Andrew Sullivan's Critique of CRT

In a recent essay Andrew Sullivan explains his objection to Critical Race Theory. In his view CRT is an attack, not on racism, but on the whole idea of liberal (in the classical sense) society. It's an attack on the principles upon which the United States was founded.

After describing those principles, Sullivan writes:

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.

CRT holds that the notion of objective truth and free speech are frauds:

Claims to truth are merely claims to power. That’s what people are asked to become “awake” to: that liberalism is a lie. As are its purported values. Free speech is therefore not always a way to figure out the truth; it is just another way in which power is exercised — to harm the marginalized.

The idea that a theory can be proven or disproven by the empirical process is itself a white supremacist argument, denying the “lived experience” of members of identity groups that is definitionally true, whatever the “objective” facts say. And our minds and souls and institutions have been so marinated in white supremacist culture for so long, critical theorists argue, that the system can only be dismantled rather than reformed.

The West’s idea of individual freedom — the very foundation of the American experiment — is, in their view, a way merely to ensure the permanent slavery of the non-white.

In other words, "truth" is whatever a member of the oppressed class feels strongly about. If you were to insist that their feelings don't align with objective facts then you're just seeking to perpetuate oppression. You're "marginalizing" those you believe to be racially inferior.

Even to object to CRT, to write an essay like Sullivan's based upon a reasoned critique of it, is itself considered a form of oppression, another manifestation of white supremacy.

To point out that something like The 1619 project is riddled with historical errors simply confirms that the critic is an oppressor and that his criticism is therefore irrelevant. The 1619 project speaks "truth" because it reflects the "lived experience" of blacks in America.

Sullivan comments:

[The 1619 Project] doesn’t just expose some of the hideous past we’d rather forget. It insists that “white supremacy” is the definition of the United States, that its true founding was therefore 1619, that its core principle from the get-go was not freedom but slavery, that slavery is the true basis for American wealth, that the police today are the inheritors of slave patrols, that only black Americans fought to end slavery, and so on.

It insists that the Declaration of Independence was “false”, not merely imperfectly implemented, and designed to obscure the real project of racist oppression. And its goal is the dismantling of liberal epistemology, procedures, ideas and arguments in order to revolutionize what cannot by definition be reformed.

The logic of [CRT] — it denies the core liberal premises of all the other schools and renders them all forms of oppression — means that it cannot long tolerate those other schools. It must always attack them.

Critical theory is therefore always the cuckoo in the academic nest. Over time, it throws out its competitors — and not in open free debate. It does so by ending that debate, by insisting that the liberal “reasonable person” standard of debate is, in fact, rigged in favor of the oppressors, that speech is a form of harm, even violent harm, rather than a way to seek the truth.

It insists that what matters is the identity of the participants in a debate, not the arguments themselves. If a cis white woman were to make an argument, a Latino trans man can dismiss it for no other reason than that a white cis woman is making it. Thus, identity trumps reason. Thus liberal society dies a little every time that dismissal sticks.

Liberal society dies a little every time racial identity or "lived experience" is made the supreme arbiter of truth to which everyone must accede, and in today's culture liberal society is doing a lot of dying.

Sullivan says much more about CRT in his essay than I can include here. Check it out.

He concludes with this:

This debate is not about whether you are a racist or an antiracist. The debate is about whether, in your deepest heart and soul, you are a liberal or an anti-liberal.

And of those two options, I have no doubt where I stand. Do you?