President Trump has taken a lot of incoming from the left for cancelling “diversity” training for government workers that is based on Critical Race Theory.
These courses were taxpayer funded and they promoted an undigested ideology of racial grievance that, as the President remarked, makes people hate our country.
Jason Riley has a must-read column in the Wall Street Journal that makes two important points about CRT: CRT is a “dangerous folly,” and only conservatives are willing to criticize it.
The column is headlined “Where Have All the Honest Liberals Gone?” Riley maintains that in the past there were liberals such as the late Stanley Crouch, the Village Voice writer who died in September, who dared to question thinkers on their side of the political aisle when they thought these thinkers were wrong. No longer, apparently, as a large portion of today’s public liberals have swallowed CRT hook, line, and sinker.
Riley gives a great description of the Theory that in the past definitely would have drawn astute liberal critics. He writes:
Critical race theory attributes social inequality to racial power structures. It posits that problems within the black community are entirely the fault of whites and the responsibility of whites to solve. This thinking has grown in popularity over the past decade through the writings of Ta-Nehisi Coates, Michelle Alexander, Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi. Its jargon—“white privilege,” “systemic racism,” “unconscious bias”—has entered the vernacular. It has moved beyond college campuses and into our elementary schools via Nikole Hannah-Jones and the New York Times’s “1619 Project.” It has entered workplaces through “diversity” and “racial sensitivity” training.
CRT has become a parlor game for well-off black intellectuals, but it is harmful to those who don’t share their posh educational credentials:
Pushing “white supremacy” or “systemic racism” as a blanket explanation for racial disparities is a parlor game for better-off blacks who can afford to play games. It helps activists raise money and intellectuals secure cushy posts in the academy, but it does nothing to help the black underclass, which is more interested in safer neighborhoods and better schools than in making white people feel guilty.
Stanley Crouch isn’t the only independent thinker Riley touts. Randall Kennedy, a black law professor at Harvard Law, penned a devastating critique of race theory in 1989. Kennedy acknowledged that black colleagues had begged him not to publish it because it might undermine racial hiring preferences. He published it anyway.
Meanwhile, blacks who are not playing the CRT parlor game and live in the real world are being harmed by CRT. They are the ones who will suffer from decreased police presence in black neighborhoods and restricting charter schools.
But all of us are being harmed by this spurious Theory that pits us against each other and offers a chip on the shoulder instead of a path towards seizing opportunities.