist assault. From radical feminism to racial and sexual politics, postmodern leftists blend their unique brand of cultural criticism with the political objectives of these movements. In their intellectual laboratories -- the cultural studies and humanities programs at American universities -- they apply theories of structuralism, poststructuralism, and deconstructualism to achieving the political objectives of the New Left. The results are a cornucopia of identity theories promising perfect diversity. They include radical multiculturalism, critical race theory, African-American criticism, feminist theory, gender and transgender theories, gay and "queer" theories, Latino studies, media "criticism", postcolonial studies, and indigenous cultural studies, to mention only a few. The latest identity cause to add to the list is the "neurodiversity" movement in which, as its supporters put it, autism, "ought to be treated not as a scourge to be eradicated but rather as a difference to be understood and accepted". All adversity, even that which is biologically inherited, can be wiped away by simply adjusting one's attitudes.

In Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, for example, Delgado and Stefancic write, Unlike traditional civil rights, which embraces incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.

Postmodern Theory and liberalism don’t exist alongside each other. In fact, they are almost directly at odds. Unlike postmodern Theory, liberalism sees knowledge as something we can learn about reality, more or less objectively. It embraces accurate categorization and clarity. It values the individual and universal human values. Although left-leaning liberals tend to favor the underdog, liberalism across the board centers human dignity over victimhood. Liberalism encourages disagreement and debate and accepts the correspondence theory of truth—that a statement is true if it accurately describes reality. Liberalism accepts criticism, even of itself, and makes changes based on that criticism.

CRT is not up for debate. Critical reading and critical thinking about American history leads directly to "critical race theory." Only this is a misnomer, it's not "theory"; it's facts. It should be called "critical race analysis.

Privilege theory typically only sees social structures as the sum of their individual parts, their individual consciences. At its base level, it provides you with the fantasy of intervention and action; it offers you criticism without critique . For the proponents of privilege theory, social change follows the gradual and predictable path of reform.

Privilege theory offers the liberal multicultural subject a phantasmatic reality. It gives that subject the tools to name society’s bad apples: they are easily discernable; they are those who don’t check their privilege, blind to the social and cultural power that they undeservedly enjoy. And if privilege theory calls on you to curtail the pleasures of your own privilege, to willingly renounce your culturally given claims on the world, you are rewarded with “libidinal profit,” with what Lacan calls a “surplus-enjoyment,” an enjoyment-in-sacrifice or enjoyment-inconfession. Suffering—the feeling of guilt from realizing that you can never fully eradicate your privilege (again, privilege theory concedes that “one can no more renounce privilege than one can stop breathing”), that you are enjoying the fruits of an impure liberalism, that you’re taking up the space of someone more deserving, and so on—and exhaustion— the emotional cost for your unflinching vigilance in naming racism and denouncing prejudice wherever it appears—ironically become signs not of your defeat but of your self-enlightenment, moral righteousness, and true commitment to social justice. There is thus a kind of illicit satisfaction—an unconscious enjoyment—not only in exposing the blind spots of others, in the rhetorical disciplining of others, but in your own self-discipline, in your perceived suffering and exhaustion as well, amounting to an abstract testimony to the heroism of whiteness (“another self-glorification in which whiteness is equated with moral rectitude,” as Butler puts it) and the progress of multicultural liberalism: it’s not perfect, but we’re getting there . Along the way, privilege theory redeems its practitioners: since its biopolitical logic tends to individualize racism— check your privilege—your self-check exempts you from the charge of racism. It is fundamentally the problem of individual others (typically that of the less educated, white blue collar workers), concealing society’s “civil racism,” the pervading, naturalized racism of everyday liberal life. In contrast, psychoanalysis compels the liberal multicultural subject to confront a starker reality. For psychoanalysis, the routinized and ritualized call to check your privilege appears too convenient; it enables the liberal multicultural subject to diminish his or her guilt ( I ’m doing something personally about implicit biases) without needing to take on the sociopolitical framework directly. If privilege theorists are pressed, they will gladly confess that they know that it is not enough to denounce the unearned privileges of others without simultaneously attending to the networks of power relations that sustain such advantages. And yet in their active scholarly activist lives, they act as if it were enough, displaying the psychoanalytic structure of fetishistic disavowal (I know very well, but all the same). They maintain a split attitude toward antiracism. They know very well that denouncing white privilege is necessary but not sufficient, yet they don’t really believe that this critico-gesture does not accomplish the task at hand. Privilege theory, we might say, “wants social change with no actual change.” Rather than addressing the social antagonisms immanent to capitalism, it misapprehends the framework (and its enablement of racism). Privilege theory typically only sees social structures as the sum of their individual parts, their individual consciences. At its base level, it provides you with the fantasy of intervention and action; it offers you criticism without critique . For the proponents of privilege theory, social change follows the gradual and predictable path of reform.

In turn, subjective assessments take priority over objective ones (which are denied as being falsely objective and, often, “white”), which hits truth largely only by accident, empowers grifters, and grants ultimate authority to those within the Party—a proven recipe for societal disaster.

(Even more bizarre than these examples is Bell’s story “Space Traders,” in which he articulates a belief that “white” society would trade off all of the world’s blacks to alien invaders for lots of money and to solve major problems like climate change.)

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.

We’d do well to remember that Leftist authoritarianism has been tried many times throughout the world since the French Revolution at the end of the 18th century, and it has been a catastrophe every time.

It is crucial we understand Critical Race Theory as rejecting liberalism, which is to say rejecting freedom, which we can read here in plain English.

So to understand Critical Race Theory, we need to understand neo-Marxism and Cultural Marxism.

Gramsci recognized that culture is produced, upheld, and transmitted in key cultural institutions and recognized that changing a culture to make way for Marxism is to be accomplished by infiltrating and changing those key institutions from within.

The “Cultural Marxism” of today mostly attacks the idea of universal liberal values in a different way: not by claiming them to be bourgeois but through identity politics.

Communists tracking back to the 1930s knew that the American racial divide would be the most fruitful mass line for tearing open its society and paving the way for a Communist revolution in America.

Critical Social Justice Theories, including Critical Race Theory, arise from a deliberate fusion of Critical Theory (neo-Marxism) with postmodern Theory that mostly took place in academia in the 1980s and 1990s.

This book was turned into a guide called Racism in Education in 1973, which is perhaps the world’s first “Diversity” manual. It was commissioned, paid for, and distributed by the nation’s largest teachers’ union, the National Education Association (NEA) in 1971–72.

When informed by critical race theory and its postmodern attachment to finding truth through an oppressed lens, this creates a knowledge hierarchy whereby less social power means greater access to knowledge about systemic oppression in society.

In reference to book banning, literature is how kids learn the perspectives of others. Essentially, it's how they are able to view the world. How do we expect them to build a better world if we take away their tools?

Like other totalitarians in a long line preceding them, Critical Race Theorists are interested in ordering the world according to the vision contained in their

Undoctrination Sonnet If we teach kids history, They say we're indoctrinating them. If we immunize them against disease, They say we're microchipping them. If we teach kids science, They say we're practicing blasphemy. If we teach kids biology, They say we're messing with their identity. With such mentality of a caveman, How on earth did you manage to conceive! I guess, to raise a human takes common sense, But to make a baby takes only genital breach. Hence it is more reason for reason to persevere. There is no way we can let stone age reappear.

Derrick Bell, a law professor at Harvard and one of the founders of critical race theory, believed “progress in American race relations is largely a mirage, obscuring the fact that whites continue, consciously or unconsciously to do all in their power to ensure their dominion and maintain control.”77

The theory’s basic teaching is that racism is systemically embedded within the fabric of society and can only be addressed by first interpreting the world through the lens of minority experience. While critical race theory accomplishes deconstruction, the sub-theory “intersectionality” accomplishes construction. It is this element which has become, perhaps, the most important concept for understanding the modern social justice movement.

standpoint epistemology’. This is the idea that some forms of knowledge are socially situated, so that only if you are in a particular social situation are you able to easily acquire that kind of knowledge. The term originally comes from Marxism and the idea that oppressed people can have insight into two perspectives or ‘standpoints’ at once – their own and their oppressors’ – whereas oppressors can have only one perspective (their own). Since the workers are subject to bourgeois rules and a bourgeois worldview, they get insight into the bourgeoisie’s standpoint. Additionally, though, workers have intimate knowledge of their own socially situated standpoint, which the bourgeoisie lacks. This idea has been adopted by several social justice movements, including feminism, critical race theory and trans activism.

Critical Race Theory, by “considering many of the same issues that conventional civil rights…discourses take up” actually (dialectically) synthesizes some liberalism and some postmodernism into its neo-Marxist foundation.

Most people do not realize that Critical Race Theory also accepts that racism is permanent

Critical Race Theory is built upon a foundation of atheistic materialism, a godless ideology, completely opposed to Christianity, which holds that time, matter, and human experience form the sum total of existence. Furthermore, Christianity affirms objective, universal truth. CRT promotes varying moral standards based on the color of a person’s skin, instead of God’s righteous judgment. This epistemological difference is rejected outright in Proverbs 20:10 (NIV), “Differing

microaggression,” by which they mean one of those many sudden, stunning, or dispiriting transactions that mar the days of women and folks of color.

The critical race theory (CRT) movement is a collection of activists and scholars engaged in studying and transforming the relationship among race, racism, and power.

Critical race theory sprang up in the 1970s, as a number of lawyers, activists, and legal scholars across the country realized, more or less simultaneously, that the heady advances of the civil rights era of the 1960s had stalled and, in many respects, were being rolled back.

critical race theory builds on the insights of two previous movements, critical legal studies and radical feminism,

many scholars in the field of education consider themselves critical race theorists who use CRT’s ideas to understand issues of school discipline and hierarchy, tracking, affirmative action, high-stakes testing, controversies over curriculum and history, bilingual and multicultural education, and alternative and charter schools.

The theories, whether critical race or intersectionality, are emotion-driven versions of the old Marxist ploy of hatred and envy toward arbitrarily chosen identity groups that ignore the image of God, individual worth, and loveliness of every creature God created.

The core of critical race theory (CRT) lies in the propositions that racism is ordinary and permanent; that whiteness and property coincide; that history is told only by dominant groups, and requires a counternarrative; and that color-blindness is a myth, and that the notion of equality of rights is itself a reflection of color hierarchy.

Telling people that they are racist—on the basis of immutable characteristics, using incomprehensible definitions that they may not know or understand—then claiming they are “fragile” and in denial when they try to defend themselves, or accusing them of “gaslighting” when they don’t agree with you, is a punitive way of treating people, whatever their colour.

There is also a risk that repeatedly telling people they are victims may lead them to develop a sense of “learned helplessness” and a belief that they have no control over their lives, leaving them vulnerable to depression. Yet, CRT would accuse anyone from a minority group who expressed such contrary views of having “internalised oppression” or of “acting white”.

white-collar and corporate/industrial crime—perpetrated mostly by whites—causes more personal injury, death, and property loss than does all street crime combined, even on a per capita basis.)

America cannot mend if its wounds are constantly covered and not treated.

Critical theories addressing issues of race (critical race theory), gender (feminism), gender identity and sexual expression (queer theory), and disability (critical disability theory) are aimed at identifying interpersonal, social, cultural, and political mechanisms that support inequality, marginalization, or exclusion in order to change them. Critical race theory (CRT) in particular is making its way into social work education (Abrams and Moio 2009; Ortiz and Jani 2010). Ortiz and Jani emphasize that the assumptions behind CRT are that race is a social construction that has profound effects on all aspects of life. Kendi (2019) asserts that the concept of race was developed specifically to justify race-based oppression.

CRT poses, in essence, a sharply pointed question. What, really, were the chances that the white, propertied men of the early American Republic would set up a judicial and political and economic system that didn’t privilege...white, propertied men? Critical Theorists would say those chances would be, approximately, . . . zero.

Especially in the cause of mission, Christians must be sensitive to language—every bit as much as foreign missionaries must be sensitive to language in their crosscultural contexts. How do we hope to win the attention and appreciation of others if we offend them on secondary issues? So keeping up with trends in polite (or “correct”) speech isn’t merely to be trendy. It might be just considerate.

Since late 2020, the distorted notion of critical race theory has become a broad and powerful weapon wielded by the far right to halt teaching about or acknowledging the role of race in society.

Winant, a leading proponent of the social constructionist theory of race, offers an extreme evaluation of the implications of a totally raceless future: The five-hundred year domination of the globe by Europe and its inheritors is the historical context in which racial concepts of difference have attained their present status as fundamental concepts of human identity and inequality. To imagine the end of race is thus to contemplate the liquidation of Western civilization.83

Jargon-mongers certainly stuffed the business schools and used convoluted language to make banalities appear profound. However, no academics could come close to matching the obfuscation and murkiness of post-modern specialists in ‘theory’ – feminist theory, postcolonial theory, ‘other’ theory, critical race theory, queer theory, communicative action theory, structuration theory, neo-Marxian theory … any kind of theory, every kind of theory.

In our system, rights are almost always procedural (for example, to a fair process) rather than substantive (for example, to food, housing, or education).

In order for ethnology to live, its object must die; by dying, the object takes its revenge for being 'discovered' and with its death defies the science that wants to grasp it.

None of my professors talked about race or ethnicity; it was apparently irrelevant to the law. None of my professors in the first year talked about feminism or the concerns of women, either. These concerns were also, apparently, irrelevant. Nowhere, in fact, did the cases and materials we read address concerns of group inequality, sexual difference, or cultural identity. There was only one Law, a law that in its universal majesty applied to everyone without regard to race, color, gender, or creed.

Three years after I got my law degree, in the summer of 1989, I was a first-year law teacher invited to attend the first-ever workshop on something called “critical race theory,” to be held at the St. Benedict Center in Madison, Wisconsin. At that workshop, I discovered what had been missing for me as a student. I met some of the people who, by then, had begun to be recognized across the nation as major intellectual figures: Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Richard Delgado, Mari Matsuda, Patricia Williams. And I discovered a community of scholars who were inventing a language and creating a literature that was unlike anything I had read for class in three years of law school. As we enter the twenty-first century, critical race theory is no longer new, but it continues to grow and thrive.

Those who fear and resist “Critical Race Theory” have taken the phrase and reified it into an ominous identifiable principle as a threat to the status quo. In fact the phrase “Critical Race Theory” is simply an ordered, disciplined way of studying the way in which racism and white supremacy have prevailed in and dominated US history. It is nothing more (or less) than the recovery of our national history that has been infused with racism.

At the end of an interview for her first post-PhD job Tessa abandons the politically correct answers and says, "The doctrine of equity sounds good--and maybe the hearts of some of those who profess it are in the right place. But in reality, it's immoral, unfair, harmful to academic standards, and deeply paternalistic. So in response to your question, Dr. Franco, I do not promote equity in the classroom. I promote education instead.

The Liberal Principle: Checking of each by each through public criticism is the only legitimate way to decide who is right.”26

Unlike the other four, this last principle cannot be accepted by postmodern Social Justice thought. Theory insists that it isn’t acceptable to criticize some ideas. It also holds that whether a person is right or wrong cannot be established by evaluating the soundness of her ideas, but is dependent on her identity (“positionality”) and willingness to employ the right discourses. The “checking of each by each” is effectively impossible in Theory, as people from different identity groups can never fully understand each other. This is the essence of the postmodern knowledge principle. It is clear that postmodernism contains a rejection of liberalism at its very core. If we reject the liberal approach to generating knowledge, we are only left with illiberal alternatives, and, as these gain in moral status and their underlying assumptions are increasingly adopted, they become ever more fundamentalist. This is the essence of the postmodern political principle.

Although left-leaning liberals tend to favor the underdog, liberalism across the board centers human dignity; Theory focuses on victimhood. Liberalism encourages disagreement and debate as means to getting at the truth; Theory rejects these as ways of reinforcing dominant discourses that suppress certain perspectives and insists that we cannot get to “the” truth, but only to “our” truths, which are rooted in our values. Liberalism accepts the correspondence theory of truth—that a statement is true if it accurately describes reality; Theory promotes the idea that truth is a “language game” and that words, ultimately, only point to other words and can never correspond concretely to reality—unless those words describe oppression. Liberalism accepts criticism, even of itself, and is therefore self-correcting; Theory cannot be criticized. Liberalism believes in progress; Theory is radically cynical about the possibility of progress. Liberalism is inherently constructive because of the evolutionary processes it engenders; Theory is inherently corrosive because of its cynicism and attachment to methods it calls “critical.” This is no surprise since critical methods have always been explicitly and by design critical of liberalism as a means of social, political, and economic organization.

This is why it is best to call intersectionality as it actually exists in the world by its correct name: Identity Marxism.

One of the functional points of Critical Race Theory is to adopt a sufficiently paranoid and conspiratorial stance to conclude that the Civil Rights Acts didn’t really change anything except make racism harder to find and fight (and repelling global Communism, apparently).

That is, it is to convince people that they are dependent upon a system that oppresses them and that rather than taking responsibility to raise themselves out of their dependency, they must band together to smash the system.

Critical Race Theory is a Marxian Theory that views whiteness as bourgeois property to be abolished through racial class conflict.

America cannot mend if its wounds are constantly covered.

part of a larger system of white supremacy.

Given that Marcuse was also calling for “A Biological Foundation for Socialism” (first section/ chapter) and made very clear that liberation means liberation into a new kind of socialism that doesn’t yet exist (that offered praise to the Maoist revolution in China that was going on at the time—to the death of tens of millions), understanding intersectionality as the sociocultural dimension of the “new sensibility

Let me underscore that: by definition. As we see in the marxists.org Encyclopedia entry for “praxis”: “[Praxis] is really just another word for practice in the sense in which practice is understood by Marxists, in which neither theory nor practice are intelligible in isolation from the other.