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Anti-racism

By Dara Macdonald - posted Thursday, 5 August 2021


Critical race theory (CRT) is defined by encyclopaedia Britannica as an:

...intellectual movement and loosely organized framework of legal analysis based on the premise that race is not a natural, biologically grounded feature of physically distinct subgroups of human beings but a socially constructed (culturally invented) category that is used to oppress and exploit people of colour. Critical race theorists hold that the law and legal institutions in the United States are inherently racist insofar as they function to create and maintain social, economic, and political inequalities between whites and nonwhites, especially African Americans.

As an intellectual movement (or doctrine) it was first organised in 1989, but its roots extend back to the 1960s and '70s with its precursor Critical Legal Studies (CLS) which looked at how institutions and law favoured those with privilege. It took aim at the idea of equality before the law as an ideal as:

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emphasis on the equitable treatment under the law of all races ("colour blindness") rendered it capable of recognizing only the most overt and obvious racist practices, not those that were relatively indirect, subtle, or systemic.

This suspicion of equality before the law or colour-blindness is a common thread that made its way to the CRT of today. Many of those who preach the doctrine of CRT, both popular and scholarly, are constantly on the hunt for minor forms of racism ('microaggressions') or institutions that produce unequal racial outcomes regardless of diversity policies or affirmative action ('systemic racism').

This constant search for racism is why Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay subtitles the chapter on CRT as "Ending Racism by Seeing It Everywhere."

John McWorter has drawns the link between CRT and a religious ideology saying that:

Critical Race Theory tells you that everything is about hierarchy, power, their abuses, and how to not be Caucasian in America is to be akin to the captive oarsman slave straining belowdecks in chains.

It is a fragile, performative ideology, which goes beyond the passages above to explicitly reject linear reasoning, traditional legal theorizing, and even Enlightenment rationalism. We are to favor an idea that an oppressed race's "story" constitutes truth, in an overarching sense, apart from mere matters of empirical or individual detail.

The purveyors, particularly of the popular variety (e.g. Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi) are all entirely US-centric - yet their ideas are spruiked as universal truths. Another accurate shorthand descriptor of CRT would be "ending ideas about racial supremacy by exporting US racial ideas to every corner of the planet."

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CRT has become the doctrine most favoured by big corporations who pay thousands of dollars an hour to lecture workers on how not to be racist - or rather "How to be an Anti-Racist?"

The doctrine of CRT has left the scholastic realm of the university and become a crowd-pleaser in the halls of power with travelling preachers (Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi et al) and big beneficiaries financing its proselytisation. But this isn't what brought it to the masses, for that an institution was needed, enter Black Lives Matter (BLM).

Black Lives Matter, The Church of Anti-Racism

Black Lives Matter (BLM) is more than merely a slogan to unite around it is a full-blown organisation that creates a religious movement around the cause of anti-racism by sanctifying the doctrine of CRT.

BLM looks like a religion to the unfamiliar observer. A glance at their website and you will see they have saints that sacrificed their lives (Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, Trayvon Martin, Mike Brown, George Floyd etc), congregations (it boasts 40 chapters around the world), holy days, such as Juneteenth (the celebration of the end of slavery in the US), and even an art movement to idolise their heroes, much like the iconography or frescos sponsored in the middle ages.

There is no problem with fighting to end racism, celebrating the end of slavery, or commemorating unjust deaths. The problem with BLM is all this rests on a hard ideology, that of the doctrine of CRT, and unless someone swallows the whole lot, they are not anti-racist. Every criticism of BLM is derided as 'white supremacy. The basis of this is CRT as it expressly says that "white supremacy is at the root of systemic racism that still thrives today."

BLM leaves no room for people, like Coleman Hughes, who oppose reparations (something BLM demands) or those "who don't share a vision that is radical and intersectional."

Whilst to the untrained eye this looks like a political movement, particularly as many of their demands are political, this is a by-product of an extremely constrained vision of the world "where Black lives are systematically and intentionally targeted for demise." If the whole of society is white supremacist and cops everywhere are just waiting to gun down innocent people, then the most radical political intervention is warranted. Even more important to the religious vision of BLM is that the outer world bends to their extremely unconstrained vision of justice.

BLM and the Unconstrained Vision of Justice

The liberal view of justice takes its job very seriously and begins with an assumption of innocence. It believes firmly in the adage that it is better for 10 guilty people to go free than have one innocent deprived of their liberty. It doesn't attribute collective guilt. There is no such thing as group justice, only individual justice. It is a constrained vision of justice that hems in the judiciary either by precedent or law. There is no room for creativity for that would mean going beyond the role and power prescribed to a judge. They only interpret the rules to an individual circumstance, not make them up.

Much of the political demands of BLM are justice orientated. Their vision of justice is unconstrained, unlike the constrained system and ideals of justice that historically stand in the anglosphere. It presumes guilt, ascribes group punishment, and celebrates judicial activism if the result is desirable.

The narrative that police "systematically and intentionally" kill Black people leads to a presumption that when a cop shoots a black person, it is always the cop in the wrong. There is a presumption of guilt against the police officer in all of these cases. But most of the cases that involve police altercations are rarely this black and white (no pun intended).

The result of this hard narrative of white cop victimiser and black person victim is that acquittals of the police officer that was involved in altercations (such as the case of Trayvon Martin) are taken as further proof that the system is irredeemably racist, not that the narrative of systemically racist cops is wrong.

Group guilt rears its head in several ways but most significantly in the arguments about reparations that are had in the US. The idea that all white people must pay all black people to make up for slavery makes people guilty for what their ancestors did, a wholely illiberal idea. Even more so, it denies the years of mixing and immigration since slavery ended. Not every person with black skin is a victim of slavery. In fact, there is modern slavery happening in many countries around the world, a first-generation immigrant could even be a perpetrator - I know an extreme example.

Neither is every white person a historical slave trader. Where do you think the term "slav" came from?

BLM commemorates court cases such as Brown v Board of Education, at the same time as saying that this historical decision didn't go far enough. There is a clear taste for an expansive role of the judiciary to intervene in decisions involving race relations (despite the Supreme Court's terrible track record such as the Dred Scott case). The effect of this expansive conception of justice and the court is that BLM campaigns against Republican appointees, even ones like Amy Coney Barrett that have a track record of curbing police powers.

BLM creates a religious movement out of CRT doctrine; the result is a constrained religious vision that sees everything - particularly in the US - as irredeemably racist. This is a kind of original sin. The demands that came from this vision of an unconstrained justice system that offers redemption from the original sin.

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This article was first published on The Conservative Vagabond



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About the Author

Dara Macdonald writes at The Conservative Vagabond.

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