Critical Race Theory is Racist Against Everyone!

This is being made into a few short videos. Part 1 is available exclusively on JoshWhoTV. Part 2 is in progress.

See the first in this series about CRT in written form here and video form here.

See the second in this series in written form and in video form.

INTRO

Critical race theory is racist against pretty much everyone either directly or indirectly as we shall see for ourselves with some examples from the book Critical Race Theory - an Introduction by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic.¹ Both hold high positions in legal academia.² The former is “one of the founders of critical race theory”³ and the later, they make a point in telling us, is white.⁴ In the forward, Angela Harris writes that Delgado is one of the “major intellectual figures”.⁵

CRT IS RACIST AGAINST BLACK & BROWN PEOPLE

In a discussion regarding what they call “minorities” (“black” and “brown” people only), the authors indulge in the narrative that “minorities” are less capable of successfully applying for and acquiring photo ID.⁶

Elsewhere in the book⁷ they write…

…many things young black and Latino men are prone to do, such as congregating on street corners, cruising in low-riders cars, or scrawling graffiti in public places, are energetically policed, sometimes under new ordinances that penalize belonging to a gang or associating with a known gang member.

In support of this view, they cite a court case with the statement…

Gang members . . . congregate on lawns, on sidewalks, and in front of apartment complexes at all hours of the day and night. They display a casual contempt for notions of law, order, and decency - openly drinking, smoking dope, sniffing toluene, and even snorting cocaine laid out in neat lines on the hoods of resident’s cars. The people who live in Rocksprings are subjected to loud talk, loud music, vulgarity, profanity, brutality, fist-fights and the sound of gunfire echoing in the streets. . . . Area residents have had their garages used as urinals; their homes commandeered as escape routes; their walls, fences, garage doors, sidewalks, and even their vehicles turned into a sullen canvas of gang graffiti.

. . . The people of this community are prisoners in their own homes.⁸

They present this as being representative of “minorities”. Yet, backing up a page⁹, we can see them complain about…

…ordinary people who avoid blacks or Latinos because they believe they are more likely than whites to be perpetrators of crime or members of vicious gangs.

That hardly seems fair or, well, sane. It does seem to indulge in hypocrisy, does it not?

CRT IS “ANTI-SEMITIC AND ANTI-ASIAN”

On pages 89-90 of the 1st edition and on pages 103, 104 and 111 of the 3rd edition they express their view that if members of some groups (Jews and Asians are given as examples) tend to be more successful than members of other groups it’s because they go along with a “rigged” system that is “biased against minorities”. One may fairly ask - aren’t Jews and Asians minorities in America?¹⁰ Not according to these authors.

At any rate, they acknowledge that “therefore, CRT’s critique of merit is implicitly anti-Semitic and anti-Asian.”¹¹ Ah. Well, how nice of them to include other peoples of the Middle East in that broader stroke of intolerance.

MUSLIMS

On pages 78-79 and 99 they write as if Muslims are a racial group. Is that racist or just stupid?

ESSENTIAL DIVISION

In the introduction they make a point of shunting off to a separate racial category their “fellow travelers and writers who are white”¹² including co-author Jean Stefancic for no other reason apparent than to racially divide themselves and to denigrate those among them that are of a particular race. But race is just a social construstion¹³, mind you - race is just something the white race invented.

In their section on “critical white studies” they write that white people…

…do not believe that they think and reason from a white viewpoint but from a universally valid one - “the truth” - what everyone knows.¹⁴

Silly me. Here I was thinking that white people, like other people, can have all sorts of views - universally valid views, uniquely insane views and many others between and besides these. I am glad I have Delgado and Stefancic to tell me that white people have a white viewpoint and not a universally valid one.

This, according to this book, is an “essentialist” view: the view that people of different groups (such as different skin colors) are essentially different, not just superficially different. But don’t forget that race is just a social construction the white race invented. At any rate, this view that people of different skin colors are irreconcilably different is sometimes called the “(unique) voice-of-color thesis” to which we will return later.

There are endless variations of the singular human species. There isn’t a Caucasoid species, a Mongoloid species, a Negroid species, and a few others. In other words, there isn’t a “white race”, a “black race”, a “Mongol race” and so on. We’re all the human race, the human species, Homo sapiens. But to deny that there are variations in skin tone, hair texture and so on is insulting to the intelligence.

You can say that there are more than just 6 colors, more than just red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple because there are endless colors between these few. But to say that there’s no such thing as colors would be absurd. At any rate, if something doesn’t exist it can’t invent itself or anything else. At any rate, Europeans did not invent skin tone or invent noticing skin tones. Also, people of light skin tone are not a different species than other humans. But in critical race theory, there is the view that there are just a few different humans - the “white race”, “Jews” and so on - and that they are different in their essence.

In this section they also state implicitly that whites are guilty of being white.¹⁵ That is, they are guilty for slavery because other white people engaged in slavery.

They also indulge in the racial stereotype that white people are not “hip, cool, and musical” like people of “color”. ¹⁶

In this spirit of intolerance and division they invoke philosopher Jean-François Lyotard’s concept of differends which they characterize as, for example, “when a concept such as justice acquires conflicting meanings for two groups.”¹⁷ Notice that this is necessarily built on the unfounded assumption that people of certain groups (skin colors, sexes) think in accordance with their group.

It is one thing to say that people who choose to adhere to a certain political party agree with other members of that party on certain political issues but it is an other thing to say that people born with a certain skin color and/or sex and so on generally agree with each other. While we’re at it, let us remind ourselves that whether or not different groups (or individuals) agree it is an objective fact that 2 + 2 = 4 and that people alive today are not guilty for what happened before they were born, regardless of skin color. They write, furthermore…

For example, when contemporary Euro-Americans resist even discussing reparations for blacks on the grounds that a black person living today has never been a slave and so lacks standing nor has any white person alive today been a slaveholder, the black person who wishes to discuss these questions and is shunted aside suffers the differend.¹⁸

Reading this in full context the reader sees that the authors never offer a counter argument to the one described. They claim that on the one hand there is the white viewpoint (which, they say, is the view that people are not guilty for what other people of the same skin color have done generations ago) and that on the other hand there is the unfair point of view (the non-white viewpoint according to these authors).

I resemble that remark. But I can’t decide if their characterization of the fair viewpoint as the white viewpoint is racist against whites, non-whites or everyone at once.

CATCH-22

On page 22 they set the trap for a catch-22 (coincidentally, presumably, and not in jest)…

What is true of the subordination of minorities is also true for its relief: civil rights gains for communities of color coincide with the dictates of white self-interest. Little happens out of altruism alone.¹⁹

They then state that this is the position that founding CRT figure Derrick Bell took in a “classic article for Harvard Law Review”²⁰. So if you’re white you’re racist if you’re for or against civil rights. In other words, if you’re white, you’re racist (though race is just a social construction of the white race).

Speaking of hypocrisy, on page 104 (of the 3rd edition) they write…

Recently, the right wing has mounted a furious attack on civil rights and critical race theory…

On the very next page²¹, in describing the “activist critique” of critical race theory, they acknowledge that CRT is…

…disdainful of existing civil rights statutes and remedies…

They also set up CRT in opposition to civil rights on page 3 (of the 1st and 3rd editions).

RACISM IN THE HEART OF CRITICAL RACE THEORY

One could argue that these are just displays of the author’s own racism and not central features of CRT. Let us turn, then, to the central features of CRT starting with their opposition to “colorblindness”. CRT’s opposition to colorblindness is typically presented as a necessary remedy to a racist system that favors whites (and Jews and Asians). However, I have yet to see any of these proponents of CRT make any attempt whatsoever to demonstrate and measure this systemic racism and/or show how the policies they support (such as affirmative action and diversity quotas) can (or would) remedy this systemic racism.

See, for example, pages 8 and pages 26 to 28 (of the 3rd edition) where they attack the liberal positions of “color blindness and neutral principles of constitutional law”²² and the liberal belief in “equality, especially equal treatment for all persons regardless of their different histories or current situations.”²³ CRT tends to attack liberalism from the far left, by the way. Later in the book (page 91 in the 3rd edition) they make it clearer than they did in that last passage that they think white people are guilty of being white: that they are, for example, guilty for what other white people have done in the past but which they have never done themselves because they are white.

According to these authors, the first central feature of CRT is the position that society is racist.²⁴ They make it clear throughout the book that they characterize this racist society as white and racist in favor of whites (who don’t actually exist because there’s no such thing as race as they argue on page 9; race is just something racist white people invented).

The say that the second central feature of CRT is the position that whites are racist because racism serves them in a material way (if they are successful) and/or mentally (if they are poor).²⁵

They describe something called the “(unique) voice-of-color thesis” as being a central feature of CRT. This “thesis” (which is not actually a thesis any more than CRT is a theory) holds that being of “minority status” affords a person “a presumed competence to speak about race and racism.”²⁶

These examples of intelligence-insulting racism from CRT justify your mocking laughter at the following display of clownish, bungling, bafoonerific, acrobatic, self-duping, sleight-of-mind denial of their own racism. In the book Words That Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, and the First Amendment, the authors (who include Richard Delgado, one of the authors of the book we have been quoting from throughout this piece) write about the importance of pushing back against that which is racist while claiming to be anti-racist.²⁷

If only they had a mirror.

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SOURCES

Cineas, Fabiola “What the hysteria over critical race theory is really all about” Vox, June 24, 2021

Delgado, Richard & Jean Stefancic. Critical Race Theory - An Introduction (3rd Edition), New York University Press, 2017

University of Oregon Libraries Critical Race Theory: A Selected Bibliography, April 2007 http://libweb.uoregon.edu/reference/conversations.html

Video clips used in part 2 of the video version of this piece is from…

Jordan B Peterson “Political correctness: a force for good? A Munk Debate” Youtube, May 20, 2018 (clip starts at 26:12)

RT “'Kids brainwashed to see color, not character' | Black dad slams critical race theory” Youtube, June 8, 2021

TheDC Shorts “Mom Goes Nuclear On School Board Over Critical Race Theory” Youtube, June 7, 2021

TheDC Shorts “'Leftish Agenda In Class': 15-Year-Old High School Student Exposes Critical Race Theory In Speech” Youtube, June 17, 2021

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NOTES

1. Critical Race Theory - An Introduction by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic. There have been 3 editions. I use both the 1st edition of the book (New York University Press, 2001) in pdf and the 3rd edition in print form (New York University Press, 2017).

2. On page 199 of the 3rd edition of their book Critical Race Theory - An Introduction (3rd edition) Delgado and Stefancic write about themselves…

Richard Delgado is the John J. Sparkman Chair of Law at the University of Alabama and one of the founders of critical race theory. His books include The Latino/a Condition: A Critical Reader (coedited with Jean Stefancic; NYU Press) and The Rodrigo Chronicles (NYU Press).

Jean Stefancic is professor and Clement Research Affiliate at the University of Alabama School of Law. Her books include No Mercy: How Conservative Think Tanks and Foundations Changed America’s Social Agenda. She and Delgado edited Critical Race Theory: The Cutting Edge.

3. Page 199, Critical Race Theory - An Introduction by Delgado and Stefancic (3rd Edition). In the 1st edition, the section about the authors is found on page 167, but this was printed many years earlier.

4. “The movement counts a number of fellow writers who are white, notably…Jean Stefancic…” - page 7, Critical Race Theory - An Introduction by Delgado and Stefancic (3rd Edition).

5. Page xix of the 1st edition, page xv of the 3rd edition.

6. Page 140, Critical Race Theory - An Introduction by Delgado and Stefancic (3rd Edition).

7. Pages 120 through 122, Critical Race Theory - An Introduction by Delgado and Stefancic (3rd Edition). In the 1st edition, this passage is found on pages 113-114.

8. Pages 120 through 122, Critical Race Theory - An Introduction by Delgado and Stefancic (3rd Edition).

9. Page 121, Critical Race Theory - An Introduction by Delgado and Stefancic (3rd Edition). In the 1st edition, this passage is found on page 114.

10. On pages 103 of the 3rd edition, they address a criticism of CRT by authors Daniel Farber and Suzanne Sherry (note: the term “crits” in the following passage is short for critical race theorists);

For their part, Farber and Sherry accused critical race theorists of hiding behind personal stories and narratives to advance their points of view, as well as lacking respect for traditional notions of truth and merit. Citing the examples of Jews and Asians - two minority groups that have achieved high levels of success by conventional standards - they argued against the idea that the game is rigged against minorities. If conventional tests and standards are unfair and biased against minorities, as the crits assert, how can one account for the success of these two groups? Did they cheat or take unfair advantage? Are they unimaginative mimics and drones? All possible explanations are implausible. Therefore, CRT’s critique of merit is implicitly anti-Semitic and anti-Asian.

The authors never offer a valid rebuttal to this valid criticism of CRT.

On page 111 they write;

If Group A (say, Jews) is successful and Group B (say, blacks) is not, and Group B charged that the system is rigged, is that an implied criticism of Group A, because it implies that they took advantage of an unfair system to get ahead?

Keep in mind, also, that CRT argues that the system is a white system and it is racist. Hence, those who succeed are participating in that racist white system and helping to oppress others and that CRT acknowledges that Jews and Asians have a higher tendency to succeed in this system. Therefore, they are, in fact, by definition, claiming that Jews and Asians are racist which is itself a racist claim.

The only defense offered by this book is offered on page 104;

As the crits saw it, Farber and Sherry confused criticism of a standard with criticism of individuals who performed well under that standard. Judge Richard Posner and the New Republic writer Jeffrey Rosen also took issue with the crits along predictable lines.

On pages 89-90 of the 1st edition of Critical Race Theory - An Introduction, Delgado and Stefancic they write more-or-less the same thing as they did in the 3rd edition about this criticism. However, in this edition they offer the following which they did not include in the 3rd edition;

Farber and Sherry’s broadside struck others as ahistorical: Jews and some Asians may have had long histories and experiences with racism, but those histories and experiences may not have been the same ones other groups of color such as Indians or blacks suffered.

In case the following doesn’t go without saying for some, let me explain that if this doesn’t fit the standards of what is racist of the reader, that’s beside the point. The point is that by their standards they are racist. That they try to deny this demonstrates that they have double standards.

11. Page 103, Critical Race Theory - An Introduction by Delgado and Stefancic (3rd Edition), page 90 in the 1st edition.

12. Page 7, Critical Race Theory - An Introduction by Delgado and Stefancic (3rd Edition)…

This movement counts a number of fellow travelers and writers who are white, notably Andre’ Cummings, Nancy Levit, Tom Riss, Jean Stefancic, and Stephanie Wildman. (See also the discussion of critical white studies in chapter 5.)

In the 1st edition they divide up the “principle figures” of CRT by ethnic group.

13. Pages 9, 21 & 184, Critical Race Theory - An Introduction by Delgado and Stefancic (3rd Edition).

14. Pages 91 & 92, Critical Race Theory - An Introduction by Delgado and Stefancic (3rd Edition). In the 1st edition, this passage is found on page 80.

15. Page 91, Critical Race Theory - An Introduction by Delgado and Stefancic (3rd Edition). In the 1st edition, this passage is found on page 44.

16. Page 163, Critical Race Theory - An Introduction by Delgado and Stefancic (3rd Edition).

17. Page 51, Critical Race Theory - An Introduction by Delgado and Stefancic (3rd Edition), page 44 of the 1st Edition.

18. Page 52, Critical Race Theory - An Introduction by Delgado and Stefancic (3rd Edition), page 44 of the 1st edition.

19. Page 22, Critical Race Theory - An Introduction by Delgado and Stefancic (3rd Edition), page 18 of the 1st edition.

20. Page 18 in the 1st edition, page 22 in the 3rd.

21. Page 105 in the 3rd edition, page 93 of the 1st edition.

22. Page 21, Critical Race Theory - An Introduction by Delgado and Stefancic, 1st edition.

23. Pages 21, Critical Race Theory - An Introduction by Delgado and Stefancic, 1st edition.

24. Pages 8 through 11, Critical Race Theory - An Introduction by Delgado and Stefancic (3rd Edition), page 7 in the 1st edition.

25. Page 7 of the 1st edition, page 9 of the 3rd.

26. Page 9 of the 1st edition, page 11 of the 3rd.

27. This is according to Fabiola Cineas in her piece; What the hysteria over critical race theory is really all about for Vox.