Critical Race Theory: Liberals Discover They Are The Bad Guys
This just in from the front lines of the Woke War I: Associated Press will now capitalize the word ‘Black’ but not the word ‘White,’ citing concern of legitimizing white supremacy. Also, academics are trying to eliminate the words “master” and “slave” from computing, suggesting that the expression “to master a skill” will be mothballed.
Strange days, indeed. So we shouldn’t have been surprised when a former colleague, who’s been in a successful mixed-race marriage with kids, announced that, thanks to critical race theory (CRT), she now needs to examine the “white privilege” she employed growing up in Canada. She now thinks she’s irredeemably stained by her ancestors.
Whatever gets as you through the night. (Although night in black so we may have been micro-aggressing here.) She’s hardly an anomaly. In the four years since NFL QB Colin Kaepernick took a knee during the Star Spangled Banner to publicize the radical #BLM agenda, people like my colleague— once calm, rational people— have been overtaken by CRT fever. Guilt is the new religion.
They now are convinced that the most successful society in history is built upon a bedrock of slavery, exploitation and rapacious sexism. Using Trump Derangement Syndrome as their inversion point, they now drown in guilt for sins of the past. Sometimes the very distant past. (see: Columbus, Christopher) No slight is too subtle to be ignored. It’s the sack cloth and ashes.
Yet, if one weren’t so obsessed with promoting a total re-ordering of society on Marxist principles, you might draw exactly the opposite conclusions from what we see in the world around us.
Things have never been so good.
Fifty years ago my colleague— indeed all my friends in mixed-race marriages— would never have dared challenge the norms of her community to marry a black, an Asian, a white, a Cree person. Today, it is as accepted as the sun coming up in the morning.
Children brought up in this era are largely colour-blind (until CRT stigmatized whites). They have gay friends, friends of colour. Some have trans friends. They date whomever they want. They’re not sure what there fuss is about, but, being kids, they go along with the authority of their teachers (when they have them) and the over-heated polemicists of #antifa who tell them how bad things are.
Access to education and opportunity exceeds anything dreamt of in the 1950s. Low interest rates and generous lending practices made, until COVID19 intervened, wealth accessible to anyone who was willing to work for it. Health innovations have made 90 the new 70. The accumulated knowledge and wisdom of centuries is at the touch of a key-stroke on a computer.
Fewer people go to bed hungry, fewer children lack a meal (or did until they’ve were sequestered in troubled homes by Covid panic). Crime statistics— especially violent crime— were on a steep decline.
But you’ll never get to the promised land of collective socialism on good news. So CRT zealots flipped the good news on its head with concepts such as safe spaces, unconscious bias and micro-aggressions to destabilize people like my colleague and her family. As a bonus, they’ve hammered the corporate world into submission, too, reaping hundreds of millions in donations from guilty capitalists.
They’ve junked classic learning and the Socratic method in academia and, increasingly, society in general. Author James Lindsay describes it as, “science, reason, and evidence are a ‘white’ way of knowing, and that storytelling and lived experience is a ‘black' alternative”.
As my colleague proves, this fever has infected the brains of many apolitical people. Lindsay points out some— not all— of the other salient qualities of CRT here. To anyone who’s been watching carefully they should be immediately recognizable.
(CRT) believes racism is present in every aspect of life, every relationship, and every interaction and therefore has its advocates look for it everywhere
It relies upon “interest convergence” (white people only give black people opportunities and freedoms when it is also in their own interests) and therefore doesn’t trust any attempt to make racism better
CRT is against free societies and wants to dismantle them and replace them with something its advocates control
It only treats race issues as “socially constructed groups,” so there are no individuals in Critical Race Theory
It rejects all potential alternatives, like colourblindness, as forms of racism, making itself the only allowable game in town (which is totalitarian)
CRT acts like anyone who disagrees with it must do so for racist and white supremacist reasons, even if those people are black (which is also totalitarian)
It cannot be satisfied, so it becomes a kind of activist black hole that threatens to destroy everything it is introduced into.
For liberal whites, who grew up believing that Martin Luther King’s dream of no colours, no bias, equal opportunity was the panacea, this is all a little bracing. As my colleague will soon learn, CRT doesn’t believe in MLK’s equal opportunity. It doesn’t believes in equal outcomes. It believes in superior outcomes guaranteed by the state.
Having constructed a sympathetic societal response to address MLK’s goals in minority communities liberal like my colleague now find out that they’ve wasted their time. They were the bad guys all along, says CRT. There is no possible response from whites, other than surrender, that will satisfy. Leave by the side door.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com). The best-selling author of Cap In Hand is also a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, his next book Personal Account with Tony Comper will be available on BruceDowbigginBooks.ca this fall.