Critical Race Theory is a product of Identity Politics which is itself a product of Marx’s vision of the world which reduced the entire human experience to a matter of “oppressors” and their “victims.” Impervious to any given Individual’s moral/intellectual merit, it deals in gross stereotypes even as it purports to loathe stereotypes of any sort. In the “progressive” ethos of the contemporary West, it is perfectly permissible to make critical generalizations about designated “elites” [i.e., White people, straight Males, etc.] but an abomination to make any negative comment whatsoever about those who are their apparent victims. Such is the “intellectual” basis of contemporary Leftist politics!
While I am perhaps exaggerating, when was the last time a Woman came forward accusing a high-profile Male of sexual abuse in the distant past while offering no tangible evidence whatsoever, when the mainstream media did not take her at her word, thereby devastating the career of the Male in question?
In Nevada, Gabrielle Clark is suing the charter school attended by her son William for forcing him to take a class which is basically a compendium of every Left wing cliche imaginable. Maintaining that William has been compelled “to make professions about his racial, sexual, gender and religious identities in verbal class exercises and in graded, written homework assignments,” the suit is a response to what can only be described as the sheer stupidity and pervasive Fascism of the contemporary “progressive” status quo. What gives one hope, indeed what is truly wonderful, is that while Gabrielle is apparently outraged that her son is being taught that all White people are inherently racist, she is in fact a Black woman, her bi-racial son’s White father having died at a sadly early age. For Ms. Clark, skin color would seem to be less important than Truth.
But not to the N.Y. Times whose “1619 Project,” widely accepted amongst academics, suggests that White Supremacism is an integral aspect of America’s DNA. It is hardly an original proposition, of course, given that Marxists such as Marcuse have been saying the very same thing for decades.
Conservative author and educator Alex Newman says the history being taught in many Western schools is “a complete and total reversal of reality.” I’m not sure it is quite that simple, but several of the fathers of the U.S. Constitution, however compromised by the circumstances of their day, were clearly devoted to the Enlightenment Principle that All Men are Created Equal to an extent yet to be realized in many of the nations of the world
Did Antebellum America profit from slavery? Of course it did. Did it take almost a century for the U.S. government to ban it from the Republic? Yes, at the cost of well over half a million lives. Were Blacks still being treated like second class citizens as recently as 70 years ago? Again, sadly, yes! Bigotry does not disappear with the snap of a finger. But as America recovered from the devastation of the Civil War, it would no doubt have achieved significant social change far more quickly had it not been for the two Global Conflicts and Great Depression of the following century. In the Thirties, for example, Eleanor Roosevelt was actively lobbying for changes which would ultimately not be realized until the Sixties. But historical context and indeed the givens of human nature are of no interest to narrow-minded Ideologues. Co-authored by Alex Newman, 2015’s “Crimes of the Educators: How Utopians are Using Government Schools to Destroy America’s Children” attempts to expose the basic dishonesty of the Marxist vision that has come to dominate contemporary Western Academia.
One book seemingly born of that vision, a book widely used in American schools, is Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the U.S.” As I have not read the work, I am reticent to expatiate on it to any great extent. But it apparently paints Columbus as a genocidal monster, thereby impugning Western European Man’s advent to the Americas as an exercise in mass murder. This indictment, of course, suffers from the same intellectual fraudulence that has poisoned the reputation of John A. MacDonald here in Canada. Columbus was determined to bring Christianity to the Indigenous of the Americas. Not versed in the Post-Modern Relativism of the 21st Century, he, like MacDonald, simply assumed his cultural heritage to be demonstrably more civilized than that of those he was confronting in the New World. Was he guiltless in his dealings with America’s natives? Of course not. But the notion that he was a genocidal monster is just another example of the arrogance of 21st Century “intellectuals” perfectly willing to apply their postmodern standards to those who lived 500 years ago!
Leslie Harris, Professor of History at Northwestern U., strongly disagreed with the N.Y. Time’s “1619” contention that America had rebelled against Great Britain primarily to defend the institution of slavery. While The Times had asked Ms. Harris to fact check its “Project,” it subsequently refused to respond to her critique. Clearly its mind was already made up. And so we live in an absurd world in which Black Racists such as the aforementioned Raphael Warnock of Georgia can make dozens of incendiary comments about Whites only to be defended by the censors at Facebook who have disingenuously refused to “cancel” him on the grounds that he really doesn’t hate White people but merely the concept of Whiteness.
Anti-White Racism is nothing new within Western Academia. In 2005 Black professor Kamau Kambon of North Carolina State University told a panel at Howard U. Law School that the only solution to the travails of Black Americans was the extermination of “white people off the face of the planet,” a project made necessary “because white people want to kill us.”
Imagine the paroxysms of outrage had any White academic or politician made a similar statement about People of Color!
Nothing better illustrates the cultural suicide immanent in Critical Race Theory than the fact that the Chinese Communist Party, clearly intent on the subjugation of the West, has been noticeably complimentary of the Time’s “1619 Project.”