Critical Race Theory is the new Black Lives Matter
“Critical Race Theory” or “CRT” has been in conservative media at such an amount that I had to start digging into it. What is “Critical Race Theory”? Well as with a lot of controversial topics these days, it depends on who you ask. I prefer to start with Wikipedia since everything there is reviewed, curated, and cited. I also attempted to find sites that predated this current culture war.
According to Wikipedia:
Critical race theory examines social, cultural and legal issues as they relate to race and racism.
In other words racism is “systemic”. But when you listen to conservatives I get the impression that their belief is that critical race theory teaches that all white people are racist and oppressors.
To say another way for one side, CRT means our laws are racists, not you. But for the others it’s just you are racist.
I have watched the ideas behind critical race theory percolate even before the word exploded into the media. Every time you hear someone explain how red-lining has limited generational wealth in the black community they are expressing this idea that the system we have was molded to benefit one group over another. Or when someone touches on the cocaine/crack disparity, where crack cocaine thought to be used by minorities got a much more severe punishment than powder cocaine thought to be used by rich people, they are touching on some of the reasons why people may think our laws are racists.
“You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities,” Ehrlichman said.
When you hear a top Nixon advisor admitting that the drug war was designed to “disrupt” black and hippie communities. It’s hard to not come to the conclusion that race has had an effect on our laws and institutions.
There are some aspects of critical race theory that should probably stay in academia until further study in my opinion. The assumption that an institution is or continues to be racist because of a racist origin for example. This has been used to argue against the electoral college and the police because these have been designed so that southern states could keep their slaves. While the origin stories of these institutions are interesting on an academic level, when talking about policy today, I think it is more useful to evaluate these things in the here and now because a racist origin story is not going to be enough to convince a conservative or even an independent to abolish the electoral college, if they think that it works for us today.
I believe there is a fear that critical race theory is correct and our laws and policies benefit one group, specifically white men, over another and changing these laws may cause a redistribution of resources. If that fear exists, there is an incentive to destroy this examination. Even if we were to correct for what critical race theory alleges without a redistribution of resources, that correction requires doing something. And for some that is incentive enough to destroy it.
A video circulated in social media of a black radio host shouting down critical race theory. Fox News, given what it is and given it’s audience, has every incentive to amplify his message.
The issue that a lot of black people have right now is swallowing the hard red pill and that’s to realize that we absolutely are the biggest problem and biggest threat to us progressing, not white people.
I don’t believe CRT proponents are trying to shrug personal responsibility. As a community I would like to believe there is a shared responsibility. Many black leaders have said that we have work to do ourselves but at the same time “stop killing us.” Black Wallstreet is proof enough that we are more than capable of picking ourselves up by our “bootstraps” as long as people get off our necks.
Speaking of our collective necks. Until the murder of George Floyd, Black Lives Matter was just as controversial in it’s early days. When I heard “Black Lives Matter,” I heard it as a reminder as if you were to say “Black Lives Matter too.” With the “too” being silent. What others heard was “Only Black Lives Matter” with the “only” being silent. And for years the two groups talked across each other thinking they were talking about the same thing, but they weren’t. That’s the limitation of the English language unfortunately. It’s not just the words that people use, it’s the context by which people use them in that gives them meaning. Sadly in the US we’re so segregated that we no longer share the same context and I would argue that makes it harder for us to share even the same language.
Politicians are aware of this though as I suspect they were when they launched “All Lives Matter.” Per the Wikipedia entry, conservative activist Christopher Rufo stated:
The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory,’” so that the term would become synonymous with “the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.
Critical race theory is just a study. We’re only going to know if it’s right or wrong through study. We can only become a smarter, healthier, society by understanding ourselves and the world that we’ve built. If we meander about in ignorance we’re going to break stuff, mainly ourselves. Knowledge is power. And also we can’t let a few people develop an understanding of the world we’ve built, because they’re going to take advantage. Much in the same way that priests used take advantage of the illiterate, who had little choice to believe them when they insinuated you could pay your way into heaven. We need to stop letting politicians, many of whom do not live in the same context as most of the US, and have their own incentives to maintain that context, to control the conversation.