By Steven Yates
Critical race theory (CRT) has the nation divided — to the point where angry parents disrupting school board meetings and people leaving stable employment in protest have become yesterday’s news. What’s it all about?
Defenders of CRT insist that American school are not teaching it, that its critics don’t understand it. They claim they are not calling all white people racists, or trying to shame them, or get them to hate and loathe themselves for their “whiteness” or “white privilege.”
They are talking about a system, they say. Systemic racism is built into the legal and Constitutional structure of America, and into occupations. They want to eliminate systemic racism. But that means comprehensive system change. How are they going to do that without tearing up the country’s legal and Constitutional framework and replacing it wholesale? The virus of revolutionism strikes again!
And in the meantime, if they are saying that racism is built into the system, then how do they avoid the conclusion that white people are racist by default, and that replacing them is the strategy to pursue?
Claims that CRT does not attack white people are solidly refuted by invective such as the following:
This is the cost of talking to white people at all. The cost of your own life, as they suck you dry. There are no good apples out there. White people make my blood boil. … I had fantasies of unloading a revolver into the head of any white person that got in my way, burying their body and wiping my bloody hands as I walked away relatively guiltless with a bounce in my step. Like I did the world a f***ing favor.
This is from a lecture entitled “The Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind” by a psychiatrist (not psychologist?) named Aruna Khilanani speaking before the prestigious Yale University School of Medicine. Yale administrators repudiated the remark. Under fire from across the political spectrum, what choice did they have?
This is just one such case from academia in free fall, where tenured professors ponder whether math is racist. (I’m not joking, or making this up!)
There are numerous other statements, some from self-hating white “scholars” such as Donald Moss, who wrote this (I am quoting the abstract, unedited, for an academic journal article entitled “On Having Whiteness“):
Whiteness is a condition one first acquires and then one has — a malignant, parasitic-like condition to which “white” people have a particular susceptibility. The condition is foundational, generating characteristic ways of being in one’s body, in one’s mind, and in one’s world. Parasitic Whiteness renders its hosts’ appetites voracious, insatiable, and perverse. These deformed appetites particularly target nonwhite peoples. Once established, these appetites are nearly impossible to eliminate. Effective treatment consists of a combination of psychic and social-historical interventions. Such interventions can reasonably aim only to reshape Whiteness’s infiltrated appetites—to reduce their intensity, redistribute their aims, and occasionally turn those aims toward the work of reparation.
No hatred of “whitey” there? No self-loathing, encouraging other white people to self-loathe? I did not read the article. The abstract was enough.
Recently, moreover, an NAACP rep in a PTA leadership role attacked those parents who are “anti social justice” and “anti-equity” with a “Let them die!”
All over complaints that their children have returned from school in tears reporting they were told they were racists. Small wonder parents are showing up at school board meetings, angered, demanding that their voices be heard, and getting even angrier when the leftists that tend to dominate such boards try to shut them down.
White men are leaving jobs in education — some expressing the exact same complaints, belying the idea that CRT is not being shoved down their throats in school districts across America, all the way down to elementary schools, and that white employees and white students alike are being given assignments telling them to identify their “white privilege”!
Consider the case of Daniel Concannon, who rejected “white privilege training” (some might deem parts of his letter “inappropriate” but what do you expect?):
I hereby resign as 21CCLC Site Coordinator in light of the Frankfurt School Manchester School District’s endorsement of the dehumanization and hatred of White People, as evidenced by their dissemination of the imbecilic “White Privilege” curriculum presented by the intellectual titans at “Learning for Justice,” an organization founded by America’s eternal arbiters of truth and morality — the SPLC — where senior fellow Mark Potok’s office is decorated with celebratory charts of the declining percentage of White people in the United States and Europe….
Interesting that Concannon knows about the Frankfurt School. Getting CRT studied in depth and traced to its actual roots is a challenge, though.
Just recently I penned a deep dive into the foundations of CRT (here).
I don’t have the impression that people are much interested in deep dives. Admittedly the piece was long and involved — 8,000 words — but after over a week online, it has yet to reach 50 hits. Attention spans have never been shorter, of course. But the essay is there for those who might be interested in finding out how CRT’s actual foundations are Western, white, and male — through and through.
Whether anyone likes it or not, white people built Western civilization from its foundations upward. White Europeans developed a specific body of ideas and learned to apply them. I do not claim that white people accomplished this alone, or that we’ve done the job perfectly. No one is saying there hasn’t been any racism or unjust discrimination. But surely white people deserve the bulk of the credit for those documents (from the Magna Carta to the Declaration of Independence of 1776 and beyond), ideas (e.g., natural law, limitations on government, the rule of law), institutions (such as private property), and techniques (e.g., the printing press; the harnessing of energy for propulsion first on water, then on land, and then in the air) that built the most advanced civilization we’ve ever seen.
Minority groups have benefited from these achievements as well as the white majority. The black population in America is the most economically well off black population in the world. Their counterparts in Africa do not come close.
Perhaps a little gratitude might be in order, not the resentment and hostility leftists have fostered.
The hostility is not exclusively race-based. There’s an ethos of hostility to achievement of any sort loose in the land, and it hardly began yesterday. It is the hostility directed against achievers of whatever stripe by nonachievers. The latter put other nonachievers (George Floyd is an example) up on pedestals and turn them into objects of pagan worship.
You can’t reason with hostile mobs of whatever ethnicity, since it is emotional and not rational or fact-based. Nor can you reason with their spokesmen. Consider the following, from a “progressive” writer named Rob Kall who puts out daily effusions by himself and fellow leftists. This article’s point of departure is the recent passing of William Regnery, conservative author, publisher, and philanthropist for conservative causes:
“I’m not one who does not speak ill of the dead. This maggot feeder white supremacist fascism funder deserves to rot in hell and be reviled, his grave desecrated. It might even make urination a protected first amendment free speech right.
“Multimillionaire white supremacist William Regnery who financed fascists and fascist, white supremacist organizations, has, happily, dropped dead and is now rotting in hell. May his burial place be added to a list of places where despicable people are buried for tourists to pee or spit or throw garbage on their graves. These ugly sociopaths deserve to have their graves given such treatment. There is not much that separates people like Regnery from other monsters in history.”
What do you say in response to something like that?
Nothing said would do the slightest good! All you can do is turn away from the real haters in Western civilization: leftists, perhaps invoking one of their own lines: haters gonna hate!
There are action steps you can take. I’ve beaten the drum for over 20 years now: get your kids out of government schools and send them to private Christian schools or homeschool them. There are complete and readily available homeschooling curriculums, such as that of former Sen. Ron Paul. Your kids will learn sound English, sound math and science, sound economics.
Western civilization is clearly self-destructing. If there is any turning back from the brink, it is going to have to happen on such margins, through conservatives, especially conservative parents, who have separated from the present-day mainstream of secularism, materialism, and cultural Marxism.
There is no time to waste, because whatever happens, the next generation is already having to deal with crises the cohort I grew up with couldn’t have imagined.
In the meantime, my essay (final section) contains all the reason for calling CRT a weapon of mass distraction.
Whites and blacks have no compelling, fundamental reasons to hate one another. We all have the same problems: earning decent livings, keeping families together and raising children, and finding meaning and fulfillment in our lives such as they are in a society growing more controlled every day. The problem is that one race is being taught that all of its problems are the fault of another race which is being demonized. White leftists in particular have led the way in teaching generations of black kids to “hate whitey” because “whitey” is to blame for all their problems.
And that they are owed reparations for an arrangement (chattel slavery) that has not existed in America for over a century and a half now.
In a multiracial society, this is a recipe for division, conflict, and chaos that benefits those with actual unearned privileges.
While whites and blacks (and other minority groups as well) are looking at each other with hostility, no one is paying any attention to what is going on at the top. Who, after all, is benefiting the most from distractions such as this?
The only answer: the entity I’ve been calling GloboCorp: the super-elite class who not only believe themselves most fit to rule over as much of the planet as possible, they’ve designed a strategy and amassed the resources to further that goal apace!
It is clear, too, that the super-elites are using the “white supremacy” wedge to advance their goals of global domination. (This, from super-elite owned Time Magazine, proposes a “global fight” against something that doesn’t exist. What does exist is super-elite supremacism.)
Frankly, what would be nice to see (not expected, obviously) is for recognized leaders as well as a critical mass of the rank and file of both blacks and whites across the world to start paying attention to what’s really going on from the top down while they still can.
Especially that much of what is going on in terms of growing surveillance in a more controlled society is happening right in front of their eyes!
STEVEN YATES’s book What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory has just been published by Wipf and Stock (Eugene, OR).
© 2021 Steven Yates – All Rights Reserved
E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com
