Critical Race Theory: What It Is, And Why It Matters

Liberals have been claiming that Derrick Bell was not a radical.

That's awfully funny, given that arch-liberal Michael Tomasky, in a column making fun of the right for making an issue out of this, cannot contest the proposition that Bell was a radical.

Obama undeniably pays homage to Bell, whose views on race and the law in America were undeniably radical.

Undeniably. And yet most liberals aren't on this page, because they are all-in on denying the undeniable.

Bretibart.com's Ben Shapiro explains the theory and its aims.

This criticism mirrored a Marxist attack long voiced in academia: that the Constitution had been a capitalist document incapable of allowing for the redistributionist change necessary to create a more equal world. To create a more equal world, the Constitution and the legal system would have to be endlessly criticized – hence critical theory – and torn down from within.

The Marxist criticism of the system was called critical theory; the racial criticism of the system was therefore called Critical Race Theory.

So, what does CRT believe? In their primer, Critical Race Theory, Richard Delgado (one of the movement’s founders) and Jean Stefancic set out some basic principles:

1. “Racism is ordinary, not aberrational”;
2. “Our system of white-over-color ascendancy serves important purposes, both psychic and material.”

When taken together, these principles have serious ramifications. First, they suggest that legal rules that stand for equal treatment under law – i.e. the 14th Amendment – can remedy “only the most blatant forms of discrimination.” The system is too corrupted, too based on the notion of white supremacy, for equal protection of the laws to ever be a reality. The system must be made unequal in order to compensate for the innate racism of the white majority.

Second, these principles suggest that even measures taken to alleviate unequal protection under the law – for example, the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education – were actually taken for nefarious purposes, to serve white interests. This is exactly what Derrick Bell believed: he said that Brown had only been decided in order to prevent the Soviet Union from using American racial inequality as a public relations baton to wield against the white-majority United States.

Overall:

So here’s what we’re left with, in simple terms. Racism cannot be ended within the current system; the current system is actually both a byproduct of and a continuing excuse for racism. Minority opinions on the system are more relevant than white opinions, since whites have long enjoyed control of the system, and have an interest in maintaining it.

Shapiro goes on to note how Critical Race Theory informs so much of the Obama Administration, from a Justice Department that refuses to prosecute black racial malefactors, to race-conscious supreme court nominees (a "wise Latina" must, by nature of her race and gender, render better opinions than a white man), and so forth.

Radical? To a majority of the country-- which is the correct test -- it is undeniably radical.

As at least one liberal is capable of admitting.

posted by Ace at 05:07 PM

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