Depending on who you ask, Critical Race Theory (CRT) is potentially one of the biggest threats to society that the West has ever faced. It’s being fed to our children and making them grow up to become beta cucks who are unable to properly defend their country against all the Alphas in China and Russia, or even worse, grow up to become women. With a nation of self-hating, over-educated snowflakes, the West is sure to crumble under the weight of its own wokeness. And this shit is starting in our schools! Our babies! If they start teaching our babies about CRT, what’s next? That gay people exist!?
Of course, we all know about gay people because we’ve had such an thorough and well-balanced exploration of homosexuality in our publicly-funded sexual education previously to now. But what is CRT? How can a race be critical when it doesn’t even have a mouth? Unfortunately, I didn’t grow up in the United States so I didn’t have CRT shoved down my young throat when I went to elementary school. I had to wait until my Master’s degree to learn about it, so my education came much too late.
What I learned is that one can frame racism beyond personal prejudice. CRT asks us to imagine a world where interpersonal racism evaporated overnight, and wonder whether racial disparities would still exist. Given that it’s easy enough to see that they would, CRT opens up a conversation as to what contributes to racial disparities beyond subjective attitudes.
CRT is a legal lens in that it focuses primarily on how laws that can appear neutral on their face represent a history of laws that originated in more overt forms of discrimination. The case I’m most familiar with, since that’s what I did my studies on, are drug laws that seemingly apply to everyone equally (they don’t use the n-word in the legal code, for instance), but in their history and implementation primarily target people of colour. Drug laws, in both the United States and Canada, were implemented entirely to control immigrant populations and prevent the mixing of races. Famously, in 1907, there was a massive race riot in Vancouver’s Chinatown because White people believed that Asian men were seducing White women using that sweet, sweet opium. Future Prime Ministry William Lyon Mackenzie King went and “investigated” the riot, and when he returned to Ottawa, criminalized opium because that was clearly the issue. Today, even though racial minorities are generally harassed by the legal system disproportionately to their White counterparts, the criminalization actually surges when the excuse being used for that harassment is drugs. Politicians will use the dog whistle “tough on crime” to stoke racialized fears without actually saying the n-word repeatedly, and that’s because crime and in particular drug crime have been so embedded into our cultural psyche as being linked to dangerous racial minorities that we can’t escape it. Therefore, the enforcement of drug laws is inherently racist even if there are a few good apples in the police force with open and progressive values.
And that, my friends, is what I learned CRT to be. It’s the deconstruction of seemingly neutral laws through a historical lens to ascertain why their outcome today disproportionately beleaguers people of colour. There’s more to it than that, such as a look at the impotence of current civil rights laws to address the so-called neutral laws adjacent to them in the legal code that are harming the people the civil rights laws are ostensibly there to protect, but that’s the most simplistic way of understanding CRT.
What does the historical deconstruction of laws have to do with elementary school kids? It would be bizarre to teach a postmodern philosophy of law to a child who doesn’t even have an understanding of how a bill becomes a law yet. In my ignorance, I only learned about CRT from the academic journals exploring the topic. Little did I know that social media and television pundits have different sources for their understanding of CRT; namely, from all the way up their own ass.
So what is CRT, really? Well, according to timeless sage and general polymath Tucker Carlson, CRT teaches us, “if you’re a straight White American, even if you’re a very small child, you’re guilty. It’s your fault. You’re a bad person.” This is the greatest threat to American society, and “everything’s at stake” because “[CRT is] civilization-ending poison.” The group Moms for Liberty, famous for putting out a $500 reward for catching teachers daring to educate their students on CRT, describe it as categorizing people into a binary of “oppressors” and “victim” based exclusively on the colour of that person’s skin. “That means the two million union soldiers who fought in the civil war to end slavery were also oppressors!” These people must be the experts to address it with such civilization-ending gravitas to put bounties on school teachers.
How do they know this is happening? Well they can point to facts like the National Education Association wanting to include in its curriculum the “truthful and age-appropriate accountings of unpleasant aspects of American history” and “the continued impact this history has on our current society.” Our Moms for Liberty heroines cite school assignments that ask their kids to reflect on what privileges they might have within their social standing.
But hold on, my fancy university degree is tingling. How does acknowledging say, slavery, categorize White children today into an oppressor class? Should we not be teaching kids about slavery? Or do they disagree that history has an on-going influence on modern society, and perhaps have different beliefs as to why racial disparities still exist? Will acknowledging where we might have benefited from our station in life truly be the end of civilization as we know it? Seems pretty… hyperbolic, to say the least. It’s also not CRT. If you’ll recall, CRT is the postmodern deconstruction of laws to disentangle them from their colour-blind neutrality to show how racist origins influence the structure of society today. Very little to do with privilege, nor is there any categorization of people within that perspective. Its entire deal is to look away from people to look at the theory of law – remember how it said nobody had to be personally racist for these problems to continue? Frankly, it’s barely a history lesson and more of a lens through which to view a history lesson, and my guess is that school kids aren’t deconstructing drug laws in their grade 10 social studies classes even if they’re carrying forward historical events to see their influence today.
If CRT isn’t actually CRT, then what is CRT? Well, if we listen to how CRT is being described, it’s an attack on White children, bullying them into self-effacing beliefs. The threat isn’t to civilization, it’s a threat to White civilization. There does not appear to be any concern for Black children learning CRT. Presumably Black children are benefiting from this new narrative since they are now the social victors while their White peers exist only under their woke boots.
You know how when a politician is asked a question they don’t want to answer, they don’t answer it, and respond instead to an imagined question that allows them to answer in the way they want? That’s what’s happening with CRT. No one is actually responding to CRT, they’re creating a strawman of CRT that allows them to tell susceptible White folks that they are under threat from the woke mob. What will never be discussed is the demographics of that mob: logically, in order for CRT to make sense as a threat, it has to be made up of people of colour and their allies, or, n______ and n_____-lovers. Truly a civilization-ending threat to put those people in charge!
The pandering to White Fright is not even subtle! It’s those coloureds and those coloured-lovers (that’s probably safer, right?) coming to brainwash our precious White darlings! It’s so obviously race-baiting that CRT literally has “race” in the name. Florida, known for being vociferously against censorship and cancel culture, is now banning math textbooks for things like CRT and social-emotional learning (because building a relationship toward a subject rather than embodying a stoic disinterest in rigorous scholarship at six years old is for pussies – and only pussies care about racial relations). It must only be the speech of certain types of people that is worth protecting.
Racism never went away. The Southern Strategy may have changed racist language from repeatedly using the n-word to dog whistles with plausible deniability like “tough on crime”, but it was always there. The backlash to CRT shows a regression away from the dog whistle. Today’s Lee Atwater is probably out there now wondering whether political speech can start using the n-word again. If demagogues are already comfortable raising a racial panic over the threat to all of the White babies, and this becomes normalized, it’s not like racism is going to content itself with eliminating the discussion of race in schools.
Dog whistles exist for terrible people to raise the specter of what ought to be obsolete ideologies. As we see the dog whistles get put away to allow room for the more overt integration of those terrible ideologies into the mainstream, it really ought to be a wake-up call that something much worse is coming.
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