Coates is known for his essays in The Atlantic, which are stylish, personal, historical and very long. The overall mood is one of disenchantment. The American Dream is not for black people. Between the World and Me is written as a letter to his son, and it contains no consoling words for the future: “I have no praise anthems, nor old Negro spirituals”. The view that the moral arc of history bends towards justice is an illusion. “America”, Coates writes, “understands itself as God’s handiwork, but the black body is the clearest evidence that America is the work of men”. He is an atheist.
Bell was not; he was a Christian. And his detached pessimism was tempered by an aggressive moralism. In his book, Ethical Ambition, which mixes memoir and self-help, he emphasised that:
“humanity at its essence is both an ongoing readiness to recognize wrongs and try to make things better, and the desire to help those in need of assistance without expecting reward or public recognition”.
So there is a point in being human, and that point is to do good. The virtues that are most important to Bell are “passion, courage, faith, relationships, inspiration and humility”. He often reads less like a radical subversive than a hokey Grandpa, slipping you moral maxims rather than sweets. Which raises the question: how can someone with such piety end up conceiving an ideology characterised by doleful pessimism?
Bell is in truth an unlikely candidate for the godfather of critical race theory, an ideology sceptical about the positive impact of anti-racist legislation. When he was younger, he worked for the NAACP, the establishment anti-racism group that believed American society could be transformed through the legal system. He worked, in particular, as a civil rights lawyer in the fifties Deep South. But eventually the US Justice Department’s Civil Rights division asked him to stop being a member of the NAACP: they thought he couldn’t be objective. He quit his position in the department, but continued to work for the anti-racist organisation.
One plausible way to reconcile these two sides of Bell — the moralist and the pessimist — is to emphasise his Christianity. He believed in the permanence of racism just like any Christian believes in the inevitability of sin — nevertheless, the inevitability of sin does not mean we shouldn’t try to be better.
But perhaps a better way to account for this tension — a way that explains the similarities between Bell and non-Christians like Coates — is to view his conception of critical race theory as a case of thwarted idealism in the American Dream. America did not become a post-racial utopia after the civil rights revolution; therefore racism is a permanent feature of American society. Just like every passionate atheist is in some sense an inverted believer, people like Bell who are so antagonistic to American idealism belie their underlying attachment to it. This is true of critical race theory in general.
Although he is not a Christian, Coates is as profoundly American as Bell. His criticism of the nation is animated by his acceptance of American exceptionalism. “One cannot”, he writes, “at once, claim to be superhuman and then plead mortal error”. His proposal is this: “to take our countrymen’s claims of American exceptionalism seriously, which is to say I propose subjecting our country to an exceptional moral standard”. In other words, he takes at face value the ideals of the American Dream (the very same American Dream that, he argues, is not for black people).
Meanwhile, the opponents of critical race theory see its ideas as hostile to — or at least inconsistent with — America (Fox News has mentioned it over 1,900 times in four months). In an exact inversion of critical race theory’s contention that racism is present in every aspect of American life, many on the Right — in this case, Christopher Rufo — now complain that critical race theory has “pervaded every aspect of the federal government” and poses “an existential threat to the United States”. Rufo and his ilk aren’t opposed to, say, teaching the history of slavery and segregation in American schools; what they oppose is schoolchildren acknowledging their whiteness. Rufo calls it state-sanctioned racism.
The irony is that critical race theory is not, as it sees itself, a realist’s ideology. And it is not, as its main opponents view it, fundamentally un-American. Like many on the conservative American Right, it espouses an idealised view of the nation’s self-professed values: if they truly believed these values were fundamentally corrupt, then what would be the point, as Bell and Coates do, of holding America to them? The truly realist position is one like Coleman Hughes’s: he has shown, with evidence and dispassionate argumentation, that black Americans have made material progress in recent decades.
Although Rufo may deny this of himself, many on the conservative Right do cling on to a form of American idealism that is insensitive to the existence of racism. But critical race theorists cling on to their own idealism by concluding that, because America is not yet a post-racial society, racism is an inexorable feature of the country. The vision of the shining city on a hill becomes the sole means by which to judge the nation — while the material realities of black people fade into the distance.
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SubscribeIf America were systemically racist it would not have voted in a Black President twice. There would not be Black entrepreneurs, Black millionaires and few billionaires. There would not be Black politicians in positions of power. Black immigrants have a significantly lower poverty rate than the native Black population as a whole. Black and Brown people are ubiquitous today in positions of power. If America were systemically racist Asians would not be as successful as they are. Jews are successful as well. I am white, I acknowledge that for 3 centuries we made it legally hard to be successful for descendants of black slaves. Those laws have made that illegal yet some persistent and historical poverty remain. The focus should be an honest conversation of how to lift those out of poverty by looking at how anybody gets out of poverty. The list of successful people who lifted themselves out of poverty is large. One reason is education, study, application. To that you need a community that stress that and revers that. That is key that is missing.
Critical Theory is the tool the people who find they have no special talent – (see your typical new University student thinks themselves pretty bright – but then right off in University finds their ability is nothing compared to the best who developed the studies they read on) – and that people so above them are all around – critical theory is the tool they use to explain their lacking in talent and creativity. Post Modernism is the next step and achieves the same but adds that there is no actual poor, mediocre, good, and excellent – that all reality is in self, and all created by others is meaningless, both also gives the tools to discredit all achievements which are exceptional, and to show any lack is based on unequal power, not unequal achievement.
Both are the Marxist/Liberal philosophy of elevating the inadequate, and bringing down the exceptional. Equity over achievement, quantity over quality.
Millions of Liberal Students students in University since the 1970s have found they have very average levels of talent, and so adopt this creed of disbelief in exceptionally Talented people and and exceptional works in (Literature, Poetry, Art, Philosophy, History, Politics, Psychology…). They believe greatness and super talent are merely uneven power, and thus as they are not exceptional they must be victims of those with power.
It is sick and twisted stuff. Go back to ‘The Frankfurt School’ of Wiemar Germany to find the origins of this all, worth a search to see where the rot began in the Western universities and intellectuals – then they moved to Columbia University, and so throughout the education system – which is out to destroy Western styles of Education, as Education by definition is elitist and teaches independent thinking, and so must be destroyed as education is thus merely power vs victim, as is every discussion, creation, achievement, and life its self – all is merely power vs victim.
Critical Theory is the philosophy of the inadequate to attack the over-adequate, to level down rather than up, as leveling up is hard work, and most are unable to achieve that.
Meanwhile in Afghanistan, desperate mothers are throwing their babies over the razor wire into the care of British soldiers. So let’s keep our philosophical dilemmas in proportion. All we need to remember is that Martin Luther King got it right.
Someone somewhere is currently even worse off, so file everything under Somebody Else’s Problem? Citizens of Afghanistan are potentially facing a dangerous and threatening future under the Taliban, so black westerners should just be grateful for not living there, and stop grumbling? Not sure that I quite follow that argument
I am not suggesting that black westerners should stop grumbling for some of them have much to grumble about. But I do suggest that critical race theorists (white and black) should recognise their lousy theory for what it is, viz. anti-white racism.
The argument is not we should be grateful for what we have. Instead, it’s a scale and context thing.
The issues that Critical Theory (CT) and all its “applications” was initially concerned with was to identify some great unfairness and power imbalances in our Western cultures. Legislation and public opinion have changed and many of these imbalances have been addressed. Despite this, the proponents of CT have not acknowledged and recognised these changes. They continue to fight for things that in context as ever less significant and weighty.
This is well described by the metaphor of St George in retirement. St George had a purpose and an aim – to slay the dragon and help the people living in fear. Once his purpose had been achieved, St George did not recognise that he then had to find another purpose in life. He could not stop fighting. Instead he continued to look for and fight ever smaller, less significant targets, treating them all as though they were all of the same magnitude of threat as the original dragon.
The argument therefore is that, in context, worrying about micro-aggressions or correct pronouns is insignificant and trivial when compared to really big challenges that other humans are facing across the globe.
CRT is a racial theory at heart but it avoids accusations of racism by redefining it in terms of power differentials between groups rather than as a belief in biological differences (as the original definition assumes).
In CRT’s revised definition, imbalances of power are what are racist, not beliefs in genetic racial superiority.
Second, it employs an Orwellian doublethink slight-of-hand in which it claims that race is a construct while at the same time claiming that races are fundamentally different. The following passage from Britannica by Tommy Curry, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Texas A&M University, makes this clear:
“Critical race theory (CRT), the view that the law and legal institutions are inherently racist and that race itself, instead of being biologically grounded and natural, is a socially constructed concept that is used by white people to further their economic and political interests at the expense of people of colour. According to critical race theory (CRT), racial inequality emerges from the social, economic, and legal differences that white people create between “races” to maintain elite white interests in labour markets and politics, giving rise to poverty and criminality in many minority communities”
As can be seen, above, CRT requires us to believe that race is artificially constructed in people’s minds, and not a biological reality. But once this is stated, the same paragraph immediately asserts that white people alone construct the idea of race to enforce their own privilege.
If white people are biologically indistinguishable from other races, as CRT at first claims, why would they have a special propensity to make such constructions to begin with? This latter insinuation is that the white race is, in fact, biologically quite different to other races.
This double-think is at the heart of Derrick Bell’s mind.
An interesting set of observations. For me, what is false regarding CRT is the complete absence of empirical, demonstrable instances of ‘power imbalances’ as CR Theorists understand them in terms of being racist. And this rests on another core revelation or belief, that ‘power’ is a feature baked into social reality and as such is everywhere and at all times the only relevant feature present in social interactions.
In essence, the acknowledgement of the correspondence theory of truth is nowhere to be seen in CRT.
Yes, I agree, CRT begins with the assumption that it is true, and interprets conflicting data as proof of its truth (for example, all white people are racist, and if they disagree with this statement, they do so because they are racist – ie unfalsifiable once the starting premise is accepted as true)
‘Double think’ or rather confused thinking…
Black America will never succeed in making sense of race in America if they rely on the sermonizing of Ivy League demagogues. These intellectuals artfully avoid mention of the destruction of the black family by a half-century of liberal social policy which effectively paid black women to be poor and have children out of wedlock. If you cannot trace the dire conditions of blacks in America directly back to the good intentions of the white saviors of the 1960s then you aren’t serious about the subject.
Brilliant article. Your own dispassionate analysis is as rare as it is remarkable, yet, despite the depth of interrogation, the borderline psychotic absurdity of our times can almost be summed up in your two throwaway lines, “No one writes much about Coates anymore. Perhaps because he left Twitter.”
…or that Coates is off writing for comic books…endeavoring to capture the ‘evilness’ of Jordan Peterson of all people – funny and absurd at once.
Very true, Cathy, but in Coates’ defence, all straight, white, middle-aged men are the incarnation of ‘evilness.’ Except me, of course.
While I found this an interesting historical overview, as always with these discussions about CRT, BLM, Woke culture etc, I am left wondering exactly what polemicists are proposing that governments should do, in public policy terms? Just wailing ‘We all doomed’ may be satisfying to the writers, but not sure it gets anyone anywhere
Well, if Derrick Bell is the godfather of this nonsense theory, he deserves, like Marx, to be condemned for the evils carried out in its name. Yes, a few things on target, but the rest incoherent and motivated by loathing, hatred and little self examination.
Critical Race Theory, which is simply an assertion repeated over and over again with no underlying evidence, is such intellectual garbage that you do wonder whether deeply buried within it is a suppressed belief that black people and societies are really, intrinsically and fundamentally, inferior to those of European origin. What can you make of people who teach, for example, that being polite or on time, or even learning maths, is ‘acting white’? It can be argued that it suits everyone to collude in this, white politicians are under little pressure to address real structural disadvantages and black activists because they absolutely refuse to see specific social factors in the African American population (and here the British Caribbean) which enormously contribute to their own disadvantage. These include among other factors, irresponsible fatherhood and lauding of a criminal and violent subculture. You then see the dishonest attitude of Left liberal people wetting themselves over how great this culture is, exemplified by its contempt for authority, misogyny, homophobia, and worship of violence, which is completely forgiven as it never would be were white people doing the same. And have you noticed the ubiquitous discourse which blames ‘racism’ for every ill, including violent assaults and other street crime, even where it is in some areas mostly other black people committing the crime. Who is forcing these overwhelmingly black boys to stab each other? The liberals screech about knife crime, and then oppose every practical means the police might use to address it.
An interesting explanation of key ideas, assumptions and internal conflicts in CRT. Thanks.
“American is not a post racial society”. What is a post racial society? The CRT movement never really explain it.
“Although Rufo may deny this of himself, many on the conservative Right do cling on to a form of American idealism that is insensitive to the existence of racism.”
Quite the opposite! With the relatively recent exposures of the full extent of the spread of the CRT disease into all of our institutions including schools, American conservatives consider anti-white, anti-Asian, and anti-Jewish racism as existential threats to a unified country.
CRT in practice is much more than “schoolchildren acknowledging their whiteness.” The evils of CRT or whatever the racist creators call the programs being practiced and exposed in American schools have been described in Unherd and elsewhere and especially the comments sections of many articles – but simply summarized they are the essence of racism itself
CRT is divisive and the only purpose is to foment such divisiveness. Christianity on the other hand is the ONLY place where race doesn’t matter. Galatians 3:28.
I think you promote a common misconception of this verse. Paul is not saying that race doesn’t matter, any more than he is saying that being a man or a woman, or a slave or free doesn’t matter and he is not trying to get rid of gender or even slavery – see the rest of the verse. What he is saying is that despite our differences, treat each other well as we are all joined to Christ. So in his letter to Philemon he asks him to treat his runaway slave Onesimus like a brother rather than to free him and if you read you will see that thought his Jewish race did matter, to God actually.
Sorry, read Romans 11 about Jews mattering.
Surely all unbiblical concepts are divisive? Because we live in a broken, fallen world we have to recognise and name the problems in order to try to resolve them. Problems, like parts of speech, need names so that we can talk about them.
To add to my previous comment if it gets shown, is to question the value and good of diversity which America tries so hard at but doesn’t seem to succeed in. Diversity is so often the mark of failed states – Lebanon, Sri Lanka, Nigeria(250 languages) etc – where does it really work, tell me? Even in the UK there are problems, it didn’t work very well in Northern Ireland and even Scotland, white, mostly protestant and did well out of Empire and has been with us for at least 300 years wants out. So why import diversity and pretend it’s fine and why try so hard in the USA? Melting pot, falling apart.
“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” – Martin Luther King
Someday, the race hustlers and race hustling industry is going to understand this quote; They are going to comprehend the meaning of the word ‘character’….but don’t hold your breathe waiting.
As I understand it Christopher Rufo is not on the political right and is arguing against the flaws of CRT from the same standpoint as Coleman Hughes, who the writer speaks more favourably of, namely that CRT and Critical Theory are assaults on liberal and humanitarian values and the kind of anti racism offered by Martin Luther King.
The author states:
‘ Rufo and his ilk aren’t opposed to, say, teaching the history of slavery and segregation in American schools; what they oppose is schoolchildren acknowledging their whiteness. Rufo calls it state-sanctioned racism.’
This is incorrect. What Rufo (and his ‘ilk’ -whatever that is supposed to mean) are very reasonably objecting to is schoolchildren being taught the kind of racial essentialism that equates whiteness with racism, where they don’t even have to get out of bed in the morning to be racist.
Thank you, Tomiwa Owolade, for this insightful article. Has really helped get my head around the ideology of CRT.
If you haven’t done so already, may I suggest James Lindsay’s rendition on his website newdiscourses dot com.
Click on the ‘woke encyclopedia’ and go to CRT under the alphabetical listings.
I studied some of Derrick Bell’s works in my Critical Theory class. Most of what he writes comes across as a set of ‘just-so’ stories. Beyond an interesting footnote, I’m not sure what he really contributes to existing bodies of knowledge.
When a man’s writings are as leaden and impenetrable as the quotes above, just dump them.
The young folk beaming lovely smiles in the photo of the subject striding with confidence and energy must be happy … inside. Does life in the West have to be so complicated? Today? With all our tech gizmos and conveniences? And creature comforts? It’s like a still from a 1980s pop video. Was not the burst of energy and creativity in popular music forty and fifty years ago, in America, symbolic of changing times? Of an America kind enough to take, if not a good look, at least a look at itself? Okay, there were the 60s, ‘Nam, protests, civil rights marches and Watergate and all that. But great things were on the way and were also already happening. And nowhere else in the world was that motor for change happening. Blacks in America must have lacked confidence well beyond the Sixties. They had lacked so much else. American musicians and singers were surely delighted to be in a position to rouse their fans, their communities, their wider audiences nationally. It was an affirmation of life, and of America.
I refer chiefly to black American musicians and singers, by way of example, of course.
Racism knows no race. It’s a sin.
Perhaps failing to recognise and respect a person’s identity, part of which will be their race, is the real ‘sin’.
“value to whites, not simply those concerned about the immorality of racial inequality, but also those whites in policymaking positions able to see the economic and political advances at home and abroad that would follow abandonment of segregation.”
A few points about his quote spring to mind: It is not necessarily true that those opposed to segregation on moral grounds and those seeing the economic advantages of abandoning segregation are two distinct groups. It is surely possible to hold both views, and when a moral view is also economically good, what’s not to like?
Perhaps the article is right in that the USA suffers from the the delusion of its exceptionalism. It’s a country founded on Enlightenment utopianism which believed a nation could be made by words- a constitution. Perhaps successful countries need a common people bound by history, culture and some approximation of race. At least doesn’t evolution place some constraints on our ideals, though we need those as well? We get on better with people like us. Might not it have been preferable, if after the Civil War Afro-Americans had been given their own state with voting and property rights reserved for them and for the nature of their relationship with the rest of America left to them – if I’d been a slave I’d want that to be very little. Except for, by way of compensation, 30 odd years of financial subsidy to help create the physical – railways, and human- schools – infrastructure. Then there would have been the chance to create a self respecting fully equal black nation, the potential for which was clearly apparent before Jim Crow etc. Then white liberals wouldn’t try and fail to get equality and blacks wouldn’t remain sceptical. ????? Perhaps today there should be black, white and hispanic states with the only the great cities, New York, Chicago, LA etc., greatly extended, fully multiracial and multicultural and the USA not United but a Federation. Discuss.
After the American Civil War, groups of blacks left the USA and went to Liberia to do just what you describe…create their own society. Today, blacks in America are also seeking to be self-segregated in a number of areas. They are demanding and getting separate black housing and student unions on college campuses; blacks also receive special separate orientation sessions just before going into college. Of course, historical black colleges like Morehouse are more popular than ever as well. It’s rather ironic that these ‘segregation projects’ are by initiated by blacks, who constantly flail about historical slavery which was ended in the 1860’s.
One of the problems with any discussion about racism is that it makes historical comparisons with the issue today. As overt racism has receded (think KKK, NF marches, ‘No Blacks, No Dogs No Irish’ signs), society is now heavily weighted against particularly those of African heritage. In America the education, policing and the criminal justice work in many ways that leaves African Americans with much worse outcomes. Those systems are not designed to be racist but the outcomes are different based on race.
But outcomes will always be different between groups since each group has a culture that makes different trade offs. Males are in prison 20x more often than females is that inequity? Asians outperform all other races in education with a rather large margin. If all racist mechanisms are removed then you cannot blame the system if so much depends on the culture of the group.
Spot on. To point out the tired old fact that AA’s over represent in the prison population is like complaining that white men are under represented in the NFL or NBA. If you commit a crime, get caught, get convicted you might go to prison. If you run faster, jump higher, catch more footballs, or dunk easier, you become an extremely highly compensated professional athlete. It’s pretty simple.
Why does everyone downvote comments just because they hold a different view? Unherd readers, please, refrain from disrespecting views you don’t agree with. If you feel someone is wrong, it’s far more helpful to suggest why than to downvote them.
The down vote (the up vote too, if I’m being honest) is a tool of the passive aggressive internet commenter. The social media ethos maintains that the person who gets the most up votes (and fewest down votes) is right. The winner. Decidedly NOT the mouth-breathing loser. I know, it’s stupid but we are, as an entire species, de-evolving at a terrifying rate. The down and up votes are how we can measure our rate of descent.
Mr Hopp, you seem unhappy. I recommend a mild laxative after which (8-12 hours, if possible) it may be time to start dating again.
My point is that a downvote is not the same as a counter-argument, and adds nothing to a debate except to communicate that something has violated the group-think average of the site’s readers, which is ironic on Unherd, given that it is supposed to be a place where those who are not part of the herd can be heard.
I must say I don’t see the point of up and down votes at all, given we can post comments and maybe agree with some points and not others. I was not really aware of it until this thread started!
Up and down votes are practical. Sometimes one has the same argument as someone else. Or not. Would we prefer seeing screeds of ‘I agree’ comments for example?
Yess indeed!
How?
I don’t disagree at a very general high level, but the societal solutions adopted since the Great Society onwards have made many things worse, in particular to fail to hold black people like everyone else to responsibilty and accountability. Crime is absolutely rife in black areas, and vastly more black people are killed by their brethren than by the police, but no one goes on demos and rampages about that.
If you are told, or ir is implied, that studying for example is ‘acting white’ for example, though you might get a college place despite your poor qualifications, you might become a useless and embittered employee pretty quickly.
But if a system is equal, neutral, then different quantities on entrance should retain their differences upon exit. Up to recently, most American public institutions have been as impartial as they could. Some cultures are better positioned to succeed in our current society than others.