For weeks I’ve watched a concerted, but hard to pin down attack on Critical Race Theory. The attacks are everywhere, but the arguments against CRT are disjointed and imprecise. Ask a conservative what they don’t like about CRT and you’ll hear some variation of “It’s a Marxist Plot to get White People to hate themselves and I want nothing to do with it!”
The fact that CRT is none of that doesn’t matter to those attacking it.
That’s their point.
Attack and Bluster. Use talking points, but don’t justify the talking points.
That doesn’t work for me I needed to look at what CRT is, what it means and how it is implemented.
Here’s some of what I found about CRT:
Critical Race scholarship is unified by two tenets;
The first is to understand how a regime of white supremacy and its subordination of people of color have been created and maintained in America, and, in particular, to examine the relationship between that social structure and professed ideals such as "the rule of law" and "equal protection." The second is a desire not merely to understand the vexed bond between law and racial power but to change it." (Crenshaw et al., 1995)
Daniel G. Solorzano and Tara J. Yosso (2000), rooted in the field of education, state, "at least five elements that form its basic perspectives, research methods, and pedagogy." They are; (1) the centrality and intersectionality of race and racism; (2) challenge to the dominant ideology; (3) the commitment to social justice ; (4) the importance of experiential knowledge; and (5) the use of interdisciplinary perspectives." CRT also developed subgroups such as Latino/a/x-critical (LatCrit) which will be discussed in other pages.
And I found this (it came with their links)
critical race theory (CRT), intellectual movement and loosely organized framework of legal analysis based on the premise that race is not a natural, biologically grounded feature of physically distinct subgroups of human beings but a socially constructed (culturally invented) category that is used to oppress and exploit people of colour. Critical race theorists hold that the law and legal institutions in the United States are inherently racist insofar as they function to create and maintain social, economic, and political inequalities between whites and nonwhites, especially African Americans.
I don’t see anything in those 2 sources above that tells me to hate my whiteness. So, where? Who? Who has an ax to grind against CRT? Why? What’s the purpose of the attacks?
After scouring the net for understanding CRT, it became apparent that the arguments against CRT are a mixture of a couple dollops of indignance combined with a pound or two of denial topped off with a drizzle of sneering white male privilege. These are not good faith arguments. Eddie Glaude had the right of this when he was faced with Christopher Rufo the other day on MorningJoe. Rufo has a steady stream of unrelated, memorized talking points he parrots when defending his attacks on CRT, then he openly laughs at his opponent when they have the screen. He’s got anecdotes galore, but no proof that learning about CRT is detrimental to the U.S. of A. White people instantly understand why Rufo is attacking CRT, because CRT gets in the way of the status quo agenda which aligns with what racists and misogynists who mourn the loss of nostalgia of the days of Daddy Knows Best. I lived during Daddy Knows Best...and he didn’t know best. That, in a nutshell is why Christopher Rufo is attacking CRT. He wants his nuclear family to resemble times that never were.
I watch Morning Joe, about an hour of him a day — that’s enough to keep me up to date on the latest GOP agenda. On July 5th Joe had this guy, Christopher Rufo on with Professor Eddie Glaude Jr. of Princeton. Rufo has reinvented himself from a so-so documentary film maker of little fame to becoming a full time fellow at a conservative think tank attacking Critical Race Theory. It’s probably fair to surmise Rufo’s meal ticket is dependent (for now) on his attacking CRT. I figure Joe Scarborough had Rufo on to make up for the dusting he got from Joy Reid a few days ago. Joy did roll over Rufo in a spectacular fashion, because Rufo was rickrolling his talking points and Reid wasn’t having it. I didn’t get any clarity on why Rufo is so against CRT other than it doesn’t fit his conservative agenda. Unfortunately, Reid slid sideways on the “centrality and intersectionality of race and racism”. True, it’s not the same thing as CRT, it is one of the five elements that form CRT’s basic perspectives. But, back to Rufo. Apparently, Rufo’s scattershot approach of his attacks on CRT are his point. He’s offering a counter story to the CRT narrative. As if the story of Tulsa and Rosewood can be swept away. No, it can’t; but Rufo can muddy the waters. Through his hubris and force of personality he does this well with people other than Joy Reid.
I’m not linking to Rufo’s pages, he writes a lot of stuff. He also does some sloppy research. Rufo draws an imaginary line between the Anti-Semitic slur, Cultural Marxism, and CRT. From the New Yorker where they follow the line of Rufo’s analysis:
This inquiry, into the footnotes and citations in the documents he’d [Rufo] been sent, formed the basis for an idea that has organized cultural politics this spring: that the anti-racism seminars did not just represent a progressive view on race but that they were expressions of a distinct ideology—critical race theory—with radical roots. If people were upset about the seminars, Rufo wanted them also to notice “critical race theory” operating behind the curtain. Following the trail back through the citations in the legal scholars’ texts, Rufo thought that he could detect the seed of their ideas in radical, often explicitly Marxist, critical-theory texts from the generation of 1968. (Crenshaw said that this was a selective, “red-baiting” account of critical race theory’s origins, which overlooked less divisive influences such as Martin Luther King, Jr.) But Rufo believed that he could detect a single lineage, and that the same concepts and terms that organized discussions among white employees of the city of Seattle, or the anti-racism seminars at Sandia National Laboratories, were present a half century ago. “Look at Angela Davis—you see all of the key terms,” Rufo said. Davis had been Herbert Marcuse’s doctoral student, and Rufo had been reading her writing from the late sixties to the mid-seventies. He felt as if he had begun with a branch and discovered the root. If financial regulators in Washington were attending seminars in which they read Kendi’s writing that anti-racism was not possible without anti-capitalism, then maybe that was more than casual talk.
The sloppiness in Rufo’s review is where he conflates Critical Theory with Critical Race Theory. People who didn’t like Critical Theory called it “Cultural Marxism” which is an anti-semitic slur (more on this later). Rufo simplistically took “Cultural Marxism”, removed the word, “Cultural”, and applied Marxism to slam Critical Race Theory, because in his mind, he could draw a direct line from the Frankfurt School of Social Research to Critical Theorist, Herbert Marcuse who taught Angela Davis when she was a Doctoral Student who is now Critical Race Theorist (but, not a founding CRT theorist). Chief among Rufo’s sloppy assumptions being Angela Davis reappropriated Herbert Marcuse’s ideology into hers...as if Angela Davis formed Critical Race Theory all by herself. What’s true is Angela Davis is/was a long time member of the Communist political party and she’s written something like 10 books on feminism, the U.S. prison system, race and class where her Marxist ideology comes through. It is also true Angela Davis agrees with CRT. What is not true, although Davis accepts CRT, she didn’t develop it with the main stage developers like Derrick Bell, Kimberle Crenshaw, Patricia Williams, Richard Delgado and others. There’s a big difference between developing a theory and accepting it. I accept gravity, but I was not in on the development of the Theory of Gravity or the Tenth Dimension or the current track on gravitational studies. Using Angela Davis in this way is a straw man argument. She is peripheral to CRT. Rufo tries to make her central.
So, what is Cultural Marxism and what does it have to do with CRT?
Rufo cannily removed the word, “cultural” and only uses Marxist or Marxism in his attacks. Other than including the word Marxist, a sure trigger word meant to call conservatives to real and manufactured outrage, not much and too much at the same time. Not much because CRT does not derive from Marxist philosophy. Too much because some, many, a bunch, or a significant number of conservatives are anti-semitic. Taking out the word, “cultural” PC’d the term for Rufo’s cynical use.
The Dictionary definition of Cultural Marxism is:
"It is a far-right anti-Semitic conspiracy theory which claims Western Marxism as the basis of continuing academic and intellectual efforts to subvert Western culture."
This is an old term. One that Pat Buchanan used to toss it around during the 1990’s. SPLC wrote about it in 2003. It’s roots go back to the 1920’s when Antonio Gramsci, an imprisoned politician called for the left to capture bureaucracy, colleges and media outlets to stay in power. Later in Germany, the Frankfurt School of Social Research was highly concerned about how ordinary people become aligned and support fascism. They looked at psychoanalysis, aesthetics, social theory and political economy to try and explain modern civilization. What made it tic? What held it back? What propelled it to do what it does? Their studies developed Critical Theory around the 1930s. Critical Theory did make use of the principles from Marxist philosophy. The fellows and faculty of the Frankfurt School were mostly Jewish.
The Frankfurt school shut down in Germany soon after Hitler rose to power and reopened in NYC in the early 1930s. The Jewish founders of the Frankfurt School prudently moved to NYC and Columbia. Herbert Marcuse one of the philosophers of the Frankfurt School stayed in the U.S. after WWII while others returned to Germany. Critical Theory was highly influential in politics, education and social customs in the later 20th century. If you wanted to discredit Critical Theory, but didn’t want to prove it; you would use “Cultural Marxism” and/or anti-Semitic attacks to do the job. Eventually, those who attacked the Critical Theorists as Cultural Marxists would include anti-Semitic slurs along with their complaints until the term itself was determined to be an anti-Semitic slur. I apologize for using this term in multiple places in this document to explain why this term shouldn’t be used. Unlike the n-word, this is a term most people wouldn’t recognize as a slur. This fact alone is a verification of the CRT concept.
Yeah but back to Critical Theory. What is Critical Theory? What does it have to do with CRT?
The dictionary definition states Critical Theory is:
a philosophical approach to culture, and especially to literature, that seeks to confront the social, historical, and ideological forces and structures that produce and constrain it. The term is applied particularly to the work of the Frankfurt School.
Others expand that definition to include the theory leads people to dig deeper into what blocks people from achievements and determining which blockages are real and which are social constructs so they can be mitigated and overcome. It’s the part where the social constructs are identified and selected for change that pulled heavily from Marxism. Marxists like Critical Theory and use it to make societal change, but libertarians and progressives can use it equally well. The U.S. New Deal did utilize socialist ideas and Social Security and the later added Medicare and Medicaid have effectively reduced poverty levels in the U.S. Not all socialist ideas are bad. Racists don’t like Critical Theory because their basis for racism is a social construct. Not real. Racism is something to be rooted out and overcome. Misogynists don’t like Critical Theory either for much the same reasons. So, maybe Christopher Rufo is not an overt racist or misogynist, but he’s ok with attacks on social theories meant to mitigate and overcome the negative effects of racism and misogyny. That’s covert, cynical and casual racism ...maybe both at once. method to keep the racist, misogynistic status quo. It doesn’t matter what Rufo’s motivations are even if it’s just a means to maintain a steady paycheck. Rufo’s actions are based upon a false premise. CRT isn’t Critical Theory.
Critical theory is global, more inclusive of all public policy, religiosity and philosophy. Critical Race Theory deals with the specifics of intersectionality of race with racism and how white supremacist social constructs reinforce the current norms that support white supremacy with both overt and covert methodologies and most importantly, what needs to be done to ensure greater inclusivity, safety and justice for all. CRT doesn’t pull from Marxist ideology it goes back over 2 centuries of slavery=bad and racism=bad ideology and examines how racists reinforce racist policy that kills and impoverishes black and brown people while dressing it up as acceptable. CRT then takes their findings and calls for fair change.
Ok, how does that dovetail with the current arguments put out by Christopher Rufo?
Connecting Angela Davis to Herbert Marcuse comes from a Canadian named Jordan Peterson. Peterson drew the line from Frankfurt School's influence of what the late-20th century rise of cultural studies in university programs concerning literature, film, sociology, anthropology, and the politics taught by Herbert Marcuse to students like Angela Davis as well as many other students over his years in academia. Peterson used that tenuous connection of unproven significance to justify his use of the anti-Semitic slur of Cultural Marxism. Rufo picked up that slur and recognized he couldn’t use the term, “Cultural Marxism”; so, he just uses the term Marxist, instead.
Rufo picked up on Jordan Peterson’s attack on “Critical Theory”. Peterson objected to a proposed Canadian law that would require people to respect LGBTQ pronoun preferences. Jordan Peterson is a Canadian philosopher and quite influential in Canada and is considered quite dangerous by some of his contemporaries. He thought his sexism was just and right. He was a professor in the University of Toronto and in 2016 he put out a YouTube series of 3 videos attacking political correctness (I’m not linking to those videos). He’s good at self-promotion. He knows how to appeal to people’s fears and exploit them. Rufo, no doubt, found these videos both compelling and instructive. Rufo likely poured over Peterson’s writings as well. Rufo uses Peterson’s schtick in his own presentations. Peterson uses exaggeration, broad assumptions, generalization and a lot of hubris to make his points. Peterson is not big on facts. He waves his academic achievements as an assumption that he is right in all the things he promotes. Peterson loves anecdotal evidence. Christopher Rufo does the Jordan Peterson schtick quite well, but Rufo doesn’t have the curriculum vitai of Jordan Peterson. Rufo hasn’t done the academic work. He has studied videos and knows how to manufacture talking points. He does this well, but he doesn’t have the chops to make his assertions and he doesn’t care. He’s too busy dazzling people with his BS. Rufo doesn’t need academic credentials, because his audience, the anti-intellectual conservative, doesn’t care that Rufo’s a charlatan. They are in on the con job. They are too busy cheering his dazzling BS. It allows them to preserve the unfair status quo.
How does that sir Walter Scott quote go?
"Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive!"
What I’m seeing now are many conservatives picking up Rufo’s talking points and using them as if they are true to attack CRT in school board meetings. State reps regurgitate Rufo’s talking points. TV media wants to both sides it when there’s really only one way to approach CRT and that’s with intellectual curiosity and a willingness to challenge personal beliefs that may or may not be accurate. Bad law is in the making over the over-emotional responses of people like Christopher Rufo, which in many ways, proves the veracity of CRT.