ANTI-RACISM IS RACIST
What is called critical race theory (CRT) now pervades American life, including the corporate world and public school systems, and has been tacitly endorsed by the Biden administration under the innocuous-sounding but purposely misleading euphemism of “racial equity.” It thus promises to become the standard American political narrative for years to come, shaping and defining how we see our experiment in self-government and individual liberty.
Proponents argue that this constitutes a long-overdue racial reckoning that will allow Americans to fully grasp the extent to which our history, institutions and society have been based on “white supremacy” from the beginning.
In reality, what CRT threatens to do is not better educate us about the evils of slavery and Jim Crow but take us back to the kind of thinking that made such injustices possible.
This is because CRT begins with the same toxic assumption as other forms of racism throughout history and across societies: that we can infer just about everything we need to know about people we don’t know from their pigmentation.
Traditional racism was built on pernicious stereotypes about Black Americans suggestive of racial inferiority. CRT is based in every sense upon similar stereotypes and resulting assumptions, only in this case in its depiction of white rather than Black people.
“Whiteness” is said to be the cause of all that ails us and the primary source of white supremacy. To be white is therefore to be guilty, regardless of how a white person behaves or thinks. They are racist purely because of the color of their skin and, in a toxic application of the concept of collective guilt, because some of their ancestors were.
If “Blackness” was a justification for the old discrimination, “whiteness” is a basis for the new; the colors might have changed, but the way of thinking about race and people has not.
We are instructed by CRT prophets like Ibram X. Kendi that discrimination in the past requires more discrimination in the present and future, and that we need to incorporate race into every aspect of life because race dictates all. And that anyone who disagrees is a racist.
It is remarkable how big a reversal this represents from what Americans of goodwill embraced in the 1950s and 1960s to great effect: equal treatment under the law, and a society in which race neither counted for nor against. “Color-blindness” was what most of us, Black and white, thought we were aiming for, but that concept is now dismissed by CRT as hopelessly racist.
Martin Luther King’s “content of their character, not the color of their skin” now becomes color of skin regardless of character (and all else).
Since it is difficult to grasp as a logical proposition how more race consciousness and race-conscious policies will lead to less racism, it might be useful to conduct a thought experiment in which we assume that CRT has nothing at all to do with combating racism and is instead primarily a means of acquiring political power, that it employs charges of racism as a weapon because it is the worst thing a person can be accused of, and because any denial is only taken as further evidence of guilt.
Those who point out that this is illogical and unjust and attempt to defend the falsely accused can be accused too.
CRT might be a false, even slanderous portrayal of America and white Americans, and toxic in its effect on our discourse about race, but there is no denying its genius as a political stratagem.
It efficiently manufactures the very thing, racism, it claims to be resisting under the guise of anti-racism, and then uses accusations of racism to effectively discourage any resistance.