Taking Down Critical Race Theory

Wood           Reed            Pullmann             Uzzell

Critical Race Theory (CRT) underpins progressives’ race-based attempt to unite America against white males. As with communism’s utopia — economic equity for all — an unreachable target keeping Lenin's “vanguard of the proletariat” eternally in power, CRT proclaims whites will never grant nonwhites utopian full equity, which would, Leninist-style, keep the CRT “vanguard” always with us.  

CRT, as John Wood, Jr. of “Braver Angels” writes, is far from Martin Luther King, Jr.’s peaceful path to power. Wood recognizes that while King was concerned with power, he increasingly focused on nonviolence to achieve it, including the moral power of agape love. King “dignified the humanity of both the seeker of justice as well as the opposition.” 

While CRT’s Ibram X. Kendi sees tension between love and power, Wood says King saw love as the “core attribute of real power.” Nonviolence requires “mastery of the inward person in a way that stills the grunts of anger and uplifts the voice of conscience.” Gandhi taught that “Nonviolence chooses to whisper rather than scream, to draw people close and cultivate the willingness to listen.”

Wood quotes King’s Stride Towards Freedom:

• Nonviolence is active, “constantly seeking to persuade his opponent.”

• Nonviolence is humanizing, working to win “friendship and understanding.”

• Nonviolence is forgiving, aimed “against forces of evil, [not] persons .   .   . doing the evil.”

• Nonviolence is suffering, “infinitely more powerful than the law of the jungle for converting the opponent.” (Gandhi)

• Nonviolence is loving, “not only [refusing] to shoot his opponent but [refusing] to hate him.”

• Nonviolence is hopeful, “based on the conviction that the universe is on the side of justice.”

Wood hopes we may “believe that the human heart [is] on the side of love.” Nonviolence “has helped opened the door for an historic expansion of the Black middle class,” uplifting African-Americans “to the highest stations of national honor,” taking us all “beyond the limits of [CRT’s] antiracism.”

Touré Reed (Illinois State University) teaches that solving black America's problems means focusing on class, not race. In Toward Freedom: The Case Against Race Reductionism, Reed argues for the 1960s emphasis on economics. Deindustrialization, the decline of private sector unions, public sector cutbacks, and wage stagnation have all hit blacks disproportionately.

Reed supports Bernie Sanders-like campaign prescriptions, including living wage policies, universal healthcare, public sector expansion, free public higher education. After all, 1960s civil rights leaders M.L. King, Jr., A. Philip Randolph, and Bayard Rustin organized the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (1963), the Freedom Budget for All (1966-1968), and King’s Poor People’s Campaign (1968). These leaders understood that economics, more than anti-discrimination measures, would attack black-white disparities.

Federalist reporter Joy Pullmann hits at CRT’s negative impact on schools:

The education establishment is wholly controlled by CRT true believers and their enablers. The last century shows that when these extremists are exposed and restricted, they just repackage and carry on.

Pullman has an action program, if conservatives are “serious like the left is serious.” Use the uproar against CRT to:

1. Counter the Unions with a Litigation Army

2. Make Opposing CRT a Litmus Test for Office

3. Take down CRT-Enabling Policies:

• “disparate impact,” instead require evidence of intentional discrimination;

• “hostile work environment,” don’t restrict political or religious speech;

• “affirmative action” executive orders.

4. Fund CRT Escape Pods for Children

5. Give Chris Rufo a Journalism Army

Lynn Uzzell at Washington and Lee University has a solution to CRT “that.   .   .  can be achieved through three simple words: ‘I am non-racial.’”

Uzzell feels CRT’s success comes from making race the center of public discourse and convincing people that race is key to their identity. If people refuse to identify as any race, the whole project collapses.

Uzzell quotes Jason Hill saying that black Americans “are ideal candidates for racial self-emancipation.” They too will benefit from renouncing divisive racial categories. “I am non-racial” would free blacks confronted by racism, and non-racial designations end racism’s grip on Americans.

Joel Kotkin and Edward Heyman, in UnHerd, doubt CRT enjoys widespread support. The vast majority of Americans — including millennials and minorities — oppose defunding the police. Most American voters — by wide margins — reject teaching CRT in schools. And CRT adherents lose by attacking leftists TV host Bill Maher and journalist Andrew Sullivan for advocating color-blindness, even as former Clinton advisor Bill Galston labels CRT a “doctrine” that’s “deconstructing the American order” in favor of an “entirely different foundation.”

To Kotkin and Heyman (and to us), intermarriage and interracial dating are rejecting CRT. Interracial dating in America is up 40% since 2003, according to the Census, while interracial marriage has soared from 3% in 1967 to roughly one in six now.