If much of the dire rhetoric behind America’s moment of racial reckoning seems from an oppressive world of a half-century ago, that’s because it comes from “critical race theory,” a decades-old philosophy deeply skeptical about the possibility of racial progress.
It turns up in the best-selling book “White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism,” in which readers are told that “white identity is inherently racist” and that “the white collective fundamentally hates blackness.”
The New York Times’ historically revisionist 1619 Project, published last year and distributed to more than 3,500 K-12 classrooms, similarly instructs that “anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country.”
In Durham, North Carolina, a racial task force last month issued a 68-page report to city leaders stating that all social structures were designed to subjugate blacks, to privilege “the health of white bodies,” and “to indoctrinate all students with the internalized belief that the white race is superior.”
So-called equity teams of students and faculty at some high schools in North Carolina’s capital region are reading a primer, “Critical Race Theory: An Introduction,” which says African Americans aren’t only subjugated through hate and terror, but also kept down through supposedly white cultural mechanisms of individualism, objectivity, neutrality, meritocracy, and color blindness.
These are just a few of the examples of how contemporary culture is being shaped by critical race theory, a movement born in law schools in the 1970s, influenced by Marxists, French postmodernists, the Black Power cause, radical feminists, and other disaffected leftist scholars.
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