How Critical Race Theory Works

By Cameron Hilditch

Saturday, May 08, 2021

 

Critical race theory is a subdiscipline of a broader and older intellectual project called “critical theory.” The former can’t be understood properly without some acquaintance with the latter.

 

Critical theory, though preceded by a whole host of philosophical antecedents and related ideas, was really pioneered by a group of German Marxist thinkers known as the Frankfurt School. Made up of philosophers, academics, and social scientists, this movement included Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, and Erich Fromm, among others. Horkheimer first defined “critical theory” in a 1937 essay contrasting it with what he called “traditional theory,” which, by his lights, sought simply to understand and explain a phenomenon. Critical theory, however, is first and foremost practical. A theory is critical to the extent that it tries “to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them” and “to create a world which satisfies” their “needs and powers.”

 

He provides three criteria that a theory must meet in order to be considered critical: It must provide an account of what is wrong with existing social arrangements, identify the agents of change (in classical Marxist thinking, this would be the revolutionary proletariat), and provide achievable aims and standards against which these agents can judge their efforts. Any kind of theorizing that doesn’t lead ineluctably to activism and agitation is categorized as “traditional” and “bourgeois,” and certainly not “critical.” In this respect, critical theorists take their lead from Marx’s line, inscribed on his headstone in Highgate cemetery, that “philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.”

 

Underpinning the practical emphasis we find in critical theory is the assumption that it’s possible to change the world in radical and revolutionary ways. Most of us share this belief to one extent or another. We can all point to certain watershed moments or epochs in history when seismic shifts in the social order have been brought about, such as the agricultural revolution, the advent of Christianity, the downfall of feudalism, and the rise of democratic capitalism. But most of us also believe that certain aspects of the world are immutably fixed or fated. We believe that we are constrained in what we can (or should) do by the unchangeable contours of human nature, by accident of birth, by material and geographic factors, by sheer dumb luck, and by an innumerable array of other factors that are beyond our control but that nevertheless effect social outcomes in an uneven way.

 

Critical theorists place far less emphasis on those fated and fixed factors and instead believe that societies, cultures, and civilizations are almost entirely social constructs. For them, the shared interests of an oppressor class in society constrain and determine reality to an altogether dispositive degree. The most important question to the critical theorist is therefore Cicero’s famous “Cui bono?” — “Who benefits?” Once a prosperous group is identified, these theorists then take the prosperity itself as dispositive evidence that the group in question has organized the social order in such a way as to exploit others and benefit themselves. No (or very little) room is permitted for impersonal, incidental, or individual explanatory factors. Almost every social malady is the fault of an oppressor class.

 

However, regarding the behavior of this oppressor class as the most consequential factor determining social outcomes is also incredibly empowering to agents of change. The oppressors, after all, can be removed from power by either a peaceful democratic awakening among the masses or by revolutionary violence. If the political policies of the ruling class are the building blocks of reality, all one really has to do to usher in nirvana is supplant this class and replace it with the revolutionary vanguard. The belief that reality is socially constructed is therefore a necessary premise of utopianism. It makes every bad outcome in society the fault of the people who constructed society in the first place. It imbues every tragedy or misfortune with malevolent agency and pernicious intent. It makes the problem of evil, which has plagued the downtrodden and perplexed the philosophers since the dawn of time, ultimately the problem of the existence of the oppressor. The irresistible conclusion of this line of thinking is that heaven can be dragged down to earth by the falling of the guillotine’s blade.

 

Critical race theory (CRT) takes the social constructivism that critical theorists applied to class and applies it to race. Not to all races, however. One of the tenets of CRT is that the universalizing abstractions of European liberalism — “race,” “mankind,” “truth,” “justice,” etc. — disguise the particular provenance of these terms as products of imperialist European thought. They are thought to veil the particular injustices perpetrated by white European peoples against non-white non-European peoples. “Racism,” then, ends up meaning not “discrimination on the basis of race” but “the discrimination perpetrated by whites against non-whites.” The abstract, universal formulation of the former definition is condemned as an example of colonial, imperial, white European, hegemonic thought.

 

The weapons-grade social constructivism in which critical race theorists believe leads them to conceive of the modern West as a social order constructed almost entirely by white people and for whose shortcomings white people (and their Vichy collaborators, such as Senator Tim Scott) are solely responsible. America’s most famous critical race theorist, Ibram X. Kendi, wrote, in perhaps one of the most historically illiterate sentences ever written, that “racial discrimination is the sole cause of racial disparities in this country and in the world at large.” (Never mind that two-parent privilege, for instance, dwarfs white privilege as far as factors contributing to economic outcomes are concerned. Print the legend, I guess.)

 

The social constructivism of critical race theorists also leads them to think of historic injustice as a kind of zero-sum relationship that can be rebalanced if only the correct political arithmetic is applied. The civil-rights approach to racial equality has been to attempt to redress the inequalities of today rather than to parcel out justice for every historic wrong ever committed. Bygones were, in this older view, to be treated as solemn and harrowing bygones from which we all must learn, but justice to the oppressed dead could no longer be done in any retributive sense since their oppressors have died with them.

 

Critical race theorists totally reject this view. Conceiving of identity in collective terms, they look upon white people today as essentially coextensive with their oppressive ancestors, still in possession of their ill-gotten racist gains — gains that manifest themselves in the guise of privilege. As Christopher Caldwell wrote in an essay on Kendi for National Review last year, “the historic victims of [the racist] system . . . look at the system as having taken from them concrete things that were theirs by right — above all, jobs, money, and housing. They will not consider the problem fixed until those deprivations have been remedied.”

 

According to this view, the first white slaver who landed on the coast of West Africa some 400 years ago inadvertently opened a kind of tab of oppression on behalf of every other white person alive or yet unborn, that has been growing with each passing year. Until this tab has been paid in full, we are told, justice will not have been done. In the anti-racist view of Kendi and his fellow critical race theorists, discrimination against whites is the only way to begin to settle the tab. Kendi writes:

 

The defining question is whether the discrimination is creating equity or inequity. If discrimination is creating equity, then it is antiracist. If discrimination is creating inequity, then it is racist. . . . The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.

 

There are two glaring problems with this view: Kendi’s envisioned future and his envisioned history. First, no one has yet come forward with a definition of what atonement will look like. How will we know if and when enough anti-racist policies have been pursued finally to reach equity? At what point will Kendi repeat to white people the words uttered by Christ on the cross that “it is finished,” letting those who stand under judgment know that their sins have finally been washed away? The logic of the paragraph quoted above would seem to suggest that unless and until black Americans discriminate negatively against white Americans for as long and to the same degree as black Americans have been oppressed themselves over the past 400 years, white people can have no legitimate objection to the policies that critical race theorists want to pursue. Such a view would surely have vanishingly little purchase on most Americans of any race. Most Americans still retain what Kendi would surely view as an irresponsible affection for Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision of a racial jubilee in America, with past sins forgiven and old enmities put to rest as Christian charity commands.

 

As for Kendi’s view of history, his idea of retributive racial justice tacitly assumes the existence at some point in the distant past of a time when the balance sheet of racial injustice was zero: a kind of equitable Eden shrouded in the mists of time before the white man ate of the poisoned tree of human bondage. The project of CRT that he spearheads is, as a result, almost a kind of Christian heresy. It’s seeking to retrieve a paradise lost, to vanquish the lily-white angel guarding the gates to a lost land of pristine justice, from which people of color have been cast out into a land and into a life of unrelenting toil and oppression.

 

The truth, of course, is that there was never any such time. It’s true that racial injustice began at a certain point in history, and that it really took off when civilization reached a point of development that allowed for intercontinental travel. But before the time in human history at which people of different races began to encounter one another, the story was still one of violence and oppression. It was merely one of Africans oppressing Africans and Europeans oppressing Europeans. The balance sheet of human conflict has never been zero.

 

Of course, it’s possible that critical race theorists do not find the idea of people oppressing members of their own race to be particularly problematic (or certainly not nearly as problematic as interracial oppression). After all, collective identity is one of the two great pillars of CRT. People exist first and foremost as members of a race. So, while seeing members of the same race in conflict with one another might be distressing, as a moral matter it might be no more distressing than the sight of a person punching himself in the face: senseless, disturbing, but, from a CRT standpoint, not really the issue.

 

Along with collective identity, the other great pillar of CRT is, as we have seen, social constructivism. Put the two together, and you have a vision of a world entirely constructed by the single most powerful racial group in it. Doing their best to verify horseshoe theory, critical race theorists join the chorus of white supremacists who claim that white people are responsible for everything. “It’s the white race’s world, and people of color are just living in it,” Richard Spencer shouts exultantly, while Ibram Kendi echoes the same claim — with disgust.

 

This brings us back to the essentially theological nature of CRT, which is really the most interesting aspect of it. The two best-selling books of the two most prominent anti-racists in America, Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, are, in different ways, autobiographical. Both men are talented writers trying to make sense of the suffering they’ve experienced in their own lives. In this respect both of their books belong in the same genre as the Book of Job and Augustine’s Confessions. They’re trying to come to terms with the problem of evil, with suffering as it’s manifested itself in their own lives. For Job, the source of suffering was cosmic, and he railed against the Lord of Hosts to answer for the pain inflicted upon His servant. But the social constructivism to which both Kendi and Coates subscribe relieves them of the need to search the heavens for the power who has visited their afflictions upon them. Critical race theory brings the indicted deity responsible for the world’s suffering down to earth in the form of the white race. It is whiteness, not Jehovah, that presides over this vale of tears, and whiteness, unlike Job’s God, can be laid low. That’s why critical race theory has such a firm hold over the minds of its apostles: It offers a practical solution to the problem of evil.