The conservatives – or far-right fringe, more accurately – has been using the woke, or critical race theory (CRT), as a boogie man for keeping their base together, a tactic that’s hardly a reason to be worried about CRT for someone from my perspective, which is an independent centrist. I tend to view the far-right as a dishonest pack of grifters mixed with a few deadly earnest types, whose motivations are not connected to reality.
But when someone I respect as a thinker expresses alarm, then I have to start wondering.
First, what is CRT? That question has been bothering me, and when WaPo recently published an anodyne article on the subject I read it with interest. This seems a good summary:
This way of thinking “compels us to confront critically the most explosive issue in American civilization: the historical centrality and complicity of law in upholding white supremacy,” some of the founding scholars wrote in 1995 in “Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement.”
While critical race theory does not have a set of doctrines, its scholars say they aim to overturn what they characterize as a bond between law and racial power. Critical race theory holds that race is a social construction upheld by legal systems and that racism is banal and common. Under this framework, George Floyd’s killing and Black Americans’ higher mortality rate from covid-19 are not aberrations, Bridges said.
“Critical race theory is an effort really to move beyond the focus on finding fault by impugning racist motives, racist bias, racist prejudice, racist animus and hatred to individuals, and looking at the ways in which racial inequality is embedded in structures in ways of which we are very often unaware,” said Kendall Thomas, co-editor of “Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement.”
But Andrew Sullivan expresses alarm (paywall, I suspect) at what he sees in the practice of CRT:
The genius of liberalism in unleashing human freedom and the human mind changed us more in centuries than we had changed in hundreds of millennia. And at its core, there is the model of the single, interchangeable, equal citizen, using reason to deliberate the common good with fellow citizens. No ultimate authority; just inquiry and provisional truth. No final answer: an endless conversation. No single power, but many in competition.
In this open-ended conversation, all can participate, conservatives and liberals, and will have successes and failures in their turn. What matters, both conservatives and liberals agree, is not the end result, but the liberal democratic, open-ended means. That shift — from specifying a single end to insisting only on playing by the rules — is the key origin of modern freedom.
My central problem with critical theory is that it takes precise aim at these very core principles and rejects them. By rejecting them, in the otherwise noble cause of helping the marginalized, it is a very seductive and potent threat to liberal civilization.
Am I exaggerating CRT’s aversion to liberal modernity? I don’t think I am. Here is how critical theory defines itself in one of its central documents. It questions the very foundations of “Enlightenment rationality, legal equality and Constitutional neutrality.” It begins with the assertion that these are not ways to further knowledge and enlarge human freedom. They are rather manifestations of white power over non-white bodies. Formal legal equality, they argue, the promise of the American experiment, has never been actual equality, even as, over the centuries, it has been extended to everyone. It is, rather, a system to perpetuate inequality forever, which is the single and only reason racial inequality is still here.
And much more, as Sullivan explains himself completely. It’s worth a read if you have a subscription, or are willing to pay a few bucks to see an honest critic’s concerns on one of the intellectual pushes of the last couple of decades.
In conjunction with this, it’s worth one other observation on my part. It’s quite possible that CRT advocates, explicitly or implicitly, point at liberal traditions of government, identify them with the United States government and the fate of the black community, and proclaim liberal modernity, to use Sullivan’s terminology, implicitly racist.
But there’s two problems here. The first is the common logical problem of conflating causality with correlation. But the second is more important, and that’s ignoring a fact of political life:
While the United States may proclaim liberal modernity as its goal, it has not achieved it. There is no identity relation between the two.
It’s undeniable that many of the constitutive States of the United States have demonstrated illiberal behaviors since the Founding, since the American Civil War, the Great War, World War II, Korea, Vietnam. To conflate those behaviors with liberal modernity is to say that black is white, 1 == 0, pick your oxymoron. To take the irrational hatreds and illogical supremacist behaviors of even high officials of the United States, which are clearly at odds with liberal modernity, and condemn liberal modernity based on that shallow reading of history, is to commit an intellectual error.
And to yell that this very attempt at debate demonstrates just those unacceptable attitudes is intellectually disastrous, and will lead to an unpleasant terminus for those who follow that philosophy to its end.
If, indeed, the suggestion that at the heart of CRT is an aversion to debate and the liberal modernity is, in fact, true.
I suspect we’ll find that CRT is a spectrum of opinions, on one end quite reasonable and rational, and at the other end the ideologues hang out, hamstrung by broken understandings of history and humanity. I look forward to seeing how this plays out.
