By Nic Woods
… (M)odern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug.
If anything in 2021 fits George Orwell’s description above, it is “critical race theory.”
To the right, based on recent media – both mainstream and social – discussions, critical race theory is
1.) critical of America
2.) centering racism, and
3.) only a theory.
The left understand it no better. It’s something that should be seriously considered – how does America move forward as a nation without grappling with its past?
To many African Americans, both left and right, it’s a school of legal scholarship that academics have been studying, without incident, for about 40 years. The American Bar Association definition is a huge paragraph, but the gist is that it’s “a practice of interrogating the role of race and racism in society that has spread to other fields of scholarship from law” that “recognizes racism is not a bygone relic of the past” but “acknowledges the legacy of slavery, segregation, and the imposition of second-class citizenship” on people of color “continues to permeate the social fabric of the nation.”
It was not diversity or inclusion training. It is not in the history, government, or social studies lanes, particularly not K-12, as it’s too complex for a sixth grader or a high school senior to understand. It’s also not about religion, although the recent Southern Baptist Convention spent an inordinate amount of time debating it, inviting a schism among themselves in the process.
As a result, the recent explosion of the term in those circles is … rather confusing.
But isn’t that the point?
Facts, and definitions, about CRT don’t matter. If it did, it would be defined whenever mentioned so there’s no confusion of what is being discussed. But that definition never comes.
It’s really not about facts – it’s just another contest of status, power, and wealth in an era rife with such contests. It’s really about angst that the people who have told the story for generations won’t get to exclusively tell the story anymore. And the story, viewed through other lenses that have existed all along, will go to places where they don’t want to go.
Thus, the opposing calls for “objective history.”
This is more of a chimera, because outside of “The American Civil War was fought between 1861 and 1865,” there is not much we “know” about the American Civil War and its aftermath that isn’t from someone’s point of view. If you consider a POV, you leap from objective facts to history and, without that history, the current culture war makes no sense.
That CRT and “The Lost Cause” – an ideology that advocates the belief that the cause of the Confederacy during the Civil War was heroic, and not just centered on slavery (despite the documentation from Confederate leaders) means so much right now that a vocal minority claim to be willing to start another Civil War over it means there is nothing at all objective about history.
What people seem to fear about critical race theory is that history would be rewritten to exclude everything that “makes America great.” But the history we learned in school was never objective. We don’t learn how Manifest Destiny looks to the Native American. We don’t get the Mexican-American POV of the Treaty of Hidalgo. That all matters, and the exclusion of that to be “objective” does everyone a disservice.
Whatever your feelings about The New York Times’ 1619 Project, that America for Blacks starts in 1619 when enslaved people from Africa were first brought to the colonies is probably more accurate and objective than that America was “discovered” when settlers from Britain landed at Plymouth Rock or Jamestown – the Portuguese, Spanish, French and Dutch who preceded the British might have something to say about that.
And what most of us “learned” about the Reconstruction period of U.S. history is told from the POV of the U.S. South – so, in a way, they lost the battles but won the narrative of how the country views the war – and because of groups like the Daughters of the Confederacy, a substantial number of Americans believe that the enslaved enjoyed their bondage and what a shame it was that they were forced to leave their masters for lives unknown.
Maybe, the full terror – as some have expressed in public – is that their 10-year-old is going to come home and call them a racist. If that’s the fear, maybe spend less time railing at a four-decade-old legal strategy and start reassessing your life and priorities.
Just because a concept effectively gets your blood boiling, doesn’t mean it should.
Note: Read the complete bibliography for Nic Woods’ column at thehustings.substack.com