What we talk about when we talk about "critical race theory," Part I: Background and "liberalism"

 Time for a series in which I combine pedantry with curmudgeonliness.  Now.  You know that nightmare in which you just remembered that you have an exam, and you haven't done any of the readings all semester?  Welcome to your nightmare.  This is that exam, and I am your professor.  Let us dispense with any discussion of the sartorial aspects of such common nightmares, and get right to the exam.

Question The First:  Briefly define critical race theory.  (10 points)

[Your answer here.]

OK, what did you write?  Keep in mind that this is a 10 point question.  If you wrote something like, "Critical race theory is the argument that we should study the complete history of America, including the history of African-Americans, slavery, discrimination, and racial inequality," you get zero points.  You saw the word, "race," in the question, so you made up a bunch of stuff that you thought might fit, or perhaps you parroted what you have been hearing from CRT defenders in the public sphere.  Either way, you didn't do any of the readings I assigned you from Derrick Bell, Kimberle Crenshaw, Patricia Williams, or whoever else I chose to assign you in this dream-course that didn't happen anyway, in this solipsistic question.

You may note that word, "theory."  This should be a clue that "critical race theory" is something beyond historical data that may be omitted from what we often call "whitewashed" history.  As we shall explore in this series, critical race theory is not a "theory," in the scientific sense of the word, "theory," but in a broader sense of the word, "theory," we use it because it is a construct designed to explain a broad array of facts.  Hence, if your answer does not present something like a construct that explains a broad array of facts, you are missing something, and the presence of that word, "theory," should have been the tip-off.

So perhaps you wrote something about "systemic racism."  If so, you might get 2 points, or something like that.  Mercy points, for a concept that is vaguely on topic, but that isn't actually "critical race theory."

Do you see what happens when you don't do the readings?  This is what happens, Larry.

On the other hand, there's some little douche who hid a phone, which I didn't see as I proctored the exam.  He Googled "critical race theory," and if we're only doing this as a 10-point question, all the little shit has to do is transcribe what comes up from the Google-machine that he hid under the table to get those points, little cheater-shit that he is.

His 10-point answer is:  "Critical race theory has five tenets:  the permanence of racism, narratives and counter-narratives, interest convergence, whiteness as property, and the rejection of liberalism."  Two points for each tenet.  Honestly, at 10 points, he doesn't even need to explain what these tenets are, which means he fails the Turing test, but passes the test test.  He doesn't know what he's saying, but he gets a higher score than you did when you tried to bullshit me.  (Cheaters sometimes prosper.  As long as they don't get caught!)

Another student who misses a tenet misses two points, and with a 10-point set-up, that's basically how it works.  Cheater-fuck gets 10 points by transcribing all five, others get multiples of two given their memories, and perhaps someone else finagles another score with a more nuanced answer because there are actually a lot of variations of CRT, and if you give me Professor So-And-So's version, which isn't quite the five-tenet variation, I'm not gonna dock you any points because I'm not actually a total prick.  I just play one on this blog.

The key point is that none of these point-scoring answers are "the history of race & racism," nor "systemic racism."  You get zero points for the former, and maybe a couple of mercy points for the latter.  Why?  Because none of this is actually "critical race theory."

Welcome to "What We Talk About When We Talk About Critical Race Theory."  Also, cliched construction of titles by professor-bloggers who suck.

The Fall semester is comin' up.  If you are a student, hit those books.  If you aren't, hit those books anyway.  Reading is a way of life.  Either way, my basic point is that "critical race theory" is a scholarly body of literature, which is quite different from what is described in the popular dialog about "critical race theory."

And the purpose of this new series is... how the fuck is there a popular dialog about critical race theory in the first place?

Go back and re-read those five components.  Notice that those are not the subjects of discussion when we talk about critical race theory.  Defenders of this thing called "critical race theory" accuse opponents of getting it wrong when they attack critical race theory, but when you see people defend "critical race theory" in the public square, do you see people list, explain and defend those five components?  Generally not.  You are more likely to see defenders-- including the very law professors who live and work within the realm which houses the theory itself-- talk about something else entirely.  They are more likely to talk about the history of racism.  Which... is not critical race theory.  They are more likely to explain "systemic racism."  Which... is not critical race theory.

Why?

Many don't actually know what the components of critical race theory are, or don't understand what they mean.  Others are intentionally obfuscating, because once you understand what these components are, they are kinda crazy.  I keep telling you that critical race theory is a conspiracy theory.

It is.

But more than that, it is an attack on many of the very people who defend it most vigorously in the public sphere.  (Wait, did I say "square" earlier?  Now I'm saying "sphere."  I should make up my mind.)

So we have a puzzle.  Critical race theory is an academic body of literature, either unread or misunderstood by many of those who advocate it.  How did it become mainstream?  In part, when we talk about "critical race theory," we are generally talking about something other than the body of literature that began in law journals, fundamentally as an attack on "liberalism."

By that term, "liberalism," I refer both to the classical tradition of liberalism, and the modern, American definition, where we describe the political spectrum as a left-right spectrum with "conservative" on the right, and "liberal," on the left.  Critical race theory rejects both the classical liberal tradition, and our modern spectrum.  It is not a theory that is precisely orthogonal to the spectrum, but rather, a philosophy that is so ideologically extreme as to view anyone who is on the left as fundamentally part of the problem by virtue of accepting the spectrum itself.  It is a view of the world that demands an overthrow of the spectrum itself, and the system itself.  So if you have sort of been a mainstream liberal in the LBJ/Great Society/MLK tradition, critical race theory says that you are the problem because you accept America, Western liberal democracy, and all that.  Critical race theory says that all of that needs to be scrapped.  Remember that tenet-- rejection of liberalism?  Yeah, we're goin' there.  It's way out there.  CRT is an ideology that is outside of the American tradition, which demands an overthrow of the American ideological tradition.

Words like, "Marxist," and "communist," have been bandied about as political weapons for decades, but Derrick Bell-- the founder of critical race theory-- really did begin with a fundamentally Marxist foundation, except that his focus was race rather than class, and just as true Marxists reject the liberal-conservative spectrum, so did Bell.  So do other critical race theorists.  And it is not orthogonality that leads to their rejection, so much as extremism.  Marxists are so far to the left as to see the American left-right spectrum as just a con.  False consciousness.  A way of keeping the workers from seeing their common interest in tearing down the whole, fucking system.  That's how critical race theorists see the left-right spectrum, except that for them, it's race rather than class.

General Milley got attention for saying that he reads Marxist and fascist literature to understand, not because he sympathizes, in order to explain his willingness to read CRT, and... yeah.  Now follow that through.  CRT is an extremist ideology, closely connected to Marx, derived from Marxist thinking by Derrick Bell, which views the entire American system as unfixable and unsalvageable (the permanence of racism), and demands a complete tear-down.

So how did this go mainstream?  And how did the followers of Bell convince liberals to advocate an ideology that calls them the enemy?

This is all one, big, "what the fuck?"

Let's dig in.

In order to do this properly, we need to have some context.  A lot of this series will focus on the CRT critique of liberalism, Bell and others' rejection of it, and the paradox of the American left's embrace of those who call them somewhere between dupes and the enemy.

So let's talk about liberalism.  I've done this before, but yeah, we gotta do this again.

Alas, the word, "liberalism," has been bogged down not only by historical changes and geographic differences, but by hacks in academia who refuse to read beyond their own fields, or even acknowledge the validity of other fields.  The word, "liberal," means something different in modern American politics from what it meant in the past, and it does not mean the same thing here as in Britain or Europe.  Self-righteously ignorant douches who study the politics of Europe or the UK, and refuse to study the politics of the US because that would sully their purity, or something, then assert, with all the upturned pinky-ness of aristocratic fucks who don't actually read, that the only true definition of liberalism is the UK/Europe definition.

And every peer-reviewed book/journal in my field is objectively wrong, all speeches by everyone involved in politics here is wrong, wrong, wrong, and fuck these people.  Unfortunately, I have to tolerate these assholes because some of them have tenure.  I then have to correct their mistakes by explaining to students how the meaning of "liberalism" has changed over time in the US.  I read widely.  I don't understand why they can't.

I don't like that words change over time.  If I could stop these changes from happening, I would.  Decades after the fact, though, if I use the word, "liberal," according to the UK definition (which is closer to the classical definition) while discussing American politics, I will create misunderstandings.

So, to the various professors who study European and UK shit, and refuse to learn anything about America, once again, either read a book or fuck off.  Y'all are supposed to like reading.

Once more, with feeling.

Liberalism.  Root word:  liberty.  An ideology based on liberty.  What we now call classical liberalism is an ideology that traces its roots to philosophers like John Locke, really through John Stuart Mill.  It isn't a philosophy of life, so much as a philosophy of the proper role of government.  What should the government be allowed to do?  Do we begin with the premise that the government is allowed to tell you what to do, or that it is not allowed to tell you what to do?  If we begin with the premise that the government is not allowed to tell you what to do, and that the telling requires justification, then you can, generally speaking, live your life without infringement from the government.  It is a reversal of the base assumption.  Under a monarchy where the monarch is the presumed chosen of god, and rules by divine right, the monarch is presumed to have the right to tell you what to do.  Liberalism is the philosophy that flips that around.  It reverses the base assumption and says that you determine your own life.  An infringement requires justification.

Under social contract theory (not a scientific theory, but a political philosophy), you enter into an implied social contract with the government wherein you give up certain limited rights, in exchange for things like basic protection, and for someone like Locke, you have the right to say that the contract has been broken.  Not so, in a Hobbesian leviathan-state.  That's why we dig Locke more than Hobbes.  Then you get to Mill, and as a student of Bentham's philosophy of utilitarianism, he set out some criteria for infringement.  Essentially, the principle of maximizing happiness, and all of this is predicated on the notion that the default is that the government cannot infringe unless criteria are met.  You are free unless...

Liberalism, in its classical form.  Small government.  Not conservatism, but closer to libertarianism.

In the 20th Century, though, the word began to change in America.  In 1929, those bitcoin SPAC-ulators and associated other... oh, wait.  They weren't around yet.  Never mind.  Hey, is it me, or is this market lookin' a bit high?  Anyway, the market, and then the economy all went to shit.  Herbert Hoover, as it turned out, did not know much about cleaning it up.  Enter Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and a wide range of wildly experimental policies to say, "hey, what if we tried X?"  Keynsian economics are relatively well-established now, but they are established now, having been made up on the fly in response to the Great Depression.  Basically, FDR expanded federal spending, and expanded the welfare state, while using the word, "liberal."

Suddenly, "liberal," got attached to big government, which requires heavy taxation, which is infringement.  Huh?

This still confuses people across the pond, and even some blinkered professors on this side of the pond, but here's what happened.  Your key reference is Irving Isaiah Berlin.  No songs, sorry.  He described two concepts of liberty:  positive liberty and negative liberty.

Negative liberty is freedom from government intervention.  Classical liberty.

However, in order to explain positive liberty, consider the following canonical aphorism.  Everyone is equally free to sleep under a bridge.  Only a rich person is free to sleep in a posh hotel.  To take advantage of the freedom to sleep in the posh hotel requires money.

Positive liberty requires the resources to take advantage of the lack of government intervention stopping you from doing X.  In the hotel example, we don't make a big deal of it.  In the case of healthcare...

When FDR and the Democratic Party used the term, "liberalism," they used the term in a way that took a positive conception of liberty, so over the course of the mid-to-late 20th Century, liberalism in American politics came to refer to an ideology based on positive liberty.

See?  The word makes sense now.  Think like a linguist.  Multidisciplinary studies help.

If I say, "Miles Davis is the shit," am I complimenting him, or insulting him?  If you look at the word, "shit," you would think I am insulting him, but if you trace out the language, and understand common usage, you understand that I am praising him.  In fact, Miles Davis is among the greatest artistic geniuses in human history.  He is... the shit.

Anyway, FDR didn't touch civil rights, because the "New Deal Coalition" combined white Southerners and black Northerners.  (Black Southerners not being allowed to vote...)  That coalition doesn't work if you talk about civil rights.

What happened then?  Lyndon Johnson.  From the Civil War on, the South had been solidly Dem, and segregationist, while Northern Dems moved towards civil rights, creating a party rift that FDR just basically papered over.  Lyndon Johnson moved the Dems solidly over to civil rights.  This had a lot of consequences, including Goldwater, and the real beginning of the South's Republican shift.  There's a lot of history here, but the important thing for our purposes was what this meant for the definition of American liberalism.  It linked civil rights with FDR-style economics.  Or at least, it linked civil rights in the style of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act with FDR-style economics under the Great Society.

This established the meaning of American "liberalism," refinements aside, from Johnson through Barack Obama.  The Democratic Party is in a weird state right now, but it was during this period that Derrick Bell came along.  Two definitions of liberalism.  Classical liberalism in the tradition of people like Locke through Mill, and 20th Century liberalism as defined, really, by Johnson.

In order to understand Bell, you have to understand his disaffection.  There are a lot of ways to interpret "history."  One damned thing after another...  The arc of history bending towards justice.  Bell took the perspective of a failed promise.  He went to law school as the civil rights movement was seeing its successes, and he was excited.

But what he observed, empirically, was that wealth gaps persisted, Nixon starts the "war on drugs," and fuck yes, that was about race, this gets you to all sorts of bad shit with, shall we say, racial discrepancies, and basically, anyone looking at 1964 and 1965 with an overly optimistic view of race was in for a rude awakening.

And here's the thing about rude awakenings.  Sometimes, they come with a backlash.  Critical race theory was Bell's backlash to the promise that didn't materialize.

Why didn't all of that federal legislation, 'n stuff, set everything right?

Remember, I said that "critical race theory" is not "the history of racism."  It is a broad explanation for the swath of American history, and really, America itself.  It is something like an attempt at a unified field theory for America, to borrow the language of physics, except that it is not actually a scientific theory, in that it resists the development of falsifiable hypotheses (it is postmodern).

Critical race theory says that the reason none of that stuff "worked" is, basically, America exists for a purpose:  to establish and maintain a racial hierarchy, and this is baked into everything, so no legislation, no Supreme Court ruling, will do jack shit to address that racial hierarchy.  It is intrinsic to America.  (Remember Nikole Hannah-Jones and her ahistorical lunacy that the Revolutionary War was fought to preserve slavery from rising abolitionism in England?  That came from CRT mentality.)

So all that lefty stuff about civil rights?  Like trying to build on quicksand.  And either they didn't realize what they were doing, or they were just participating in Kabuki theater.  Either way, fuck 'em.

Critical race theory is a backlash against the perceived failures of the civil rights movement, arguing that civil rights movements that operate within the classical or modern liberal traditions cannot work because they accept the American tradition, which is built, fundamentally, on a racial hierarchy.

Which means, if you're a liberal, you're a dupe at best.

This is the background.  This is the origin of CRT.  We need to dig in here, because it should be obvious now, if you haven't actually read any CRT, that it is not merely "the history of racial inequality," or anything like that.  There is way more going on here.  Let's see where this series takes us.  I have some ideas.

I think Part II will elaborate on the components of CRT itself, and their problematic natures.  This is a mess, and it matters.  Why?  Because schools matter.  Hi!  I'm an educator.  (Nominally.)

Music.  The performer here goes by the stage name, "Shawn Persinger is Prester John."  Sure.  OK.  Why not?  Anyway, "Pre-History," from Peerless.