The (real) problem(s) with critical race theory

[image: anti-racism demonstration in Copenhagen, Denmark, 2015, Wikimedia]

Critical Race Theory (CRT) is all the rage these days. Meaning, literally, that it enrages people. Or at least, pundits and politicians on the extreme right of the political spectrum. Predictably, it also serves as a rallying cry for people on the extreme left of that same spectrum. The fact is, though, that it is a good bet that most of these people — on both sides — have no idea what CRT actually is. Or why it may, in fact, be objectionable. So let’s take a look.

CRT is a theory, meaning a philosophical, political, and legal account of a certain aspect of reality (hence the “T” in CRT). The aspect of reality picked out by the theory is racism (hence the “R”), though modern CRT is cross-sectional, meaning that it also looks at other kinds of systemic discrimination, including for instance sexism and ableism. So far, nothing unusual or objectionable, I should think. Philosophy, political science, and law studies have produced several theories having to do with racism and structural discrimination, critical race theory being one among several. The controversial bit concerns the “C” in CRT: Critical. Critical of what, and in what way?

To understand this we need to take a couple of step backs and talk about the more general Critical Theory (CT), which is the broader umbrella within which CRT eventually was articulated. CT originated with the Frankfurt School, a group of scholars including Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, Antonio Gramsci, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse. The goal of CT was to develop a social philosophy capable of reflecting on, and critiquing, otherwise invisible power structures. One (debatable, as we shall see below) assumption of CT is that it is these power structures, not individual psychological factors, that are chiefly responsible for social problems such as racism.

The school developed in Germany in the 1930s, under the influence of Marx and Freud. Which is a problem, actually, since both Marxism and Freudianism can be legitimately criticized as intellectual endeavors, and Freudianism has even been accused of being pseudoscientific. You don’t want to build an entire school of thought on a highly debatable set of ideas about class relations and on discarded notions about human psychology.

However, CT underwent a second generation renewal spearheaded by Jürgen Habermas. Habermas actually turned away CT from its (questionable) roots in German idealism, and gave it a decidedly American pragmatic spin. In the 1960s, Habermas attempted to articulate a version of CT that somehow positioned it outside both the natural sciences and the humanities. Habermas was worried (and I agree, for what is worth) that modernity’s emphasis on instrumental rationality is a dangerous departure from Enlightenment ideals and paves the way for new forms of enslavement.

Speaking of the Enlightenment, the “C” in CT is derived from the work of one of the most influential modern philosophers, Immanuel Kant, who famously wrote a Critique of Pure Reason. By “critique” Kant meant the search for the limits of any given system of knowledge, and his approach has accordingly been used to dismantle dogmatic thinking in, for instance, theology and metaphysics. Kant’s approach fits well with the Enlightenment critique and rejection of superstition, not to mention of authority based on irrationality, such as that of the Catholic Church. The “C” in both CT and CRT is also associated with Marx’s philosophical activism, as in the 11th section of his famous Theses on Feuerbach, where he wrote: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.”

This complex background is important to keep in mind when talking about critical race theory, because CRT has retained some of the original impetus of CT, but has also, for instance, explicitly rejected Enlightenment ideals.

One more thing before we finally get to CRT. Postmodernism and social constructionism too are associated with critical theory, but are in opposition to the kind of CT that I have described so far. The latter was concerned with the sort of forms of authority, and associated injustices, that characterized the rise of industrial and corporate capitalism. Postmodernism, by contrast, for instance in authors like Michel Foucault, rejects the very possibility of that sort of CT, because it maintains that researchers cannot even objectively describe a social order, whatever people may mean by “social order.” This has resulted in a focus of postmodernists on local socio-political phenomena and away from Enlightenment-style generalizations. To make things even more complicated, Habermas himself has been one of the major critics of postmodernism.

We are now ready to take on critical race theory, which is an academic movement that originated in the 1970s, primarily located in law schools and in independent programs. The movement is comprised of scholar-activists who are concerned with issues of racism and other kinds of discrimination. CRT was originally articulated as a challenge to the liberal approach to social justice, on the grounds that although such approach had led to the civil rights movement and legislation of the ’60s, it had clearly not eliminated racism from American social life.

One of the fundamental assumptions of CRT (inherited from CT) is that racism persists because of institutional structures and dynamics, not because individuals themselves are explicitly or intentionally prejudiced. And this is one big problem with CRT. It is certainly the case that we have a number of examples of institutional discrimination, including but not limited to racism and sexism. For instance, racial and ethnic profiling is still practiced in a number of countries, including by several police departments in the United States.

But there is also plenty of evidence that racism very much is a matter of individual psychology, and that individual action can and does override systemic attempts at enforcing equality. For instance, in the U.S. one cannot, by law, engage in discriminating hiring practices. And yet plenty of studies show that resumes that are perceived by a prospective employer as “white” do much better than resumes that are perceived as “black” (or female). This sort of data, which has been replicated many times over several years, is really difficult to reconcile with the fundamental tenets of CRT. Proponents are correct that just passing colorblind laws — which is the standard liberal approach — is not enough. But they seem to at least partly misdiagnose why this is the case, since they ignore individual psychological factors.

In their book, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, researchers Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic have summarized the major themes common to CRT. They include:

(i) Cultural nationalism, the idea that oppressed groups should ask not just for reparation of past wrongs, but actively engage in separatism from the oppressing culture (e.g., black nationalism). This is clearly at odds with the liberal / cosmopolitan view that cultural differences should be respected but not elevated to yet another source of division among human groups, since historically such divisions have only bred mutual incomprehension and even violent conflict.

(ii) Critique of liberalism, which means a rejection of the Enlightenment ideal of rationality, of the idea of Constitutional neutrality, and of the incrementalist approach to civil rights.

(iii) Intersectionality, the recognition (correctly, in my mind) that the needs of, say, a black woman are different from those of a white, Latina, or queer woman. This, however, comes at the cost of fracturing the sort of cross-sectional solidarity that was so effective during the civil rights movement of the ‘60s.

(iv) Revisionist understanding of the history of American civil rights legislation, whereby progress during the ’60s and thereafter is (rather unconvincingly, I think) reinterpreted as being in the self-interest of white elites.

(v) Standpoint epistemology, the idea that oppressed people have a privileged perspective on their own condition. This is, of course, true. But it is often used to disallow other points of view, which impoverishes social discourse. Also, while it is certainly the case that if I experience something I should be a primary source of insights into that experience, it is just as true — as evidence from cognitive science clearly shows — that individuals can misunderstand or misinterpret their own experiences, at least to an extent, which is why input from the outside can be beneficial.

(vi) Story-telling and naming “one’s own reality.” This is often couched in terms of a re-evaluation and validation of story telling traditions in Indigenous Americans and other people, but it implies a downplay, or outright rejection, of systematic, scientific approaches to inform our understanding of systemic racism, sexism, etc.

(vii) Structural determinism, the notion, mentioned above, that the root causes of discrimination are systemic, and not a function of individual psychologies. As I said, there is clear empirical evidence that this assumption is false and that both systemic and individual factors are at play.

Arguably the most insidious aspect of CRT has been addressed by Anne Applebaum in a nuanced and thought provoking essay in The Atlantic, where she writes that “Marxist literary scholars and popularizers of critical race theory have one thing in common with certain GOP commentators: a tendency to see their own view of the world as the only valid one.”

Indeed. A good example, which Applebaum explores in detail, is the application of Marxist / CRT ideas to literary criticism, specifically to the novels of Jane Austen. It is certainly possible, and valuable, to engage in a Marxist reading of Pride and Prejudice, whereby, for instance, one begins to pay attention to the role played by wealth and power in shaping the attitudes of the main characters.

Or one could engage, again, usefully, in a feminist reading of Austen, which makes immediate sense of the outsized role of marriageability in her stories.

In this context, Applebaum mentions the famous critic Edward Said, who in 1993 wrote an essay entitled “Jane Austen and Empire” (section 11 in this document). Said noted the peculiar fact that Austen doesn’t talk much about slavery and colonialism, even though her father was trustee of a sugar plantation in Antigua, a position that went a long way toward establishing the sort of family wealth from which Austen benefited (and which is reflected in her characters).

If you are a scholar, or even an avid reader of Austen, this sort of background knowledge should be welcome, as it opens up new vistas on both the author and the society in which she lived and about which she wrote. But, Applebaum also says, “being aware of [Austen’s] silence won’t help you understand why Elizabeth finally marries Mr. Darcy or why Mr. Darcy saves Lydia, and it certainly won’t explain the deep appeal of Austen’s novel across time and geography. If the absence of conversation about slavery is the only thing you know about Austen, then your understanding of her books will be severely impoverished.”

Similarly, continues Applebaum, “you can be inspired by the Declaration of Independence, horrified by the expulsions of Native Americans, amazed by the energy of immigrants and frontier settlers. You can understand that the United States is a great and unique country whose values are worth defending — and realize simultaneously that this same country has made terrible mistakes and carried out horrific crimes. Is it so difficult to hold all of these disparate ideas in your head at the same time?”

No, it shouldn’t be so difficult. And yet both extreme right-wingers and CRT supporters would have you adopt a single filter through which to understand everything that is going on, though of course their preferred filters are entirely at odds with each other.

Applebaum concludes: “critical race theory is not the same thing as Marxism, but some of its more facile popularizers share with Marxists the deep conviction that their way of seeing the world is the only way worth seeing the world. … The structural racism that they have identified is real, just as the class divisions once identified by the Marxists were real. But racism is not everywhere, in every institution, or in every person’s heart at all times. More to the point, any analysis of American history or American society that sees only structural racism will misunderstand the country, and badly. It will not be able to explain why the U.S. did in fact have an Emancipation Proclamation, a Civil Rights Act, a Black president.”

Exactly. So these are the real problems with Critical Race Theory, not the ones made up by hysterical right-wing commentators. CRT should be taught in college classrooms, but it should be taught critically. That is, alongside other perspectives, including the Enlightenment-inspired liberalism so despised by many CRT proponents. Still, the fact that the United States has a long and continuing history of racism and sexism ought to be taught much earlier than college, because it is not a liberal ideology, but an important aspect of what America is. This country was built on the high ideals of religious freedom and equality of opportunity for all. But it was also built on genocide and slavery. And as Applebaum says, it shouldn’t be too difficult to hold both those thoughts in our head simultaneously.