What Is CRT?
by Dr. Doug Cardell
Someone contacted me recently saying, "I know an economist might not be the one to ask, but what is this CRT I keep hearing about?" I replied, "I know it may not seem like it but an economist is exactly the right person to ask. Here's why."
Critical Race Theory evolved from Critical Theory, a key component of Marxism, an economic system. According to Marxist theory, class conflict would be the beginning of Marxist left's political revolution. According to Karl Marx, an imbalance of power between capitalists and worker characterizes industrial societies. Marx believed that the workers would eventually become aware of their plight, seize the means of production, overthrow the capitalist class, and usher in a socialist society. Several regimes underwent Marxist-style revolutions during the 20th century, and each ended in disaster. Socialist governments killed nearly 100 million people in the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, Cuba, North Korea, and elsewhere. People remember them for gulags, show trials, executions, and mass starvations. Marx's ideas, when tried, unleashed the dark side of human nature; the human capacity to kill for the sake of an ideology.
The West's Marxist intellectuals began to acknowledge these atrocities by the mid-1960s. They realized that workers' revolutions would never happen in Western Europe or the United States, where the middle classes were large and living standards were rapidly improving. Particularly among Americans, class consciousness and class division had not developed. By educating themselves, working hard, and being good citizens, most Americans believed they could transcend their origins and achieve their "America Dream" of prosperity.
But the ivory tower Marxists in the West didn't renounce their socialist dreams during the 1960s; instead, they adapted their revolutionary theory. They created a coalition of dispossessed based on racial and ethnic categories to replace Marx's economic dialectic of capitalists and workers as the basis of political revolution.
This new revolutionary coalition was undermined in the 1960s by the civil rights movement, which aspired to fulfill the American promise of freedom and equality. Consequently, this highly visible improvement made overthrowing their country less appealing to Americans than improving it. This new disruption to their plans led to another adaptation to the Marxist revolutionary theory, which is where CRT comes in. CRT began as an academic discipline in the 1990s and built on the intellectual framework of identity-based Marxist Critical Theory. Over the past decade, it has increasingly become the default ideology in our public institutions after being relegated to universities and obscure academic journals for many years.
As a result, government agencies, public school systems, teacher training programs, and corporate human resources departments now inject the CRT agenda into diversity training programs, human resources modules, public policy frameworks, school curricula, and teacher training programs. To describe CRT, its supporters use euphemisms such as "equity," "social justice," "diversity and inclusion," and "culturally responsive instruction." They use this language because critical race theorists have a widespread understanding that the neo-Marxism they advocate would be very difficult to sell. Equity, however, sounds friendly enough and is easily confused with the American principle of equality. It is essential to understand the vastness of the difference between equity and equality. Critical race theorists explicitly reject equality, that principle proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence, formalized by the 14th and 15th Amendments, and passed into law by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. According to them, equality merely means "non-discrimination" and hides white supremacy, patriarchy, and oppression behind equality.
The difference between equity and equality is in at what stage being equal is measured. Equity demands equal outcomes while equality requires equal opportunity. Equity means everyone has the same wealth, the same social status, influence regardless of their contributions to society. The goal of equality is a society where everyone has the same rights under law, the same societal opportunities, the same freedoms but the outcomes will vary depending upon how each individual makes use of those assets. Implementing equity requires an oppressive totalitarian government to implement it since property will have to be involuntarily transferred from those who have more than 'average' to those who have less. It requires a Marxist dictatorships just like all the others that have killed millions and destroyed their countries. By contrast, equality is the goal of representative democracy as practiced in the U.S. It only requires that government make every effort to insure that everyone has the same opportunities to succeed.
The following are examples of how CRT has been employed even without the force of a totalitarian state. The Department of Homeland Security told white employees that they were committing “microinequities” and had been “socialized into oppressor roles.” The Treasury Department held a training session telling staff members that “virtually all white people contribute to racism.” And the Sandia National Laboratories sent white male executives to a three-day re-education camp where they were told that “white male culture” was analogous to the “KKK,” “white supremacists” and “mass killings.” The executives were then forced to renounce their “white male privilege” and to write letters of apology to fictitious members of minorities.
In Cupertino, an elementary school forced first-graders to "deconstruct their racial and sexual identities" and rank themselves according to their "power and privilege." In Springfield, Mo., a middle school required teachers to locate themselves on an "oppression matrix" based on the idea that straight, white, English-speaking Christian males are members of the oppressor class. Therefore, they must atone for their privilege and "covert white supremacy." In Philadelphia, an elementary school forced fifth-graders to celebrate "Black communism." In Seattle, the school district told white teachers they were guilty of "spirit murder" against black children. Therefore they must "bankrupt their privilege in acknowledgment of their thieved inheritance." There are thousands more examples.
CRT's definition of equity is simply rebranded Marxism. According to UCLA law professor Cheryl Harris, who advocates racial justice, suspending private property rights, seizing land, and distributing wealth are necessary. Critical race guru, Ibram X. Kendi at Boston University, proposed a federal Department of Antiracism. The elected branches of government would not be allowed to oversee this department. This department could nullify, veto, or abolish any law at any level of government. Additionally, anyone deemed not sufficiently "antiracist" could be silenced. Kendi believes that creating a department like this would lead to the overthrow of capitalism, since "to be antiracist, you have to be anticapitalist as well." All of the above are indications that this is an attempt to install Marxist socialism in the United States.
So far, attempts to halt the encroachment of CRT have been ineffective. There are four reasons for this:
(1) It is becoming increasingly difficult for Americans to speak out on social and political issues, especially racial ones. According to a recent Gallup poll, 77 percent of conservatives are reluctant to share their political views publicly. Mostly silent, they cede public debate to those pushing these anti-American ideologies out of fear of being harangued on social media, fired from their jobs, or worse. Consequently, the institutions become dogmatic, stifling diversity of opinion. Conservatives in the federal government and public school systems say that their "equity and inclusion" departments serve as inquisition offices that search for and stamp out any dissent from the CRT orthodoxy.
(2) CRT advocates have constructed their arguments like a trap. They use disagreement with their program as irrefutable evidence of a dissenter's "white fragility," "unconscious bias," or "internalized white supremacy." They will make obviously false claims such as "all whites are intrinsically oppressors" or "white teachers are guilty of spirit murdering black children". If anyone disagrees they paternalistically explain that those who feel "defensiveness" or "anger" are reacting out of their own feelings of shame and guilt. They instruct dissenters to remain silent, "lean into the discomfort," and accept their "complicity in white supremacy."
(3) The public has failed to separate the premise of CRT from its conclusion. Its assumption that American history includes slavery and other injustices and that we should examine and learn from that history is undeniable and positive. But its revolutionary conclusion, that America was founded on and defined by racism and that we should discard our founding principles, our Constitution, and our way of life, must be recognized for what it is, an alternate avenue toward a Marxist revolution.
(4) Those who have had the courage to speak out against CRT have addressed it theoretically, pointing out its logical contradictions and dishonest account of history. These criticisms are worthy and good, but they move the debate into the theoretical realm instead of the practical one. It is the functional consequences of their ideas their opponents must force CRTs advocates to defend. Confronting CRT is not a theoretical matter. CRT has become a tool of political power.
If the United States hopes to avoid a Marxist future, then CRT must address it politically at every level. It requires exerting citizen influence at school boards, libraries, county boards of supervisors, county and district attorneys, justices of the peace, and city councils. CRT advocates must be confronted with and pressed to defend their support of public schools separating first-graders into groups of "oppressors" and "oppressed and" their support of mandatory curricula teaching that "all white people play a part in perpetuating systemic racism." They must be asked to renounce their support of re-education centers compulsory for all whites. CRT is the last ditch effort of the Marxists to incite a revolution putting the communists' elite in charge of the country and the economy.Marxist socialism has never worked, and it will never work because it requires brutality and callous indifference to the population's suffering. The populace eventually rebels, but only after destroying the country and killing or starving millions.
It is essential to make clear that most of those advocating CRT are not Marxists. The innocent-sounding rhetoric has been employed by those orchestrating the movement has led them astray. The rank and file in schools and HR departments have been taken in just like the Marxists have taken in the citizenry of every country they have overthrown. Russia and its satellites in the USSR, China, Cambodia, North Korea, Cuba, and Venezuela all became oppressive and brutal after the citizens helped the Marxists take power. The only way to prevent it happening again in the United States is for the citizenry to understand the movement's history, what its true goals are and where it must lead. Anyone who has any sympathy for this movement has only to read one of the dozens of books written by those who have escaped any of these regimes. Evidence must overcome ideology and ignorance.
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