In contrast to the anodyne way in which its advocates present it, Critical Race Theory is just that--race theory. And it is every bit as reactionary and dangerous as it ever was. In American education and culture, we are not given a history but a racestory. I was born sometime during the Eisenhower administration--and that's as specific as I'm going to get--so when I entered the school system the racist mythology of White heroism and supremacy, of the White man's progressive, civilizing mission to the world; that racestory of White benefaction and Black backwardness and dependence, of White angels and Black semi-savages, was what prevailed. I was in school when that script was flipped. The tenor and content of my high school textbooks were quite different from those I knew in grade school. Suddenly, in fact quite suddenly, I was no longer reading of exceptional White virtue (thank goodness!), but exceptional White villainy. As a result of the civil rights movements (while acknowledging other interpretations exist), Jim Crow was giving way to what I call Jim Snow. The racestory, the official, plutocracy-sanctioned, state-mandated line had gone from White angels and Black monsters to White monsters and Black angels. One could not fail to notice the difference.
What had begun and is still happening, unlike what the race lobby would have us believe, is not the application of an anti-racist corrective to a racial mythology, but rather the substitution of one fictive racestory for another, one lie replacing another.
Speaking of lies, one of the great deceptions racebots like Perry and Hill perpetrate is that criticism of crt comes from the Right. First, this posits the race lobby on the Left--where it most certainly does not belong. Second, it conceals that the best critique of race theory does, and has always, come from the Left. Let there be no misunderstanding: Where do I stand? Always with labor. I am a revolutionary socialist of the libertarian type, in other words I'm an anarchist. I am an irreconcilable enemy of capitalism, racism, sexism, statism, any form of hierarchy, hegemony, domination. I am as far Left as Left gets, and it is from this joyously extremist perspective that I declare that America runs on mutual racial antagonism, and that crt sustains racism by stoking that hostility. This it does by disguising itself as an antidote to racism, when in reality it's just another capital-friendly variant of the disease. However forcefully any individual race theorist may deny it, the net effect of crt, identity politics and so on, is to provide discursive defense, provide ideological cover, for the racist, angels-and-monsters theory of history. This position aligns itself in opposition to a materialist conception of history. It's of no real political consequence who is monster and who angel, it is the estrangement, the false dichotomy, the contrapositioning of ethnoracial groups that upholds racestory and safeguards the global, race-based, expropriation regime.
Perry says crt starts with the civil rights movements, (which is incorrect). She goes on to say that it was recognized that Blacks suffered from many forms of oppression and various levels of gov made specifics efforts to initiate programs to benefit Blacks and encountered resistance from conservatives. She says the latter complained that such programs which target Blacks for special considerations de facto discriminatory. Perry says that "the [SCOTUS] really failed the civil rights movement by treating [such programs] as the same form of discrimination as Jim Crow."
First, in multiple decisions, SCOTUS did okay racially discriminatory practices which favored Blacks in order to counteract prior discriminatory practices which disadvantaged Blacks. This was a landmark reversal, so it astonishes that Perry claims that SCOTUS "failed" the crm. Indeed, SCOTUS could have crushed it, but didn't, which should tell her all she needs to know. Irrespective of the merits of programs like Affirmative Action, Perry's claim that state and local govs were endeavoring to address racial inequality and were prevented by SCOTUS is just absurd. The opposite is true.
Second, crt doesn't grow out of the crm, but out of post-modernism, post-colonialism, and what nowadays is generally labelled intersectionality. Crt descends directly from those philosophical schools of thought which oppose and critique materialism and class politics. In contrast, Left politics, class politics, revolutionary politics were fiercely and proudly adopted and pursued by major crm organizations. The Panthers, to pick but one, was a Marxist-Leninist political party. Even some Black nationalists embraced overtly anti-capitalist policies. This is all but gone now, and we have crt and the like to blame.
Third, we must be careful--as we shall see--with the term "critical race theory" as it is quite misleading. The word "critical" is a desperate attempt to disinfect what in reality are rehashed fascist ideas. A real critical race theory would engage all race theory, however, crt orients itself in opposition to materialist race theory. That is to say rather than accommodating all race theory under its rubric, crt takes a stand against materialism. I have of late been working through the crt canon--not a rewarding task!--and while you almost always encounter some halfhearted, pro forma nod to the existence of materialist race theory, it is invariably dismissed. I have not read a single exception. It is the raison d'etre, it would seem, of crt to discredit Left race theory. What is called crt is in fact a right-wing sect within race theory.
Perry continues: At this point wherein SCOTUS is blocking crm advances, she claims, civil rights lawyers and scholars begin to address how to correct racial injustices and that is the heart of crt.
First, the precis is inaccurate, as noted above.
Second, this is a common mistake[?]. What she is talking about is cls (critical legal studies), which indeed is antecedent to crt, but is different. They are not the same no matter how hard one tries to disguise it as such. Those crt issues currently being debated are precisely those that differ from cls. Consequently, from an analytical, or even political, point of view, this is irrelevant. However shrilly the race lobby might object, the writing of Michel Foucault have greater standing within crt than those of Derrick Bell. This will induce howls of protest from the race lobby, but bring it on. I am only too happy to debate this point with anyone. I have on many occasions offered to do so with multiple "comrades" in the RCP and ISO and so far I've had no takers, which I lament.
Perry: [crt] is just a way of understanding racial inequality and how to address [it] and nothing more than that.
Hysterical. To overstate in order to illustrate: this is like saying that the Virginia Slave Act of 1682 was just a way of addressing civil unrest and nothing more than that. Perry is skirting the issue in order to conceal it. Those things which have greater fertility than can be can be captured in their transitory consideration; those issues which have prompted the controversy around crt; what matters in this debate, is entirely bypassed and, of course, unresolved--just the way Wall Street wants it. More on this below.
Perry: If you want to address inequality you have to have data...you have to look at the relationships between race and class, race and educational outcomes..if you don't actually keep track of race then you don't have the means to address racial injustice..if we can't even talk about [race] in schools we diminish our young people's ability to be active civil participants in society.
More obscurantism. Nobody is opposing data collection, it is what will be done/taught on the basis of the data, which she doesn't address. Nobody is suggesting that race should not be discussed in school. There is some debate about how old students should be before the introduction of race, but the people, Left and Right, who oppose crt being taught in schools are objecting to what is being taught. That is what the debate is about. Any suggestion to the contrary can only be made by a fool or a liar.
Perry: This is a kind of conventional Right-wing where they create a moral panic around an issue that actually doesn't really exist.
I have to admit there is something about this woman I admire. They say that quality is always virtuous, and she's a good liar.
It exists. It's insipid to say it doesn't. The first I became aware of the controversy was when a Black teacher in FL told a mixed-race class that it was not a good thing to be White and a White child mentioned it to her mother. Briahna Joy Grey did a "Hill" (show) episode in which this was discussed and she described it as an "overreach" and suggested that the teacher should not have been fired. She then said that saying that it's bad to be White should be banned, but not crt itself. So for Lady Overreach, it's about what is being taught. And that is correct. Another occasion I saw a clip with the same host as in the video above interviewing somebody from (Jersey, maybe?) who read from a crt text his child's school used and it said that Whites were inherently racist. Which is, of course, a postulate which can only be supported by a racist. Saying that any race is inherently anything is biological racism. This is indisputable. So in this particular case, crt is teaching, promulgating racism.
It was hard to get much info because the host kept interrupting the guest.
This issue is what is being taught, and no amount of liberal blather from Perry to the contrary will change that.
Second, the big lie, the big one, the big'n, criticism of crt comes only from the Right.
Perry: I'm not aware of [crt] being taught in k-12...
That is a lie because it's impossible to be aware of this controversy apart from k-12 because that is where the battle is taking place. This is like saying you're familiar with the crm but have never heard of bus boycotts and voter registration drives. She's being quite ridiculous. All of the objections I've heard come from texts taught in k-12, like the ones mentioned above. Host Hill didn't correct her even though he knew she was lying.
Perry: [opponents of crt] are outraged that we would teach history in an authentic way...they want to maintain a fiction of this country, a mythology of this country...we want our kids to be raised with deep and meaningful knowledge...they don't want a basically honest history of this nation.
Here we come to the crux. Whose "deep and meaningful" and "basically honest history" will be taught? Whose opinion will prevail? Will be forced upon all? Who will be extolled and who will be sacrificed? I can say what will not be taught: anything that might actually create racial equality. Because this country runs on mutual racial antagonism, and equality, real racial equality--not alternating, equilibrious inequality, but the actual, literal, perpetual absence of racial inequality, would lead to interracial harmony. And that is precisely what the ruling class wants to avert. It's do or die for them, partition or perish. And crt, like its predecessor race theories, like all race theory, partitions. That's what it's for. That's what angels and monsters are for.
As some one famously observed: "History is a battlefield." The second service crt offers to capital is that it misdraws the political line of battle, obscures the field of forces. To the public, this debate is being depicted as a Left v Right clash, when in fact there is no "Left" in it at all. It is two competing racist narratives either--and, more importantly, both!--of which serve the interests of the ruling class. The old racist fiction of White saviorism, White angels, into which I was born has been replaced by the new racist fiction of the White bogey man, the White monster. Absurdly, all good that was abroad in the world was attributed to White proficiency and altruism. Now, equally risibly, all that is bad in the world is attributed to exceptional White venality. Both of these positions are racist, and by definition, racism is not a Leftist position--full stop. If you believe in the superiority/inferiority of any ethnoracial group(s), then you are a Rightist. We have no room for you on the Left be you Black or White. We are your enemies.
The bourgeoisie is the big winner here, as always. This manufactured crt kerfuffle keeps the races fighting each other, which is the point, and it doesn't matter which racestory prevails as neither threaten the centers of economic power. It's a win-win for the very people who administer the global, racist expropriation regime. If it wasn't, if they didn't own every dog in the race, there would be no race.
Here is some honesty that you will never hear from Hill or Perry, from those calling for a deep, meaningful account of this nation's history: Behind only race itself, perhaps the single greatest lie in the history of our species, indisputably the biggest in American history, is that the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade was something White people did to Black. It's not true. That Whites went to Africa and kidnapped millions of Africans, enslaved them in the New World, is maybe the greatest lie ever told. The tst was a trade. Blacks did 99pc of the kidnapping of Blacks whom they then sold to Whites under terms dictated by Blacks. That is the deep, meaningful truth which you will never hear in a bourgeois classroom or on bourgeois media. Black tribe fought Black tribe for control of the lucrative trade, anyone telling you otherwise is a liar. Black Africa is fully complicit in the conquest of the New World, but that bit of deep truth will be omitted. Why? Because it obliterates the racestory. Once the racist myth of White monsters and Black angels is demolished, the races will start viewing each other differently, perhaps more favorably, and that must be averted at all costs. In America, White and Black minds are aburst with curated racist delusions, with carefully cultivated false consciousness. Should that end and be replaced by class consciousness, the world will change. Those who own will rule no more. Crt and the latest controversy is just another bourgeois offensive in the ongoing class war.
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