America is burning its historical bonds (Photo by ROBERTO SCHMIDT / AFP) (Photo by ROBERTO SCHMIDT/AFP via Getty Images)
National Socialism, Maoism and Marxism-Leninism all have one thing in common: they boil down human experience to one aspect, such as race or class, and diminish the struggles and achievements of much of humanity.
In some respects, as an approach to understanding history, CRT has a certain credibility. Ibram X. Kendi’s retelling of American history in Stamped from the Beginning is lucid, well-crafted and internally consistent in its description of racism as both a motivating force and by-product of the American tale. He uses it to rationalise and support his claim that African Americans have failed to attain the fruits of American life in the same way as whites — higher education, corporate leadership, home ownership and intergenerational wealth — but suggests this is due almost entirely to racist policies embedded in American institutions and law.
It certainly does not serve any country’s history to ignore such things; they are fundamental strands of the national tapestry. But CRT and its adherents present an all too one-sided view. Its founding father, legal scholar Derrick Bell, even claimed African Americans had not made progress since Abolition, obliterating the enormous contributions — in politics, arts, culture and elsewhere — made by African Americans in the face of widespread discrimination.
CRT takes an opposite approach to many black leaders — Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. DuBois — who sought not to lower standards, but to raise them. Indeed, Black Americans made significant progress in terms of incomes and skills in the 1940s to the 1960s, before many of the most heinous forms of racism were abolished. Relying on whites to achieve an anti-racist enlightenment has never been a good strategy, in any era.
But rather than draw inspiration from this, today’s racial activists decry the habits often associated with success as reflections of “whiteness”. Some even denounce habits such as punctuality, rationality and hard work as reflective of “racism” and “white privilege”. Mathematics and science have also been dismissed for being reflective of “racism” and “white privilege”. Yet as African American economist Glenn Loury has observed, CRT wipes out agency by downgrading “western” concepts and “impedes the acquisition of traits that are valued in the marketplace and are essential for human development.”
CRT also gives short shrift to many other histories. Most working-class Americans, particularly outside the American South, had little contact with black workers. Their struggles were not against African Americans but against the white factory owners who controlled capital. Working-class Americans or Brits of the last century do not fit easily into the role of oppressors, nor have they enjoyed the economic benefits CRT imputes to them by dint of racial privilege.
Also cast into what Trotsky famously called “the dustbin of history” are the family stories of most Americans, Canadians and Australians — most of whom came to supply cheap labour. Engels writes about the Irish being “demoralised by dirt and poverty”, living in the worst slums of Victorian England.1 Whether in the United States or in Britain, Irish migrants were oppressed by their fellow whites. Although many Left-wing historians now downplay this repression, it was only in the middle of 20th Century that being Irish Catholic disappeared as a disqualification for the highest office, through the election of John F. Kennedy.
Other newcomers, such as Italians, also faced discrimination and prejudice. But few faced more strenuous opposition than Asian immigrants, who were banned from immigrating or even owning land. During World War II, the US Government actually shipped Japanese Americans off to concentration camps, albeit not for extermination but to address the racist paranoia of their mostly white neighbours — a crime not perpetrated against white German Americans.
Today, Asian-Americans and groups like Hindus in the UK generally outperform whites in school and incomes — despite a history of discrimination against them, even after leaving harsher discrimination in East Africa. Instead of embracing this history, many advocates of CRT see this success as an affront. Although clearly “people of colour,” Asians have transcended “whiteness” by dint of hard work and educational achievement.
As a result, at Harvard, the birthplace of CRT, Asians now face official discrimination, much as Jews did in the last century. In the same vein, when violence is inflicted on Asians, advocates of CRT even suggest that it is somehow the product of white nationalism. Meanwhile, some racial theorists, like Robin DiAngelo, accuse Asians of being “white adjacent”, non-whites who succeed to copping Anglo attitudes.
But perhaps no group has been more forgotten in the broad assault on “whiteness” than the Jews. CRT, notes David Suissa, publisher of the Los Angeles Jewish Journal, forces people of whatever background to allow themselves to be defined by their peculiar “systemic ethos”. This means that Jews are whites like any other, despite millennia of persecution in virtually every country where they have settled. Their right to a separate identity is denied; their unique history, obliterated.
However successful they may be today, it took centuries — including a 365-year exile — for Jews to become full citizens of the British Empire. In America, where their rights were guaranteed by the Constitution, they still struggled against fierce WASP opposition, seeking to block their ascent into the highest echelons of business, professions, media, culture and politics. Given their history, Jews often identified with black communities, and the oppressed in general, and were particularly early and disproportionate backers of African American equality.
It is strange, then, that while CRT advocates seek to obliterate three thousand years of unique history, much of the Jewish Establishment — including the Anti-Defamation League — has been slow to distance themselves from Black Lives Matter, even after riots led to desecrations of synagogues. They even embraced BLM allies like Al Sharpton, a Brooklyn preacher with a history of leading anti-Jewish protests.
In modern America, Jewish leaders would rather adopt the politically acceptable focus on white nationalists as their biggest threat. But that doesn’t change the fact that despite several bloody incidents perpetrated by individual white nationalists, a significant proportion of recent attacks on Jews came from African Americans, criminals, the mentally ill or by Palestinian activists. Neo-Nazis are not thick on the ground in Brooklyn or the Fairfax district of Los Angeles where recent acts of violence have occurred.
Meanwhile, CRT, as Rabbi Meir Y. Soloveichik has noted, represents an increasingly secular America: “a strange form of moral Puritanism without faith, and therefore without forgiveness.” Its functionaries on campuses and in the street often embrace their dogma like the sometimes hysterical Chinese Red Guards, who demonised their own country’s rich history to create a totally new one. Mao would certainly have understood such things as dismantling “the systems of hegemonic power” and introducing compulsory “anti-racism training” throughout education, business, and government.
The authoritarian nature of the movement is not hard to spot. Ibram X. Kendi has called for an Orwellian federal Department of Anti-racism with extra-constitutional power to abolish any law deemed insufficiently “anti-racist”, He identifies racism and capitalism as “conjoined twins”: both will have to collapse before racism can be eradicated. Of course, this is hard to reconcile with the lack of racial harmony in China and other socialist countries, much less the vast fortunes Kendi and BLM receive from the oligarchy.
The good news is that CRT’s racialist agenda may not become a permanent fixture. The vast majority of Americans — including millennials and minorities — do not, for example, favour defunding the police. Most American voters — by wide margins — reject the notion of teaching Critical Race Theory in schools, even though the effort is adopted by the billionaire class as well as corporate HR departments, most Democratic politicians, the White House and the powerful teachers’ unions.
Equally promising is the growing alarm among liberals —including TV host Bill Maher and journalist Andrew Sullivan — whose devotion to the ideal of colour-blindness is dismissed by CRT adherents as a “fantasy”. Similarly, former Clinton advisor Bill Galston has pointed out that CRT is a “doctrine” that rejects the Enlightenment, “tacitly requires deconstructing the American order and rebuilding it on an entirely different foundation”. In other words, it is not a project likely to be enacted democratically.
Perhaps nothing more reflects the “on-the-street” reality, as opposed to Twitter, than the growing tendency towards intermarriage and interracial dating — not only in the US, but in Canada, Australia and the UK. Inter-racial dating in America is up 40% since 2003, according to the Census, while interracial marriage has soared from 3% in 1967 to roughly one in six now.
There is, of course, more work to be done. African-American incomes — as well as those of Pakistanis and West Indians in the UK — have not kept pace. And there are still racial imbalances in imprisonment, confrontations with law enforcement and worse health effects, particularly during the pandemic.
But whatever is needed to help African Americans will only gain political support if it focuses on alleviating the economic and health challenges of all races. The key to addressing our racial divides, notes Richard Parsons, former President of Citigroup, lies not with pushing racial distinctions but promoting economic growth and opportunity. There will never be “unity”, he suggests, until people “feel it in their pockets”. The goal should be to do whatever it takes to address poverty and distress, whether in the south Chicago ghetto, Appalachia or the British Midlands.
Whether they realise it or not, CRT and its backers appear to be undermining this goal. In the last decade, the percentage of Americans who consider relations between black and white communities as “poor” has almost doubled, to near 60%. Certainly, policies of “reverse discrimination” seem likely to stir resentment. People don’t like to be forced to beg forgiveness and make recompense for the sins of their fathers, especially when they have no reason to believe their fathers , most of whom immigrated well after the Civil War, have done nothing wrong. Indeed, it’s hardly surprising that the anti-Zionist and anti-Jewish far-Right — including the neo-Nazi National Socialist Club, Proud Boys and Aryan Nations Arizona — has targeted anti-CRT protests as a way build support.
Despite the persistence of these racists, there’s still a reason that non-whites continue to move to Britain and its colonial offspring. After all, these places offer important legal protections not common in the developing world. China’s autocratic Xi Jinping may offer “the Chinese dream”, but the number of immigrants from China living in the United States more than doubled between 2000 and 2018, reaching nearly 2.5 million, with many others heading to Canada and Australia. There is little such movement to China — where the foreign population is barely one in a thousand —or most other Asian countries.2
In the end, our shared historical legacy — so different than China — represents the essential basis upon which we can expand and improve our multi-national societies. It does little good to demolish the historical bonds we, as citizens, feel, even as we recognise that our greatest heroes — whether its America’s Founding Fathers, Lincoln, Churchill, Roosevelt or Martin Luther King — were in some ways flawed.
The solution to the racial crisis in the West requires not separating people by race but by finding common grounds upon which to create a successful, diverse and coherent society. Without “awareness” of our history, its differing tangents and permutations, we, as classicist Michael Grant once noted, will be “blindfolded in our efforts to grapple with our future”. Communities that don’t fit a certain label — whether they are Jewish or Asian — will continue to find their histories obscured. And more important, we will steal from ourselves and our children the common sense of past needed to forge more perfect unions.
FOOTNOTES
- Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, translated by W.O. Henderson and W.H. Chaloner, (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press,1958), p.34
- Carlos Echeverria-Estrada and Jeanne Batalova, “Chinese Immigrants in the United States,” Migration Policy Institute, January 15, 2020
Joel Kotkin is the Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and author, most recently, of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class (Encounter)
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SubscribeThe authors of this article continuously capitalise ‘black’ while not capitalising ‘white’. This practice must be exposed for what it is: blatant racism. I will be complaining to Unherd about this.
Nit-picking, but yes, you’re right!
I find it really, really obnoxious, and very disturbing that racists who indulge in this practice, petty as it is, are allowed to get away with it.
I didn’t notice, but it’s insidious now you’ve pointed it out.
I come across this low level racist nastiness in a lot of places, and always make a fuss when I do. It really cannot be tolerated.
Weird. Actually, I’m perplexed. The rest of your commentary seems quite reasonable. Perhaps you have misunderstood me.
To Unherd’s credit, they dealt with this nonsense very promptly when I finally raised the matter with them this morning.
“There is, of course, more work to be done. African-American incomes — as well as those of Pakistanis and West Indians in the UK — have not kept pace.”
I am in agreement with much of this article but it isn’t helpful to write statements like the above without further qualification.
I am presuming (incorrectly perhaps) that the authors broadly agree with the notion that disparity does not automatically equate to discrimination? I accept that I am inferring but this is one of the central tenets of CRT which the article critiques.
If my inference is correct – then why does the fact that Pakistanis and West Indians in the UK have lower incomes than other groups automatically equate to injustice? Don’t get me wrong – it may well be, but the authors have simply asserted that “more has to be done”. In what sense? To what end? Equal outcomes for all? Again, is equality of outcome really a desirable goal? Has there been any work done on whether Pakistanis/ West Indians have been denied access to opportunities that other groups have been privy to? (I am a British Indian Hindu incidentally). If they have been denied such opportunities, then where is the evidence. We must not ever dismiss out of hand the impact of past injustice, but there is dismissing it out of hand and then there is making it literally front and centre of everything.
Apart from anything, I think we all accept by now that humanity will ALWAYS have “more work to do”. ‘Twas ever thus and forever it shall be so. One case of anything terrible is one case too many. Of course it is. But that goes for many many things – murders, robberies, abductions.. the list goes on. These figures sadly will never get to zero and to reach such a goal would require such a curtailing of civil liberties that it is not workable in a free society.
All we can do is keep plugging away; and by and large, that is precisely what we have been doing. And pretty damn well if I do say so myself
Disparities of outcomes do not prove the existence of discrimination because there are other possible causes. First, cultural: some cultural groups value leisure over material success, others have a fatalistic attitude toward success. Either such attitude will be a drag on material success in comparison to a cultural group that values material success and sees it as the result of effort, rather than fate. Second, if one really believes in the Darwinian account of biological diversity, one would be surprised to find identical distributions of traits, including behavioral traits, among human populations which have been (relatively) reproductively isolated from each other living in different environments for centuries, even though they now have lived in the same society for a few generations (while remaining relatively repoductively isolates). Some behavioral traits are relevant to success in modern societies.
This article is pretty bad that way. It is obvious to anyone not stupid that some groups of people are always going to be the top, and some the bottom. Ability and drive till win out in the absence of totalitarianism. Which is what it would take for the low achieving groups to take over from the high achieving groups. As seen in South Africa.
Consider the following description of an ideology: an ethnic group which has proved very successful by many measures of social and economic attainment is vilified as the source of the world’s miseries for centuries, if not millennia; the group’s success is held not to be the result of cultural characteristics worthy of emulation, but of blameworthy contrivances to gain unfair advantages over others; the more extreme exponents of these views suggest that the elimination of the ethnic group in question is the only way to solve the problem they present. What is being described? Hint: until recently, there was only one right answer, now there are two.
I would suggest that CRT does not ignore the Jews, but merely expands the target of the “the-Jews-run-the-world” version of anti-Semitism to all “white people” (“white” being peculiarly defined so that Sepharic Jews and Arab Christians are “white” but Arab Muslims are “people of color”).
In California they have even found a way to tar all white people with the old anti-Semitic charge of “deicide” (though being illiterate in classical languages, they mix Greek and Latin roots and call it “theocide”). “How?” you may wonder. Well, the white Conquistadors destroyed the human-sacrificing pagan religion of the Aztecs, and thus all of us white folk are guilty of offing Quetzelcoatl and company.
I think you’re right. Take one of Hitlers vile anti-Semitic rants, replace “Jews” with “Whites” and I’d challenge anyone to spot the difference between that and some of the works of Critical Race Theory.
I did that for my final assignment in my Critical Theory class and received a B.
I’ve just seen an Amazon review under Henrich’s book on WEIRD societies. It rants that it’s written by a white man and admired by white people – to justify ‘white supremacy’. Now, replace ‘white’ with ‘Jew’ and ‘Jewish’.
Well Hit *er also had it in for Slavs, Gypsies, and all sorts – and after the Jews were done he would have turned to the next on his list – much like CRT would do -‘ those Chinese – beating everyone in Harvard admissions, I bet they do it on purpose to subjugate the others.’
Yes indeed. The playbook is always the same: Stalin singled out the “kulaks”, Hitler the Jews, Mao the “rightists”, Pol Pot the “intellectuals”, Idi Amin the Asians, Mugabe the white farmers – to name just the most egregious examples. Any movement that relies on demonizing one demographic group ostensibly to redress some historical imbalance is bound to be crude and divisive. There are more than enough examples from history to tell us that this can never be the right way to go and that it will end badly – possibly very badly indeed.
The Romans ‘deicided’ the Carthaginians when they took the city, killed everyone, pulled it down, and set out to wipe it off the map. That the Carthage religion involved child sacrifice makes it less worrisome. The Carthage Generals and Politicos who lost badly were put to the death, – a less troubling aspect of their violent culture.
I tend to enjoy Jordon Peterson Youtube videos, he has such a reasoned, and soothing, unoffensive, way of telling us that what we know inside, to be true, most likely is. He is often called the top intellectual in the world today.
Basically he says CRT is like Na* is m as it is completely race based, and claims ones of that race are inherently bad, and cannot be redeemed. He is so very much superior to these writers who have to qualify and try to bring in ‘All Sides’ of the issue, and so on. CRT also seeks Government and Industry join together to defeat these bad people – the second tenet of Nat ion al Socal ism, the government/private industry married together.
This is all an evil, Post-Modernism, Marxist, Nihilist drive to destroy the West. It all comes from Wiemar Republic coincidentally, too. The group called ‘The Frankfurt School’. It was Marxist, existentialist, Intellectual, and the founders of ‘Critical Theory’ (the origin of CRT) As well as the wickedly twisted ‘Post Modernism’ (which did not get that name till 1970s with Derrida and Foucoult, but is merely a continuation of Frankfurt School)
The Frankfurt School 11 points are written by a biased group, but basically reflect on them, they were out to destroy Capitalism, and by destroying the Family they felt they could bast achieve this – they are remarkable evil… so here are the 11 points – written by a anti F.S., biased guy, but still – they are all over the internet…
“The 11 Point Plan of the Frankfurt School
1. The creation of racism offenses.
2. Continual change to create confusion.
3. The teaching of sex and homosexuality to children.
4. The undermining of schools’ and teachers’ authority.
5. Huge immigration to destroy identity.
6. The promotion of excessive drinking.
7. Emptying of churches.
8. An unreliable legal system with bias against victims of crime.
9. Dependency on the state or state benefits.
10. Control and dumbing down of media.
11. Encouraging the breakdown of the family.”
Crazy times, The West is under attack by a mere 2% of the hard Left, and they are winning so much we may go down as they have taken the MSM, Social Media, All Education, Entertainment, and Government., and the West, that great light int he world, may be destroyed.
There is no such thing as the 11 point plan of the Frankfurt School. The 11 points you have listed are from an article from the late 2000s, as I recall, which was used as a summary for some of the main areas of thought according to the author. While certainly some of their ideas and concepts relate to some extent to these points, to say there was some sort of plan is misleading. Indeed, the points are also not entirely the truth of their posturing from what I can tell. However, the take away still stands: the thought movements from the Frankfurt School are dangerous, and antithetical to what is good and beautiful in the world and damaging to human well-being.
I did say the 11 points were from a biased source – some guy made them up by looking at what he perceived as their goals. All they do is handily tell us what one guy thinks
But also it is very prophetic, how they are tracking the real time wrecking of the West.
“…relations between Black and white communities…” Why is only one capitalised?
Because of course one is good, noble, virtuous.. the other is pure evil
I have complained to Unherd about this. It’s blatant racism and they should not be allowed to get away with it.
Kotkin is riding two horses. Hoping that BLM will take the hint, back off his community, eat the WASPs and leave others to feast on the carrion.
The problem with this argument is I feel if the authors got their way and Jewish people ( and other non Anglo white groups) were excluded they would be fine with CRT.
CRT is racist anyway, even and especially to WASPs. Or in the UK, the English. ( I am not English).
Anyway, far from reducing its targets CRT is likely to extend its targets to “white adjacent” ethnic groups. In the US that would be Chinese Americans, and in the UK, as Priti Patel can attest, it would be British Indians.
Society is being trolled. A while back the state owned TV and News service in the UK, the BBC, posted an article suggesting that Dorset was racist because it was 98% white. The real reason that Dorset is 98% white, as any 6 year old could attest, is because immigrants to Britain have moved to cities mostly. Not happy with a few minor complaints from the local non-whites, largely about the “face” that some shop keepers put on that may or may not be racist, and one woman who was taken to be a carer by one man because he thought a black person in dorset is more likely to be a carer – That was it – they moved in Dorset’s well known colonial activities.
The second part of the article mentioned some Dorset immigrants had been involved in colonisation, therefore they were part of a worldwide white supremacy. This is the essence of racial essentialism. You aren’t just responsible for what you do, or even what your ancestors did, but for the people who look like you did, somewhere else entirely.
And just recently the Washington Post decided that what were likely suicides by hanging were in fact modern day lynchings. If the Chinese were smart propagandists they would be funding these articles, but they are all driven by internal ideologies. We are trolling and destabilising ourselves.
Exactly.
Yes, I suppose if im*igration was driven by a country’s economic success, people would be flocking to China. Clearly freedom and human rights are just as important as economic opportunity. The success of the expelled Ugandan Asi*ns coming to Britain should really beg the question as to why successful im*igration is not the norm.
Interesting article, and some great comments below, of which I commend in particular the one summarising the Frankfurt School objectives, which are chillingly horrible. What worries me about the article is its seeming acceptance of the “fact” of prevalent racism in the UK/US today. To me, there is no racial crisis, individuals in racial minorities now have better opportunities and practical help to succeed in life than ever before, and the “enlightenment” policies of decent Western governments over many decades is on track to further improve that. Of course things are not perfect. It can only be called a crisis if you childishly believe anything not entirely perfect is horrible, and must be somebody nasty’s fault.
Disturbing report in today’s DT about a woman m us lim police officer who has been tweeting disgusting hatred against k uff ars.
Still, good job it’s only w hit e peple who can be racist, isn’t it?
So the author goes into how Critical Race Theory and its proponents are full of crap, but then the authors treat the ADL (Anti-Defamation League) as a reliable source? Come on! The ADL has gone the way of the SPLC (Southern Poverty Law Center). Informed people do not take them seriously anymore. They even serve the same modern function. Find a political target, baselessly accuse them of antisemitism (ADL) or racism (SPLC), and pretend that you are well respected even though no one takes you seriously anymore.
CRT is the favored ideology of a global Racial Supremacy movement against people of European ancestry. It seeks the abasement and eradication of those it considers ‘white’ or ‘white-adjacent’. Those who teach it are mired in resentment and hatred. It is a pedagogy of humiliation and subjugation.
“Neo-Na*is are not thick on the ground in Brooklyn or the Fairfax district of Los Angeles…”
They’re not thick on the ground anywhere except in the fabrications of the Far Left and its mainstream media outriders.
The far left are the new neo-Nartsees.
Sheer cowardice lies at the heart of that excuse.
‘Whether they realise it or not, CRT and its backers appear to be undermining this goal. (Addressing racial divides)’ No, their objective is to increase and perpetuate racial divides, to establish a permanent underclass dependent on ‘champions’ like Kendi to protect them from their ‘oppressors’. It’s what his powerbase is built on, and he means to keep it. The method is to demonise white people, and destroy any ethos or agency in his client group which might lift them out of their plight – responsibility, education, aspiration, self reflection – by classing it as ‘acting white’, therefore ‘evil’. There’s nothing accidental about this.
Oh dear. ‘It’s okay to hate WASPs but please don’t hate *me*’. Hoping that the crocodile will eat *me* last.
‘There is, of course, more work to be done. African-American incomes — as well as those of Pakistanis and West Indians in the UK — have not kept pace. And there are still racial imbalances in imprisonment, confrontations with law enforcement and worse health effects, particularly during the pandemic.’
Of course, it goes without saying that the existence of ‘racial imbalances’ means that society is still not trying hard enough to achieve social justice. It’s amazing that two such well-credentialed writers still refuse to countenance the idea that even in a perfectly fair world racial imbalances could still exist.
edited; as it was a bad comment
Well said David. What many forget is that the conquistadors found allies in the tribes who were suppressed by the Aztec empire. They probably swapped one master for another but at least the weren’t sacrificed alive!
I’d rather live under the conquistadors than the Aztecs. The former allowed you to convert. The latter just killed you.
This article has obviously not been proof read. Someone should do so.
That’s exactly the tone I did not like, the one where it infers that although CRT is Bad, but just maybe where there is smoke there is fire… But then the Jews are very Liberal, traditionally sided with the ethnic minority against the ‘Man’, so it is hard to change tracks so sharply.
What if the “Man” is also Jewish? I think we can all agree that CRT ideology holds that skin color is causative to character. It should be resisted in the same way as DAESH, Aryan Brotherhood etc. As i have pointed out on these and several other opinion driven news media the vast majority of humans are not in the least color prejudiced or racist. So CRT is likely to go the way of the BNP or DAESH etc but probably slower and more harmful because it is backed by “elites”. Note also that these “elites” like their predecessors in the last “master race” have the usual mix of cross dressing, same sex attraction, missing testes, drug abuse etc etc which characterized the NSDAP.
Hi Mike, I suddenly realized the big point of this article:
IT IS NOT Just as it appears. So many posters like me, were complaining on how this anti CRT article still contained a lot of the language which CRT espoused. Then it hit me, these guys Dare Not leave that out! They have to show it is merely one thing they disagree with, but otherwise their Liberal credentials are beyond reproach – OR they will be pilloried to the point of being completely silenced, and maybe jobless.
This all proves even more the huge power and fear of the Marxist Liberal CRT Race industry.
What a strange comment. But the last sentence is interesting although some evidence would have been welcome – I’m aware that Rohm and his coterie were as gay as Christmas trees but it didn’t do them much good. As for missing testes (who could you be thinking of?) does such a misfortune imply a moral failing?
Child labour lasted longer than slave labour in the Western world. And in many places of the world child labour can still be found. Child labour is colourless.
Thanks for a really interesting article.
I have long been struck by thee remarkable similarity between the new atheists who made such a splash in the early millennium and today’s Woke generation, of whom Critical Race Theorists are a particularly ugly subsect. Both of them were fixated at the expense of almost all other considerations with the areas of race, gender and sexuality, and where the New Atheists were concerned that was because they were convenient subjects with which to bash the church and “religion”. Never mind that for example many Black people are deeply religious or that in the UK most Christians support gay marriage – this was never to do with factual accuracy or the truth. I recall at one debate being struck by an audience member who stated that he would be quite happy to be a fundamentalist when opposing racism. The New Atheists didn’t give a damn about other demographics who might be suffering such as the poor, elderly and disabled as the church’s relationship with those groups is more chequered. This lack of interest from New Atheists was in some regards quite sinister such as in their remarkably un-nuanced support for assisted suicide.
If Woke politics is the New Atheists Frankenstein’s monster then it’s fitting that like the monster, Woke politics has now turned on the New Atheists declaring that everything, absolutely everything, can be identified as either black or colonial white and that science and reason falls into the latter category. As for the church, some parts have put on a rather feeble resistance but far too many have been willing to sell out on Jesus’s teachings and simply to plop a cross in front of the Woke lobby’s aggressively secular worldview.
“The solution to the racial crisis in the West requires not separating people by race but by finding common grounds upon which to create a successful, diverse and coherent society.”
For me a mystical worldview in which all human beings irrespective of their individual attributes and ability have innate value would constitute a very good first step. Fundamentalism religious or secular is absolutely not a solution but it’s no coincidence that writers like Kehinde Andrews ignore religion since in its more benign manifestations it might well constitute such a narrative.
The fact that most of the ancient universities in Europe and many of the most prestigious in the USA were founded by Christian bodies is conveniently ignored. The same with education generally, healthcare and other service organizations and the promotion of human rights.
Yes, there’s work to be done. People need to refrain from having children in their teens, outside of wedlock, and have fathers or father-substitutes in the home. Without this, interventions will be fruitless.
“However successful they may be today, it took centuries — including a 365-year exile — for Jews to become full citizens of the British Empire.”
I didn’t understand that.
Jews were banished from England in 1290 and not allowed to return until 1656.
And what might constitute those “common grounds upon which to create a successful, diverse and coherent society”?
Well, what about the music scene back in the 70s, the 80s? No talented black artist or act (ie singer/songwriter or band) would ever have wished their participation in the old singles and albums charts to be anything other than a fanfare of equal opportunities. Friendly rivalry was the spice of life. Surely that high-profile black participation in music-making, serving a largely white market in terms of a record-buying public, pointed to the future: the old pop charts represented a level playing field, a clean start; they were symbolic of the common tastes and interests of everybody. They were also symbolic of a spirit of cooperation and creativity.
Must now in the age of equity old pop chart placings be recalibrated to show the “true” placing in the Top Forty? Such that a black band, back in the day, that was pipped to the number 1 spot by a white band, can claim that they made much more of an impact on white youth in terms of sales than the white band did on black youth, proportionally and all that? And therefore by rights deserve to have the record changed, or corrected, the criteria for chart placings therefore changing in order to swap around the act that reached number 1? Is that the sort of reckoning and revision the woke folk want to indulge in? Like true north, the true number 1 act to be finally revealed, as is right!
Friendly rivalry back in the day was probably a spark in itself for the creation of some really memorable songs. But going down the revisionist route, to achieve equity, would make disappear the microclimate of friendly rivalry — and had that been instituted back in the 60s, say, the dearth of good songs would have quickly become apparent. The cheer and goodwill out there would have evaporated. A brotherhood of man would have been sorely tainted.
This is the best, most balanced, and honest writing on CRT that I’ve read to date, despite the outstanding work of others. This is an approachable piece recommended both for those sympathetic (but not broadly informed) to CRT, but also to opponents who need a little help on how to frame their opposition in less hostile and emotional ways. Highly recommended.
I thought this was great article. Well reasoned and balanced for those new to this and those not.
Absolutely excellent – so fair-minded, truly and deeply reflective, grounded in history and validating genuine SHARED experience, insights and successes. The institutional ‘creep’ that back-handed communism has effected in America has now woken the scared but strong American Giant – perhaps there can be a vitalised recovery. I do hope so. So many great Black Men and Women have shown merit, generosity of spirit (sometimes in extremis), great humour and diverse artistic talent, intellectual honesty and clarity of concerns as they too face the repellent current ‘aleets’ (a = without or minus; leet = a medieval landlord charge!)
All this talk of groups and who’s up and who’s down, you’d think Top Of The Pops was back in force on the airwaves. In fact, with all the goodwill and cheer that was undeniably in the air back in the 80s, one wishes one could just evaporate this mind-numbing nonsense on identity politics that’s taken over the cultural foreground. Americans are drowning in technology and ridiculously tiny screens: they no longer know how to entertain or be entertained.
And did not Jewish immigrants to America in the early 1900s have more freedom to express themselves artistically than say Muslim migrants to the West today?
America: you are not a problem nation, really.
It might have helped if the authors had read more carefully what Critical Race Theory actually is rather than what it can be portrayed as being.
CRT (which is not taught in schools) starts on the theory that racism was baked into the US constitution from the start by the founding fathers. The constitution does not define a US citizen to avoid mentioning the subject of slavery. Jefferson, who is taken as the epitome of the Enlightenment in the US simply could not extend the “all people are created equal” with the slaves who earned him his money and, in the case of Sally Callender provided him with sexual pleasure and unacknowledged chidren. He was not alone in this, John Locke in England had come to the same conclusion a century earlier and could not extend to black slaves the rights he allocates to women and indeed children. Any attempt before the Civil War to tackle slavery foundered on the obstacle provided by the Constitution which mathematically made it impossible to vote slavery away and in 1857 a ruling by the Supreme Court effectively stated that Slaves had no rights and could not obtain them even by moving from a Slave State to a Free-soil state and the law of property trumped the individual rights of the slave.
The Civil War was, at least initially to do with preserving the Union and after the war the Northern States could not face for very long the task of restructuring the former Slave States and left the slaves to their former masters to deal with. And in recent years we have seen the erosion of the 1965 voting right act with obstacles being placed in the way of black people trying to exercise their right to vote and the Supreme Court washing its hand of the matter.
Mohammed Ali ask the question “where is this country called black?” bearing in mind most minorities could be classified as, for example “Italion Americans. Is it because they are deemed not to have some kind of heritage to relate to? Those are the sorts of questions that CRT is aimed at.
It woud help if those down voting a comment that appears to aim to be factual said why.