How Do We Stop Shouting Past Each Other on CRT?
Demographer Joel Kotkin, Political Scientist Edward Heyman Strike the Right Chord on the Cultural Divide of the Day - Critical Race Theory
A hallmark of our deeply divided and overly-politicized societal discourse these days - and not just limited to the United States - is the cultural battle du jour over Critical Race Theory (CRT). This past week, the latest volley occurred in the United States Senate during a late-night debate over a $3.5 trillion budget resolution. It was a vote over an amendment offered by US Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR).
Cotton’s amendment - which passed by a single vote, 50-49, provided by the lone Democratic who supported it, US Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) - would ban the use of federal funds to teach CRT. Now, it’s a budget resolution with no force of law, and congressional authorizes and appropriators may find ways around it during the “reconciliation” phase this Fall, but it’s a volley nonetheless. Every Republican voted for Cotton’s amendment; every Democrat save Manchin voted for federal CRT funding. You’ll be hearing about this in various 2022 US Senate campaigns. Trust me on that.
Most Americans, including me, were blithely unaware of - or least underappreciated - how deeply rooted CRT has become, and for so long, across a variety of America’s leading institutions. Especially education, but even evangelical churches and the US military. It goes back to the 1970s under the guise of Critical Legal Theory. I won’t rehash it here other than to quote my own work from earlier this year that defines it.
CRT is the belief that America is built on a bedrock of white supremacy. America was founded, allegedly, to protect Black slavery. CRT teaches us that we are not to be treated and respected as individuals, but as members of a race, or a group. We are told that white people are, by virtue of their skin color, oppressors. People of color are, by virtue of their skin color, victims of that oppression - the oppressed.
And this has now been extended into other categories, including gender, age, income, and even your native or first language. Your intersectionality score determines your degree of victimhood.
What woke us to CRT? While some were on to this early, it was the Pulitzer Prize in Commentary awarded to the New York Times’ Nikole Hannah-Jones in May 2020 for something called the 1619 Project that finally caught our attention.
The Pulitzer has long been considered the top and much sought-after award of the journalism profession. The Times and the Washington Post, for example, won a joint Pulitzer for national reporting for their breathless reporting of the now-discredited Russia Collusion Hoax, for which they’ve never corrected or apologized. And they’ve not returned their awards or the cash they “won.” That, along with the now-discredited 1619 Project, equally discredits the Pulitzer award.
The underlying problem, of course, is our culture’s embrace of relativism - you get to define your “truth” pretty much any way you want (i.e., gender) - versus a relentless pursuit of objective truth—nominalism versus Realism, in effect.
But now that we’re here, pushed wildly off course by a hurricane of cultural division, how do we keep from crashing ashore, losing our treasure, and find out way back on course to real dialogue, investigation, and introspection? We’re a country built on diversity, more than any other. We should know how to do this.
Fortunately, Joel Kotkin and Edward Heyman are helping show us the way. They have penned an informative and thoughtful post on a favorite British site, UnHerd, that treats the issue concerning all sides. It helps reframe the debate, starting with showing respect to the underlying assertions made by CRT proponents.
In some respects, as an approach to understanding history, CRT has a certain credibility. Ibram X. Kendi’s retelling of American history in Stamped from the Beginning is lucid, well-crafted and internally consistent in its description of racism as both a motivating force and by-product of the American tale. He uses it to rationalise and support his claim that African Americans have failed to attain the fruits of American life in the same way as whites — higher education, corporate leadership, home ownership and intergenerational wealth — but suggests this is due almost entirely to racist policies embedded in American institutions and law.
It certainly does not serve any country’s history to ignore such things; they are fundamental strands of the national tapestry. But CRT and its adherents present an all too one-sided view. Its founding father, legal scholar Derrick Bell, even claimed African Americans had not made progress since Abolition, obliterating the enormous contributions — in politics, arts, culture and elsewhere — made by African Americans in the face of widespread discrimination.
Kotkin and Heyman then proceed, again thoughtfully and insightfully, to outline their issues with CRT.
But rather than draw inspiration from this, today’s racial activists decry the habits often associated with success as reflections of “whiteness”. Some even denounce habits such as punctuality, rationality and hard work as reflective of “racism” and “white privilege”. Mathematics and science have also been dismissed for being reflective of “racism” and “white privilege”. Yet as African American economist Glenn Loury has observed, CRT wipes out agency by downgrading “western” concepts and “impedes the acquisition of traits that are valued in the marketplace and are essential for human development.”
CRT also gives short shrift to many other histories. Most working-class Americans, particularly outside the American South, had little contact with Black workers. Their struggles were not against African Americans but against the white factory owners who controlled capital. Working-class Americans or Brits of the last century do not fit easily into the role of oppressors, nor have they enjoyed the economic benefits CRT imputes to them by dint of racial privilege.
I encourage you to read the entire essay. It’s a good model for opponents of CRT on how to discuss it in school board meetings, with neighbors and colleagues, and other settings. It’s also useful for CRT proponents to understand the substantive arguments they have yet to acknowledge, much less address credibly.
And CRT proponents aren’t stopping with our schools, our military, or our churches or even with an anti-racism Constitutional amendment that would create a Cabinet-level “Department of Anti-Racism” to unilaterally repeal laws (Congress not needed, apparently) that unelected experts deem “racist.” Now, they want to lower the voting age to 16. Give them credit; CRT advocates are very good at organizing support around proposals and ideas, no matter how incredulous; opponents are less so, other than fighting back.
Whatever you may think of these proposals, it’s time to change the tone and substance of our rhetoric and rediscover what it means to have real conservations, where possible, with reasonable people willing to have one. And I remain hopeful that such people are out there. Shouting past, demeaning, dehumanizing, mischaracterizing, politicizing, and especially canceling people do not ultimately work and are destructive. They turn reasonable people off; persuadable people.
On both sides, I get that some people are profiting from the division being sown, with a big assist from our malevolent media, social and otherwise. Clickbait is a thing. Best-selling books are written, speeches are given, awards are bestowed, and well-paying gigs are won from major corporate human resource departments. Others seem to live for retweets and “likes” from fellow travelers. Others want the fight, and in some (perhaps many) circumstances, that’s appropriate, especially when elected school board officials shut down debate and grab microphones from concerned parents.
No one should accept their children being taught that they are defined and judged largely by the color of their skin, either as an “oppressor” or a “victim,” but figuring out how to teach and learn from history, so parts of it are not repeated is an essential enterprise. For those serious about moving the needle, however, it’s time to find a better way. If anyone is left.