Fights erupt at school board meetings, employees walk out of struggle sessions, military commanders are relieved of their command, police chiefs are fired by city councils, and politicians demonize each other—no longer over substantive issues, but over what ethnic and racial groups they each belong (or do not belong) to. The latest controversy swirling around Facebook, the Twitterverse, cable news channels, and everywhere else you may look, would, at first glance, appear to be a new idea being introduced into everything from public and private education to the corporate world, to sports and entertainment, to the military branches, and throughout the culture at large.
So what is this new idea which is causing so much rancor and division throughout the land? What is the latest example of The Left tearing down, destroying, and dividing – their specialty – rather than elevating, building, and uniting?
The answer? Critical Race Theory, commonly referred to as CRT.
CRT basically teaches that European people (or “white” Americans) and their descendants in the United States, their academic systems, systems of jurisprudence, standards, beliefs, and of course, traditions and customs, are all racist inventions designed to give an advantage to white Americans. White Americans thus have white privilege, and in order for there to be “true” justice and equality in American society, that privilege needs to be stripped away, equality needs to be replaced by equity, and all white Americans need to atone for the sins of their fathers, their father’s fathers, and of course, their own crime—primarily the crime of being born with the immutable characteristic of white skin.
Since white Americans have been the power structure in the United States since Day One (which can be either 1619 or 1776, depending on what school of thought you follow) and continue to maintain the power structure in every aspect of society, from media to entertainment to sports to medicine to law to engineering to the armed forces, it is impossible for races other than those who are white to be racist.
Essentially it is impossible for a billionaire like Oprah Winfrey to be racist because she is a racial minority, whereas a white coal miner from western Pennsylvania can easily be a racist. Oprah Winfrey is oppressed by the system and the coal miner is not. In fact, the coal miner is privileged. And the coal miner is also a white supremacist, whether he knows it and acknowledges it, or not. This is the essence of CRT.
What are the origins of CRT?
CRT did not spring up overnight. And it is not by any means a “new” idea. Its an old idea spruced up with racial window dressing but it has been around for a long time. Prior to CRT there was Political Correctness, a polite term for Cultural Marxism. Cultural Marxism came from Critical Race Theory without the “Race,” just Critical Theory. And where did Critical Theory spring from? Critical Theory goes all the way back to the 1930s and 1940s and emerged from a school of thought commonly known as The Frankfurt School.
The Frankfurt School was influenced by Marxism—which any American schooled in history ought to be aware of—but The Frankfurt School’s brand of Marxism tossed out any appeal to the proletariat and worked instead on capturing the culture by first eliminating cultural norms, customs, and tradition. The Frankfurt School has been described by William S. Lind as a school “of Marxist intellectuals who created cultural Marxism, now most commonly known as ‘wokeness’.”
Where did The Frankfurt School emerge? It began when a group of Marxist scholars, including Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and others, figured out that the working class was never going to accept the ideology of Marxism so long as they could rely on and have the support of their country’s traditional institutions, their religion, and their family. If The Frankfurt School could destroy a nation’s cultural norms, its religious faith, and wreck the family, then Critical Theory would no longer be a theory but a fact.
Some of this was borrowed from Antonio Gramsci, one of the first Marxists who understood traditional culture was a greater impediment to Marxism than capitalism and free markets. Some of it was also borrowed from Mao Tse Tung, who during China’s Cultural Revolution, successfully annihilated China’s “Four Olds” (Old Ideas, Old Culture, Old Habits, and Old Customs). And so Critical Theory was born. As William S. Lind writes, “Critical Theory quickly became one of the most important tools in their quest to destroy traditional society, Western culture, and the Christian religion. The term ‘Critical Theory’ is something of a play on words: the theory is to criticize, to damage, and eventually destroy all traditional institutions by unremitting criticism.”
After decades of Critical Theory it was inevitable a racial demagogue would come along and alter Critical Theory for his own use. That demagogue happened to be Ibram X. Kendi. Christopher F. Rufo has labeled Ibram X. Kendi as Critical Race Theory’s “Chief Marketing Officer.”[1] How did Kendi achieve such notoriety so soon? As Christopher F. Rufo explains, “after the death of George Floyd in 2020, Kendi’s book, How to Be an Antiracist, began selling an astonishing number of copies — including institutional sales to public schools, government agencies, and professional organizations, all seeking to understand the ongoing racial unrest.
During the conflict, Kendi appeared constantly on television, delivered speeches to elite institutions, and positioned himself as the guru of America’s racial reckoning.”[2] Kendi was able to dress up the old Marxist bunco game into a new con by exploiting the emergence of groups such as the Not F ____g Around Coalition (NFAC) and Black Lives Matter (BLM), and then by channeling their meteoric rise into burnishing his own academic credentials and marketing skills into a sure fire profit making scheme, all while decrying the pernicious influence of capitalism on society and its ruinous effects on black Americans especially.
Kendi has successfully leveraged his persona as a revolutionary militant to get the outraged, the ignorant, and the guilty to pour money into his lectures, appearances, and books. Christopher F. Rufo also writes, “While Kendi, born Ibram Henry Rogers, presents himself as a radical subversive, he is really an ideologist of elite opinion, subsidized heavily by America’s corporations and public institutions. Kendi’s work has been used and recommended by Fortune 100 companies, the federal bureaucracy, and the United States military—the very foundations of the power structure he claims to oppose.”[3]
Yesterday’s radical extremist is today’s mainstream thinker. Ideas once considered beyond the pale, on the fringe, or absurd not long ago, now find themselves to be mandatory and compulsory policies, all before the majority of Americans are even aware a permanent change has just occurred.
A man “identifies” as a woman and is now entitled to use a woman’s public restroom. Those who object to this are now bigots. Those who are incapable of identifying themselves as belonging to the restrictive binary “choice” between male and female eliminate pronouns in the public language – as the restrictive noun “sex” as an identifier is replaced by the more fluid “gender.”[4] So, as Christopher F. Rufo writes, Ibram X. Kendi, “like many activists before him, will likely be absorbed into the fabric of elite institutions, where supposedly radical ideas are cosseted into conventional wisdom.”[5]
Yet it is also becoming clear the American public, Americans of all races in fact, are growing weary of this confidence artist and his fellow traveler’s bunco schemes and are opposing his ideas. No genuine American raised with the foundational American premises of freedom and equality can abide with official and legal discrimination based on race, regardless of the race being discriminated against.
The term “equity” has been bandied about often over the last year, and while most Americans considered equity something they were building up in their home as they paid off their mortgage, the Cultural Marxists who came up with Critical Theory and now Critical Race Theory, have an entirely different definition of “equity” than what most Americans are accustomed to. Whereas equality meant the freedom for all to have the same opportunities based on their ability, equity means ensuring the same outcome based on race.
So, all are free to try out for a baseball team; everyone is given that opportunity. Based on their ability, those with the best athletic skills actually get to play professionally. That’s equality. Equity says those who may not possess all the requisite attributes required get hired anyway based on race and other immutable factors. This flies in the face of the type of legitimate justice Americans are accustomed to. No matter how the advocates of CRT push to replace equality with equity, most Americans continue to support The American Way: a system of individual freedom, equality under the law, and a colorblind public policy.
This is why it is so distressing that our current military leaders are pushing equity rather than equality. We see this with the current Air Force Chief of Staff demanding a quota of pilots based on race, we see this with the current Chief of Naval Operations recommending Ibram X. Kendi’s book, How To Be An Antiracist,to all sailors – officers and enlisted – of the United States Navy. We see this with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff defending CRT being taught in our military academies, and we see this with the current Secretary of Defense saying on the one hand the American armed forces do not teach, profess, or embrace CRT, while at the same time acknowledging it is being taught![6]
When a commander of United States Space Command spoke out on the similarity between CRT and Cultural Marxism he was summarily relieved of his command. This is a dangerous precedent as the military prides itself on operating as one integrated internally cohesive entity, but the division CRT naturally brings invites only disruption and distraction—two elements no effective military can afford.[7]
Even in deep-blue California and Washington State, voters have recently rejected affirmative action at the ballot box, notwithstanding heavy support for those measures from multinational corporations and the Democratic establishment.
To understand the mind-set of the Cultural Marxism of the 2020s, we need to clarify several key concepts:
Woke: Becoming aware of injustice and oppression, whether real or perceived, and becoming motivated to act to end these evils.
Raising Consciousness: Educating/indoctrinating people about racism and injustice, especially making them aware of “white privilege.”
White Privilege: The inherent advantages of being white: greater accumulated wealth, prestige, credibility. Many concepts that we think necessary for success today (punctuality, work ethic, logical consistency) are supposedly the product of white privilege. To prove a white person is a racist, a Cultural Marxist need only ask this simple question: “Are you a racist?” If a person’s answer is no, that’s all the proof needed to determine that the person is so imbued with white privilege he doesn’t even recognize his racism.
Subjectivity: Truth is subjective, not objective. Cultural Marxists arrive at truth by feeling and identifying, not by logic and evidence. In “woke” thinking, logic itself is often belittled as a Western white male construct.
Critical Theory: This is the heart of Cultural Marxism: reinterpreting all areas of study in terms of oppressors and oppressed and gaming the system to favor the oppressed. Critical Legal Studies, a movement in law schools, seeks ways of reshaping the legal system to produce outcomes to favor oppressed groups and disfavor oppressors. Critical Race Theory tries to demonstrate that the legal/political/economic system is racist and must be changed. Critical Feminism sees the system as sexist; Queer Theory applies the same reasoning to sexual orientation and identity, and more.
Identity Group: Classifying people, not as individuals, but as groups identified by race, sex, orientation, identification, wealth, health, religion, citizenship, and more. Curiously, often one’s identity group is determined by who you identify with, not who you actually are. Former Democratic presidential candidate Robert Francis O’Rourke is neither poor nor Hispanic, but by taking on the name “Beto” he tried to cast his identity with poor Hispanics, with some success. Recently on national news a young white woman was filmed yelling at black police officers, “You’re traitors to your race!” (One wonders what the officers were thinking. And does the young woman really want the black officers to resign and make the police force all white? The movement to defund the police is utterly irrational, as minorities are the primary victims of crime. And if the thought of police officers acting as social workers is scary, the thought of social workers acting as police officers is even scarier.)
According to woke thinking, some of these identity groups are oppressors, and some are oppressed. Whites oppress blacks and Hispanics; Jews and Asians may be either oppressed or oppressors, depending upon what wokesters want to call them at any particular time. Wealthy people (defined as anyone who isn’t destitute) oppress the poor. Males oppress females. Citizens oppress non-citizens. Healthy people oppress those who are disabled. Christians oppress, well, just about everybody. Fostering conflict between identity groups is a primary tactic of Cultural Marxists.
Zero-Sum Game: In simplistic woke thinking, economics is a zero-sum game in which no new wealth is generated or destroyed. Therefore, every time you gain a dollar, that’s one dollar less for someone else. If you’ve become rich, you’ve done so either by making another person very poor or making a lot of people a little poor. Businesses do not employ people and give them opportunities; they exploit people. (So according to these people, America really has the same amount of wealth as when the Pilgrims moved here — no more was created — and it keeps getting divided further and further.)
Social Justice: Justice, in the view of Cultural Marxists, is not justice in the sense of rendering a verdict that is in accord with the evidence and the law, but is attained when there is a massive shift of power from oppressors to the oppressed. According to woke thinking, oppression (whatever that is) is the ultimate sin, and fighting oppression is the ultimate virtue. Those committed to social justice often call themselves social-justice warriors, or SJWs.
Intersectionality: This term brings it all together. Obviously, no one belongs to just one identity group. Because of your race, sex, economic status, nationality, etc., you belong to many identity groups, some of which may be oppressors and some of which may be oppressed. One may be a wealthy gay white female Buddhist, belonging to two oppressor groups and three oppressed groups (gay, female, Buddhist).
And that person’s moral authority to speak out on issues of oppression depends on the intersectionality of your identity groups, because only the oppressed can know what oppression feels like. A poor gay black disabled undocumented immigrant (read: illegal alien) pagan female has great moral authority to speak about oppression. A wealthy straight white healthy American Christian male has none at all. Even though you and your wife may think alike and consider yourselves soul mates, females automatically have more moral authority than males do, because they belong to at least one oppressed identity group.
In woke minds, only members of oppressor identity groups can commit oppression. Only oppressor races can be guilty of racism. Only the oppressive sex can be guilty of sexism.
Hating white people, or using racist epithets against Caucasians, or looting white businesses, is not, then, racism, because an oppressed race cannot be guilty of racism. So there are lots of actions that some sub-groups can get away with that other groups can’t. Serving as a poll watcher in a predominantly black precinct, I observed a black man say loudly to those around him, “I’m not for the Democrats, I’m not for the Republicans; I’m for whatever is good for the black man.” No one seemed to think anything was wrong with this. But if a white voter had made the exact same speech but had said “white man,” instead of “black man,” he would have been denounced as a racist or worse.
Snide put-downs of women are in very bad taste and can bring charges of sexual harassment. But the same comments about men are considered clever and can even bring applause, because an oppressed sex cannot be guilty of sexism.
Venomous attacks upon Christianity are ignored, while the same types of attacks upon non-Christians are condemned as bigotry. Why? Because according to wokesters, Christians are an oppressor group, even though there have been more Christian martyrs in the past century than in all other centuries of Christian history combined.
Likewise, if oppressed people (whether due to race, or economic status, or just because they identify with the oppressed) loot, vandalize, and burn business establishments, they’ve done nothing wrong. After all, they’re oppressed, and they’re just taking back what is rightfully theirs. That’s social justice!
As long as groups are deemed “oppressed,” they are given a pass for disagreeable behaviors. That is why Muslims and LGBTQ people seem to tolerate one another, even though their beliefs and practices are anathema to one another. They (at least in America) both perceive themselves as oppressed identity groups. It’s likely that when they no longer perceive themselves as victims of a common enemy, one will attack the other.
The “inevitable” future anticipated by the elites is a hellish combination of an absurd ideology, cultural Marxism (currently disguised as “wokeness”) with Brave New World. As Lance Morrow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal,
The struggle to which Americans, of whatever race, should be paying attention is the one that has to do with freedom. It has to do with privacy, mind control, individual liberties—with totalitarian systems of surveillance and manipulation perfecting themselves in an alliance of big tech, big government, global corporations and artificial intelligence. Wokeness … fronts for the real problem of the 21st century: a sinister autocracy just around the corner.
How to Fight Critical Race Theory (christopherrufo.com)
[1] Ibram X. Kendi, Master Marketer | City Journal (city-journal.org)
[2] Ibid
[3] Ibid
[4] Dem. Senator Bans ‘He/She’ Pronouns During Legislative Hearings – California Globe
[5] Ibram X. Kendi, Master Marketer | City Journal (city-journal.org)
[6] Amid The Pentagon’s CRT Campaign, Lloyd Austin Says ‘It’s Really Important’ The Military Is ‘Apolitical’ | The Daily Caller
[7] Critical Race Theory in the Military | The Heritage Foundation
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