William Galston on CRT

Former Clinton administration official and current Wall Street Journal contributor William Galston has a piece in Wednesday's Journal (subscription required) that highlights a few of the most troubling aspects of Critical Race Theory.

Here are some excerpts from his column. The quotes are from two of the seminal CRT thinkers Jean Stefancic and Richard Delgado and their book Critical Race Theory: An Introduction:

He [Delgado] writes that critical race theory “questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.”

This would seem to mean that CRT opposes the idea that all persons should be treated equally under the law and that the law should not aspire to be neutral in regard to the race of those who come under its purview. By questioning the validity of Enlightenment Rationalism it also apparently questions, or more accurately, rejects, the idea that reason and logic should be employed to settle disagreements and to establish policy.

It builds on critical legal studies and radical feminism, the work of European theorists such as Antonio Gramsci, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, and the American radical tradition, including the Black Power and Chicano movements of the 1960s and early ’70s.

Gramsci, of course, was a communist and the Black Power movement was separationist. CRT substitutes race for class in Marxist theory and rejects the ideal of racial integration. Just as Gramsci's Marxism promoted the revolution of the oppressed classes, so, too, does CRT theory require a revolution that would completely overturn the social order. It would essentially seek to make whites the oppressed class.

Citing Delgado and Stefancic Galston proceeds to describe some of the key tenets of critical race theory:

These propositions include the belief that racism is ordinary, “the usual way that society does business,” not aberrational; and that “triumphalist history”—the confidence that the legislation and court decisions of the 1950s and 1960s set the U.S. on the course of irresistible racial progress—neglects social backlash and legal retreat.

Liberal approaches to racism, such as colorblindness and neutral principles of law, can fix only the worst abuses. But if racism is deeply embedded in thought processes and social structures, they say, then only “aggressive, color-conscious efforts” to change the status quo can make a difference.

Or, to quote another theorist Ibram X. Kendi in his book How to Be an Antiracist, "The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination."

Presumably, what Kendi means is that the laws must be tilted to advantage blacks even if this disadvantages whites and Asians, and if blacks are being discriminated against today, whites and Asians must be discriminated against tomorrow.

It's not a prescription likely to engender racial harmony.

Here's Galston,

“White privilege”—the unspoken, unseen advantages that whites enjoy—is a key aspect of these social structures. Changing laws without undoing the “racial subordination” inherent in white privilege will not get us very far.

Incrementalism is a bankrupt strategy; “everything must change at once.” The logical conclusion is that to overcome racism, we need a cultural revolution.

The case against affirmative action, we are told, rests on “an implicit assumption of innocence on the part of the white person” this policy displaces. The guilty parties are the beneficiaries of affirmative action who take what does not rightfully belong to them.

But if racism is “pervasive, systemic, and deeply ingrained,” as critical race theorists insist, then “no white member of society seems quite so innocent.” Because all whites benefit from a system of unearned advantage, race-conscious remedies simply rectify that injustice.

This “pervasive, systemic, and deeply ingrained” racism is, however, notoriously difficult to pinpoint. The burden of proof that it exists despite being invisible rests on the person making the claim, and mere racial disparities are not even compelling evidence, let alone proof of systemic racism.

Galston concludes with this:

I have barely scratched the surface of this complex movement in these paragraphs. But one thing is clear: Because the Declaration of Independence — the founding document of the American liberal order — is a product of Enlightenment rationalism, a doctrine that rejects the Enlightenment tacitly requires deconstructing the American order and rebuilding it on an entirely different foundation.

Yes, and those who advocate teaching this to our children are advocating teaching our children to despise both their nation and its history, their own "whiteness," and ultimately their own selves.

Little wonder that parents all across the nation are outraged that both the NEA and the AFT have endorsed teaching CRT (see the link) and thousands of teachers have pledged to teach it in defiance of state laws which prohibit it.