Critical Race Theory Wasn’t Always Like This
Quillette | Jonathan Kay
Jonathan Kay reflects on the CRT he learned at Yale Law School in the mid-90’s— “The original version of Critical Race Theory…contained a persuasive critique of the US legal system.” However, “even CRT’s original theorists generally didn’t regard themselves as social-justice priests who could exorcise racist white demons through grandiose acts of consciousness-raising. They were simply intellectuals offering an analytical tool that could help us more fully capture the effect of race in American life.”
As Kay explains, “While the version of CRT I learned about in law school typically focused on the real ways in which black people…were disadvantaged by systematically racist laws, policies, and norms, the 2022 version of CRT has a harder, more personal edge… Today…one often sees CRT and related doctrines invoked as a means to condemn individual white people for racist thoughtcrimes they didn’t realize they’d committed.”
The constant “fixation on this or that person’s ‘white fragility,’ ‘internalized whiteness,’ and ‘white-savior syndrome’ [is] a vocabulary of accusation that’s begun to crowd out discussion of black welfare (the thing we were all supposed to care about in the first place), and which sometimes channels a paranoid and even conspiratorial frame of mind.”
When and how did CRT evolve ? “During the last few years, there’s been a mashing up of jargon and professional roles among celebrity anti-racists, with Kendi, in particular, preaching to us,” Kay explains. “Not surprisingly, when recordings of these sessions are leaked to the broad public, they can seem more like cultish indoctrination sessions than legitimate academic insights.”
Related
One Lie Leads to Another Until We Tell the Truth (Harvard Gazette, 4/30/22)
