Critical Race Theory

... Originally, the Marxist Left built its political program on the theory of class conflict. Marx believed that the primary characteristic of industrial societies was the imbalance of power between capitalists and workers. The solution to that imbalance, according to Marx, was revolution... and usher in a new socialist society.

During the 20th century, a number of regimes underwent Marxist-style revolutions, and each ended in disaster. Socialist governments in the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, Cuba, and elsewhere racked up a body count of nearly 100 million of their own people... In practice, Marx’s ideas unleashed man’s darkest brutalities.

By the mid-1960s, Marxist intellectuals... came to realize that workers’ revolutions would never occur in Western Europe or the United States, where there were large middle classes and rapidly improving standards of living...

Abandoning Marx’s economic dialectic of capitalists and workers, they substituted race for class and sought to create a revolutionary coalition of the dispossessed based on racial and ethnic categories...

Critical race theory is an academic discipline, formulated in the 1990s, built on the intellectual framework of identity-based Marxism...

There are a series of euphemisms deployed by its supporters to describe critical race theory, including “equity,” “social justice,” “diversity and inclusion,” and “culturally responsive teaching.” Critical race theorists, masters of language construction, realize that “neo-Marxism” would be a hard sell. Equity, on the other hand, sounds non-threatening and is easily confused with the American principle of equality..

As Americans concerned for the common good of the nation, we reject the following tenets of “Critical Race Theory” as directly opposed to the fundamental principles of American government and political order:

• That any human being simply by virtue of being born in a given racial category (e.g., their “whiteness”) is inherently evil or bears guilt for actions committed by others in the past or present.

• That the principle of the inherent equality and dignity of all human beings insofar as they are human enables racism instead of serving as the firmest bulwark against it.

• That those who oppose replacing the equality of all citizens under the law with a system of “equity” that treats people unequally based on racial categories are complicit in racism or white supremacy.

• That establishing a legal regime of racial hierarchies is equitable or just.

In my own work I’ve called it a “moral culture” rather than a religion, and I think that’s probably more accurate. We could call it “social justice culture,” or as Jason Manning and I called it, “victimhood culture,” but in any case, it’s a worldview that places a certain conception of social justice as the highest value...

Drawing from critical theory, those who embrace this moral culture tend to view various social identities as the most important thing about people, and they see those identities as oppressor or victim identities. To be white, male, Christian, or straight, for example is to have a privileged position in a system of oppression, and to be a person of color, female, non-Christian, or LGBT is to be disadvantaged...

... interpreting everything in terms of oppression and in elevating those concerns above all others seems to have led many of the activists to disregard liberal values such as due process and free speech.

The Left wants a race war in America because they cannot otherwise win the ideological war they are waging.

The former is a cover for the latter...

Today’s Marxists’ ideological pursuit of tyrannical control transcends race, which is merely a stealth bomber in their fleet. This is not a race war. It’s something much bigger.

• Human beings are fundamentally equal insofar as they are human and citizens and must be treated as such by law.

• Blaming groups of citizens for evils they did not commit based on their race, color, or ethnicity is morally wrong and will result in civic disorder and balkanization.

• A system based on “equity”, in which equity means rejecting equality under the law and distributing goods and services on the basis of race alone is neither equitable nor just.

• Government and public institutions must not discriminate against or grant preferential treatment to persons on the basis of race, color, or ethnicity.

No longer simply an academic matter, critical race theory has become a tool of political power...

Critical race theorists must be confronted with and forced to speak to the facts...

There are three parts to a successful strategy to defeat the forces of critical race theory: governmental action, grassroots mobilization, and an appeal to principle.

Similarly, in addition to pointing out the dishonesty of the historical narrative on which critical race theory is predicated, we must promote the true story of America...

Strictly speaking, Critical Race Theory is not even traditionally racist; it’s exclusively anti-white. It is pro all races other than white....

Critical Race Theory’s central project is to make whites accept dhimmitude, not socialism....

... Brockell recalls Douglass’s famous July 4 address (pdf), delivered in Rochester, New York, to the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society. The first part of the speech does indeed support Brockell’s account, because Douglass gives a savage indictment of how American independence looks to a black man...

Already one can see Douglass’s speech as a masterpiece of rhetoric, each phrase building on the previous one, almost like a wave gathering force before crashing down on the audience. Yet as the speech moves on, Douglass makes a sharp and surprising turn. Far from denouncing the Fourth of July, far from scorning the Declaration of Independence as a charter of hypocrisy, far from blaming the Constitution for making an unholy pact with slavery—this is precisely what the critical race theorists do today—Douglass roundly affirms the founding as a “glorious liberty document” that launched “forces in operation” that “must inevitably work the downfall of slavery.”...

Douglass ended his speech on a patriotic note that vividly contrasts with the way he began, and shows why he had no problem, in the end, with celebrating the Fourth of July and what it represented. Of the Constitution, Douglass later said, “Abolish slavery tomorrow, and not a sentence or syllable of the Constitution needs to be altered.” That’s because the document gives no support, no sanction, to slavery....