This article covers many topics, but is primarily a response to recent articles decrying legal challenges to teaching CRT in public schools, and using it as a basis for policy. It is their contention that opponents of CRT simply don’t understand what they’re opposing, because they describe it differently than critical theorists would. Without further delay:
When I was a kid, there were a few occasions where I had negative experiences with individuals from other races and religions. There was a black boy we’ll call Darnel at my elementary school who was constantly talking shit about white people. Saying we’re the color of napkins and saltines(???) the cause of every problem in history and that his father, a pilot in the air force, would bomb all of our houses one day.
When I complained about this to a teacher I was taken aside and given a long speech about how revenge is never the answer. That I should take the high road, be patient and understanding with Darnel, and above all else not project my frustration with Darnel onto everybody that looks like him. Sage advice, certainly.
But I don’t think Darnel got the same speech I did. I can’t imagine a boy of less than ten years had enough life experience, positive or negative, to be so enthusiastically racist. That’s something he almost certainly was taught by his father. I can in fact understand in retrospect how his father might’ve had experiences with white soldiers in the US military that left him with racial resentments, which he then passed on to his son.
If you make a point to teach all the white children to be patient, forgiving, understanding and not to generalize whole groups based on bad experiences with individuals…while the PoC children get taught the opposite, that their negative lived experiences are valid, that their hatred is justified, and that in fact white people actually are innately wicked, what’s the outcome going to be? And what exactly motivates this weird discrepancy in how negative encounters are contextualized for children from different backgrounds?
This was not an isolated experience. A black boy we’ll call Ty I bunked with at Camp Namanu was similarly fixated on race. This is quite the opposite of how the issue was put to me, that racism is a white problem, when I never really paid any attention to race except on these few occasions where I met other kids for whom race was very obviously a frequently and hotly discussed issue in their home environment.
I only ever experienced this with black kids born here in the US. I never experienced this type of behavior from the one Indian kid, nor the Saudi Arabian exchange student who attended my highschool. I never experienced it from the Haitian immigrant I roomed with when I went to college. That may be a result of maturity that comes with age though, kids wear their heart on their sleeve and only learn to conceal it with the passage of years.
I had a few similar experiences with girls. Kids in general are nasty little sociopaths, but girls are nasty in a different way than boys. Boys are just violent with each other. Girls, socialized not to be violent, imposed their will upon their peers in other ways.
We had a “classroom court” exercise once a week to resolve disputes between students. This was presumably intended to teach us how the court system works, though it wound up doing a poor job of it. Or maybe not, depending how cynical you are about the US criminal justice system.
I mostly got a fair shake whenever I was in the hot seat. Until a particular girl, who will be identified here as Allison, got to be the judge. Even in elementary school, there was a queen bee supported by simpering subordinates. Allison punished whoever crossed her as strongly as she rewarded whoever sucked up to her.
The three times I was tried in classroom court, it was for accidents twice, and once for a case of he said, she said. The accidents were squeezing a Capri sun until it explosively shot juice into the eye of someone seated opposite me at lunch, and throwing a rock as hard as I could into the sky, only for it to come down directly onto someone’s head (which I absolutely didn’t foresee).
The he-said, she-said was a case of theft. We had a system of reward tickets we receive for good behavior that could be exchanged at a sort of indoor yard sale where kids would sell toys they were tired of to one another. My tickets had mysteriously vanished from my desk, but anticipating the possibility of theft, I’d written my initials faintly and in tiny letters at the corners of the tickets.
This precaution made it possible to prove the accused had, in fact, robbed me. But she was a girl, and Allison was the judge. She didn’t even make any effort to disguise her bias, smugly declaring “I don’t know who is right, but the defendant is a girl and you’re a boy, so I’m ruling in her favor.”
The girl in question was also one of Allison’s friends, which likely played a part in the decision, and I wasn’t one of the few boys she fancied, so under the bus I went. When I complained about this to a teacher I heard a very familiar speech about patience, tolerance, understanding, and not extrapolating my experience with Allison to all girls.
I don’t think the girls in my class ever heard that speech, or Allison would not have ruled as she did. I suspect girls are told something very different, particularly by the time they reach college.
In retrospect the speech I got seems very much like it’s specifically reserved for white, male children. Not as an appeal to higher minded ideals, so much as an intentionally inflicted handicap, while everybody else was told they’re correct to resent us. Tearing one group down, while building the others up.
I could, even then, detect the faint outlines of an ideology at work. I didn’t yet know what to call it, only that I was the intended target. In highschool, when we began to learn history properly, it was almost entirely confined to US history with the sole exception of the holocaust. Which meant it was really just the “bad things white people did” class.
My autistic ass didn’t realize how emotionally loaded the topic was, so I picked at nits. Many of the other students seemed to believe slavery was an American invention. When they said as much during presentations, the teacher did not correct them.
So I wrote my paper about the history of slavery. How it was practiced by every culture up until relatively recent history, though in fact some MENA countries are still at it today. How it was Africans who sold us African slaves, how every ancient culture regarded conquest as admirable right up until one group became way the fuck better at it than everybody else.
Moreover, that the first people in all of history to abolish slavery for moral reasons were the lily-white French and British. Americans were soon to follow, fighting a war over it, then doing more than anybody else in history to force other nations around the world to free their slaves.
It was not well received. I had to speak to the principal. There I received a superficially defensible reason for the narrow focus of our history education; that it was a western history class, so naturally it focused only on western countries and the relevant time periods. It was merely convenient coincidence that teaching this way left students convinced America is a uniquely evil nation guilty of unprecedented crimes against humanity, and that white people are history’s primary villains.
College is where I first began hearing about privilege in a detailed way. We had a writing exercise in grade school where I first heard the “invisible backpack” analogy and was instructed to list all the advantages I had that I didn’t earn, but I didn’t find out what all that was about until college.
Colleges being foul nests of Marxist indoctrination is an overblown trope. I really only had a few such experiences. One professor was intersex and clearly insecure about it as she turned what was supposed to be an ecology course into a series of lessons about intersex, how gender is socially constructed, how biological sex is an arbitrary clustering of traits and so on.
I had one history professor explicitly urge us to vote for John Kerry, and a substitute who announced upon entering the classroom that he was a communist and would proceed to spend the class teaching us the fundamentals and history of communism. Someone must’ve complained as I never saw him again.
That history professor by the way was one of many voices on the left I heard back then claiming the prediction that significant demographic change would result from unchecked immigration was just a racist conspiracy theory. Now that it has come to pass, those same voices are either silent, or celebratory.
Still, three incidents of that kind isn’t too bad. I don’t know what it’s like these days. It mostly wasn’t the professors promulgating CRT in college, it was other students. One girl did a presentation on how race is “socially constructed with no basis in biology”. A familiar phrase to those of us who encountered CRT talking points in the late 90s to mid-2000s. You don’t often hear the “with no basis in biology” bit nowadays though.
That’s because forensic scientists routinely identify the race of violent crime suspects by genetically sequencing blood and semen samples. The genetic traits they’re looking for cluster reliably according to our socially constructed racial labels, which in turn correlate near perfectly to geographical ancestry. As expected since the traits we associate with those labels evolved as adaptations to specific regional climates.
Race is also determinable from osteomorphology, as with sex. Anthropologists routinely determine the race and sex of ancient human remains by studying skeletal (particularly cranial) geometry, putting the lie to the oft repeated truism that race is only skin deep. Stephen Jay Gould was infamously outed for falsifying a study of intracranial volume in his widely cited work “The Mismeasure of Man”.
Richard Lewontin’s widely repeated claim that two individuals within the same race differ more genetically than they do from individuals of a different race was also later revealed to be a lie, rebuked by (among others) Richard Dawkins. In both of these examples, well meaning men of science were emotionally motivated to distort the facts by their desire to undermine racism, the CRT equivalent of lyin’ for Jesus.
Why was I lied to? Doubtless a little white lie as it were, told with the best of intentions. Nevertheless, I resent being intentionally misled. You might take issue with characterizing these ideologically motivated distortions as lies, though. Certainly they contain at least small kernels of truth.
Are racial labels socially constructed? Yes. But do they describe real biological categories we can reliably tell apart by genetic analysis? Also yes. This is what I wrote my paper on, presenting it not long after hers. You can imagine how it went over with the rest of the class, and the professor.
The talk I received following this incident is where I learned CRT uses a definition of racism that nobody else uses. A deliberate straw man assembled from all the misapprehensions that existed about race prior to the discovery of DNA, the sequencing of the human genome or even the publication of On the Origin of Species. It’s only natural that we had wrong ideas about race then. Lamarck had wrong ideas about evolution, that doesn’t prove evolution is false, just that it was not always accurately understood.
This proprietary definition of racism that only CRT uses is their basis for claiming PoC can’t be racist, if you were wondering. Your confusion comes from the fact that, like everybody else, you define racism as racial prejudice/discrimination whereas CRT defines it as the elaborate, archaic system of granular (and largely arbitrary) racial categorizations used by European slavers to define different degrees of admixture.
I didn’t start tugging at these loose threads just trying to be a contrarian smartass, though. I was stress testing their claims to see how they reacted, and in the process reverse engineering what they really meant when they used certain words. Like racism of course, but the same people also told me sex is socially constructed, simply labels we use to describe clusters of biological traits. They told me sex is a spectrum, not a binary, as proven by the existence of intersex people.
In reality, in humans, sex is bimodally distributed. Not a binary doesn’t automatically equal spectrum, which implies a smooth gradient. There are not equally represented intermediaries at all points between male and female. About 98.3% of us are unambiguously one or the other. The “spectrum” I was told about fits entirely into the remaining 1.7%.
Or it would, if that 1.7% figure was accurate. It comes from TRA organizations and dishonestly lumps in conditions not recognized by most physicians as intersex like Klinefelter syndrome, Turner syndrome, and late-onset adrenal hyperplasia, in order to artificially boost the final figure. Critical Gender Theory, much like CRT, is a castle built upon a cloud of well meaning lies.
The exposure of these lies by the documentary Hjervenask (“Brainwash” ) resulted in a series of firings and government ordered restructuring of the Nordic Gender Institute (though officials denied it influenced their decision). We might aspire to force a similar confrontation with reality in the United States some day, and there’s been some progress in that direction.
What is CRT, according to CRT?
But then, none of this is CRT proper. CRT isn’t just a collection of bogus scientific claims, those are just in there to satisfy the sort of person who goes looking for empirical justification for their beliefs after the fact. CRT is not a theory in the same sense as the theory of evolution. It’s a political ideology, primarily concerned with the multitude of ways that lingering white supremacy embedded into western societies affects the lives of PoC.
More broadly, the other subsets of critical theory explore (for example) how western societies are still in some ways indirectly male dominated despite laws prohibiting discrimination against women (and in fact laws like affirmative action requiring discrimination against men in business and academia), how we’re still culturally heteronormative even if gay marriage is legal, etc. with intersectionality being the study of the various ways these culturally inflicted disadvantages can overlap.
That is how critical theorists understand critical theory, because that’s how it presents itself, and they take it at face value. From their perspective, anybody who reads anything more than that into critical theory, who takes issue with the hateful undercurrents in CRT circles simply fails to understand it.
This is much like taking North Korea at their word when they say NK is a Democratic People’s Republic. Or like taking Men Going Their Own Way at their word when they say their movement is about men’s rights, not misogyny.
Most critical theorists don’t buy that, because they aren’t blind. They cannot fail to notice the strong undercurrent of woman hate in MGTOW circles, and ultimately what an ideology’s really about is defined by its members and the impact it has on the world. I’m also not blind, and thus cannot fail to see that for many members, CRT is a vehicle for hatred of white dudes:
Perhaps the more instructive comparison is with cults, and religions descended from them. Members of such a group take its teachings at face value. Well designed cults and religions appear from the inside convincingly like sober reality. That isn’t how they look from the outside however, like a one-way mirrored bubble that seems to go on forever when viewed from within, only someone outside of it can see you’re in fact confined. A fish that doesn’t see the water it’s in.
Sorry to pick on Christians, but Christianity is a useful example of this my readership will be comfortably familiar with. Christians commonly complain that critics of their religion simply don’t understand it, despite apostates routinely outscoring them on tests of Biblical knowledge.
Christians will tell you Christianity is simply divinely revealed, eternal truths about how to be a more tolerant, compassionate person. “A relationship, not a religion”. In their mind, particularly if they’ve never read the Bible cover to cover, Christianity simply equals “don’t be a dick”. Of course, as women, apostates, gays and others who have historically found themselves under the boot of the church know, the Bible unfortunately says a great deal more than just “don’t be a dick”.
Which is to say, how Christianity presents itself and how followers perceive it differs markedly from how skeptics see it, and the impact it has on the world. This should come as no surprise, every ideology paints the rosiest possible picture of itself, playing up the positive humanitarian aspects. The claws and fangs only come out when you dig deep enough into the source material.
I’m going to list some attributes, and I want you to tell me if they’re describing CRT or Christianity:
✓inherited ancestral sin
✓confession
✓shunning
✓claims to be exclusive arbiter of morality
✓absolution only by conversion
✓roots worldview in subjective feeling which can’t be examined/argued with
✓dissent is an act of violence
Inherited Ancestral Sin
All persons of European descent inherit the original sin of slavery, it is argued, because even though nobody alive today has ever participated, we continue to indirectly reap benefits from it. Confession is a common part of CRT training wherein white employees verbally confess that they are racist, that they benefit from institutional racism, and that they pledge to be better/do better.
Shunning
Shunning is a mainstay of critical theorist/SJW circles. Critical theorists on social media platforms like Twitter constantly cannibalize one another in the never-ending pursuit of ideological purity. To be branded toxic/problematic/X-ist results in being shunned by members still in good standing, aka cancelled, typically followed by deplatforming wherein people supposedly concerned with poverty conspire to impoverish you.
Exclusive Arbiters of Morality
Critical theorists position themselves as the only valid judges of morality. They alone decide what is racist, what is sexist, what is homophobic, transphobic, etc. and do not recognize any competing systems, such as religious morality, egalitarianism, etc.
Only Path to Absolution
Nobody can absolve themselves. The only way to be in good standing with critical theorists is conversion. You must adopt and study their belief system, putting it into practice in your own life, joining them in their collective condemnation of heretics and sinners.
Subjective Experiences Immune to Argument
There is no arguing with critical theorists, because a fundamental tenet of critical theory is that white males don’t get a voice. We are invalid unpersons. More broadly, anybody who isn’t themselves a member of a marginalized group fundamentally cannot understand their plight, and as such, has nothing valid to say on that topic.
Dissent is Violence
Critical theorists love censorship, and mock the concept of freeze peach (free speech) not only because their scientific claims don’t bear scrutiny, but because they define dissent as a form of violence. Defending biological definitions of words like “man”, “woman”, “boy” and “girl” for example is considered to be equivalent to physical violence against trans people.
This serves a couple different purposes. But principally it establishes ideological justification for responding to verbal dissent with violent, physical retaliation. This is how they rationalize punching people for talking, throwing shakes at strangers, and chasing down random asian men to beat them up in the belief that they might be Andy Ngo.
It doesn’t end there! Not only is speech equivalent to violence, but silence is also violence. Which means you’re not just obligated to refrain from dissent under threat of beatings, you’re also obligated to agree with these people and join them in their cause, under threat of beatings. Presumably if you find this arrangement disagreeable, beatings will continue until morale improves.
This is more than just the superficial comparison critical theorists are likely to dismiss it as, for the same reasons Christians laugh off the notion that their religion originated as an end of the world cult. Cults do not necessarily have to be religious. The most common types of cults encountered by psychiatrists and law enforcement include:
- Eastern Mystical
- Aberrant Christian
- Psycho-Spiritual or Self Improvement
- Eclectic/Syncretistic
- Psychic/Occult/Astral
- Established Cults
- Extremist Political/Social Movements
See that last one? It shouldn’t be a controversial inclusion. Critical theorists can see that MAGA is a political cult for example, much as Christians can look at Mormonism and see what it really is, versus what members believe it to be, and how it portrays itself. What neither group can do is turn that microscope back on themselves and recognize, in fact, they’re in the same boat, and that political radicalization isn’t a one-way street.
Everybody thinks they’re too smart to be fooled. Which would logically require, for example, that a non-Muslim believes him or herself to be smarter than every Muslim ever to live. Or that non-Christians are smarter than every Christian, non-Scientologists are smarter than every Scientologist, and so on.
This attitude fundamentally misunderstands why people join cults. Their appeal isn’t intellectual. Usually they have superficially scientific sounding apologetics prepared in case anybody asks for them, but their main value proposition is emotional. Cults offer you emotional fulfillment you’re not getting in the outside world.
Often intellectually principled people can be persuaded to compromise those principles if it means an opportunity to love, to be loved, and to feel their life contributes to a larger purpose they regard as morally/spiritually important. So it was that all the top ranking Rajneeshis were accomplished academics, and the 9/11 hijackers were all STEM professionals. Intelligence is often as potent a tool for deceiving yourself as it is for discerning truth from falsehood.
Likewise, this is how someone with a big heart and only the purest humanitarian intentions could look at critical theory and see something very different from the picture you get if you read between the lines, and eavesdrop on what critical theorists say amongst themselves.
To someone like this, CRT simply boils down to human decency. Human decency can’t be wrong. So anybody saying CRT is in any way bad or fraudulent must be misunderstanding it, just as Christianity boils down to kindness, and kindness can’t be wrong. So anybody disputing Christianity must simply not understand it. This is the sort of person who feels that what is beautiful and morally upright cannot be false, and what seems cruel or ugly cannot be true. In fact, this world contains as many cruel, ugly truths as it does beautiful lies.
Don’t laugh at that person. Nothing necessarily prevents the same fate from befalling you. You may well be very smart, but intelligence does not equal immunity to indoctrination. Anything, no matter how sacred to you, no matter how plainly true and important, can potentially be a cult. Well designed cults do much to place themselves beyond suspicion in the minds of their followers.
The only way out of that mirrored bubble is to compare your beliefs against known examples of cults, and general heuristics like the B.I.T.E. model. Probably even the insinuation that something so morally important to you is a cult comes off as insulting, but you’ve seen Christians, Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Muslims, Scientologists and even Amway distributors react in the same way. Are you smarter than all of them?
I’m not. But then I also don’t decide what’s true or false using emotional reasoning. I am open at all times to the possibility that I’m wrong. An educated person should be able to at least entertain any idea, no matter how objectionable, without needing to immediately accept or reject it. That’s an increasingly rare quality though, as we retreat from Enlightenment principles back towards a worldview more concerned with what’s moral than what’s true.
I do expect all of this to boil over, even moreso than it already has. The general public is slowly reaching the same conclusion I did, by observation and inference, that CRT is a pointedly racist, sexist political ideology. Eventually this will go to the supreme court, which will then need to decide why political ideology should be taught in public schools and made the basis for policy when religious ideology does not enjoy the same privilege.
If you disagreed with me going in, and came out still disagreeing, then I hope this article has at least persuaded you that there exist reasons other than ignorance of Critical Theory to dispute and oppose it. If you agreed with me going in and still do by this point, I’ve been preaching to the choir, and will leave you with this funny so that your time won’t have been wasted: