Critical Race Theory Is Made up of a Series of Tenets
- These tenets include: America is Systematically Racist, Progress is a Myth, Collective Equity Over Individual Equality, and Race Essentialism. Collectively, these premises necessarily make CRT a revolutionary ideology incompatible with the American system, a fact admitted by its most honest proponents.
- CRT jettisons, and in fact downplays, traditional Marxist concerns about class division, which they see as a distraction from the underlying struggle between groups based on race, rather than wealth. As Manhattan Institute scholar Christopher Rufo has summed up, CRT “reimagines class warfare as race warfare.”
Definitional Semantics Miss the Point
- Irrespective of what you call it (CRT, “anti-racism”, wokeness, identity politics, “diversity, equity, and inclusion” etc.), the underlying premises of CRT — that America is systemically racist and that American institutions perpetuate “white privilege” — have become ubiquitous in our public discourse and our institutions, from education to government agencies to private corporations.
- Recently, as they’ve woken up to how pervasive these underlying narratives are in many aspects of life across public and private sectors, Americans have begun to voice their displeasure with them.
- Semantic games are an attempt to fool the American people into complacency about the ideological advance of these ideas in our institutions. Treating CRT as a narrow academic theory obscures how its tenets have been broadly adopted and implemented in powerful institutions across the country.
We Need a Systemic Approach to Stop Critical Race Theory
- Under the cloak of buzzwords like “anti-racism”, equity, and inclusion, critical race theory has seeped into America’s most powerful institutions. As a result, efforts to beat it back will also need to be — in the favorite word of CRT scholars — systemic.
- Different institutions captured by the ideology, including education, government, corporations and the media, will require different strategies to purge the influence of CRT.
- E pluribus unum — “out of many, one” — isn’t just a motto of the United States that appears on our Great Seal, but presents our greatest challenge, one that our institutions and culture must constantly strive to meet. CRT directs the country away from forming a “more perfect Union” between citizens of all racial backgrounds.
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