I have just re-read an article published in my local newspaper, the Hamilton Spectator, on June 2 of 2020. Written by Henry A. Giroux, a professor at McMaster University from which I graduated 40 or so years ago, it is a graphic manifestation of the simplistic, Neo-Marxist narrative that has apparently metastasized throughout Western Academia. Giroux is a proponent of “critical pedagogy,” this an adjunct of Critical Race Theory. He occupies McMaster’s Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar Chair, Freire being one of the pioneers of CRT. Given that this perspective seems compulsively devoted to seeing all of history as a matter of oppression, Giroux’s article is a relentless screed on the systemic barbarism that is apparently the defining characteristic of the American experiment. His article is entitled “Racism and the collapse of democracy in the United States of America.” To anyone of a rational mindset, it cancels itself by the sheer violence of its rhetoric. Let me cite but a few of its host of absurd generalizations: “racialized domestic terrorism has become normalized ….. America has become an armed camp and the war on black and brown people a source of pride …… There is nothing new about the police killing black people ….. Nor is there anything new about the U.S. engaging in state sponsored violence by way of a racially marked mass incarceration system ….. etc., etc.”
So the Ideals embraced by the country’s founding fathers were mere hypocrisy, as was the Civil War which led to the deaths of more than half a million of the country’s population. And the outlandish crime rate within Black inner-city America is merely a myth as is the progress made in the realm of racial tolerance over the last 60 years. America apparently remains a horrible country rife with racial oppression. One must wonder, however, how millions of Blacks have managed to join the nation’s prosperous middle class, and why millions of disaffected South Americans have sought refuge in the States over the last several years!
I am not suggesting academics should whitewash the history of any Western nation. But “conservatives” [i.e., Humanists], while granting the persistence of evil throughout the species, are concerned primarily with defining and defending those Principles and Values most conducive to a civilized future. The proponents of “critical pedagogy,” on the other hand, mindlessly devoted to the value of Inclusiveness, refuse to acknowledge that any one set of Principles or Values is superior to any other. Genuine critical analysis is literally taboo on the political Left. Never, for example, will you see an article in The N.Y. Times celebrating the gap between the wonderful cultural achievements of Renaissance Europe and the contemporary Stone Age primitivism of other civilizations. Simply not Inclusive!
It is hardly surprising, therefore, that Professor Giroux’s article fails to mention the seemingly relevant fact that it was England and the U.S. that led the Enlightened 19th C. assault on the institution of Slavery while much of the non-Western world continued to exploit it. It is surprising and sad, however, that Western Academia now appears to be rife with “intellectuals” ironically given to avoiding discussion of the Intellectual Integrity of history’s various civilizations because such discussion might clash with their “inclusive” Neo-Marxist agenda.