Ibram X. Kendi at the School of International Service following a panel discussion on his new book How to Be an Antiracist in Washington, D.C., in 2019. (Michael A. McCoy/For The Washington Post/Getty Images) Americans are asking whether the radicals of CRT and BLM have any decency left. NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE W hat good American would disagree that “black lives matter”? Who could be opposed to “diversity, equity, and inclusion”? Who doesn’t believe in “social justice”?
These are powerful, generation-defining terms, and millions of Americans put in them their hopes for a more perfect union. But somewhere along the way, the terms were hijacked by a radical movement of racist Marxists, who redefined those terms to mean all the things they believe in, even as they redefined “white supremacy” and “racism” to mean all the things they oppose.
It was a rhetorical trick worthy of con artists. But it was only a matter of time before Americans of all races, creeds, and political persuasions started to realize that they’d been conned.
That was the significance of last week’s elections in Virginia, which sent shock waves across the country. In a solidly Democratic state that Joe Biden carried by more than ten points just a year ago, Republicans swept the statewide ballots. Suburban parents finally got fed up with the heavy-handed progressive policies inflicted on their children over the past year.
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Establishment Democrats stared at each other nervously and realized that the left wing of the party was ruining their electoral prospects. But the left wing went on the offensive, accusing Republicans of “weaponizing” critical race theory and complaining that schools are just teaching the “true history of racism in America” and “addressing inequality and social justice.” The multimillionaire sports journalist Jemele Hill accounted for Virginia’s election of a black and a Hispanic candidate to two of the three statewide offices on the ballot with her usual incisiveness: “This country just loves white supremacy.”
Despite the denials we now hear in Democratic state media such as CNN and the New York Times, public elementary schools across the country have indeed been actively indoctrinating children to see the society — and themselves — through the prism of race. As Christopher Rufo and others have reported, schoolchildren have been asked to rank themselves according to their “power and privilege” and separate themselves into oppressors and oppressed according to racial caste. In Buffalo, an “equity-based instructional strategy” has led to lesson plans that teach that “all white people play a part in systemic racism.” These are just two examples. Progressives deny that critical race theory is being taught in school districts, but examples of this virulent new racism being taught under cover of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” are too many to count.
Everyday Americans are starting to realize that behind the banner of “equity,” the radicals are advancing a racist version of Marxism, one that seeks to replace America’s competitive melting pot with a caste system. The first step is to indoctrinate white schoolchildren to think of themselves as members of a permanently penitential caste.
Nor does the indoctrination stop at teaching kids to think in racist terms, for the racism is just a veil for the latest iteration of Marxist socialism. Ibram X. Kendi, the chief theorist and popularizer of the movement, has said so explicitly:
(via Twitter) Obviously, the idea that whites are an inherently guilty race in an inherently racist country that must adopt race-based socialism to atone for its past sins is not just “teaching the history of racism.” It is Marxist indoctrination, meant to pave the way for a pervasive system of wealth redistribution — and the arbitrary totalitarian power that such a system requires.All Our Opinion in Your Inbox NR Daily is delivered right to you every afternoon. No charge.
As is always the case with totalitarian movements, this one entails the enforcement of ideological purity and the persecution of dissent, and Americans are now seeing that, too. People are being persecuted at elite universities and news organizations for merely questioning any aspect of the race-Marxist orthodoxy.
The gigantic obstacle standing in the way of this twisted and dystopian vision of “equity” is none other than the principle of “equality.” Enshrined in the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution, the principle of equality before the law requires that the same laws be applied to everyone in the same way.
Never yet fully fulfilled, equality is nonetheless the principle that countless generations of Americans aspired to and fought for as they sought to create “a more perfect Union.” Along with the colorblind meritocracy for which it stands, it is the principle that has made America a beacon to the nations of the world.
Equality before the law is all too often the very thing the new race-Marxists mean when they talk about “white supremacy” and “racism.” Consider how vehemently they dismiss the ideal of “colorblindness.” That indeed is the main point of Kendi’s milestone work, How to Be an Antiracist: “One either allows racial inequalities to persevere, as a racist, or confronts racial inequities, as an antiracist.” Therefore, if you are merely “not racist” you are in fact “racist.”
In order to be “antiracist,” you must fight to reverse “racial inequities” through racial “equity.” And what does that require? It requires recognizing the inherent racism of whiteness. It requires recognizing that you can’t be “racist” against white people, given their oppressive history and current power. It requires treating people differently according to their race. In short, this new ideology of antiracism requires you to be racist.
Our greatest protection from this assault on our values, way of life, and aspirations for a better world is the Constitution and its principle of equality. Lots of people are now complaining about the race-Marxist agenda, but that agenda is getting implemented every day, across the country, in ways large and small, as the radicals patiently chip away at the Equal Protection Clause.
Among the few organizations actually fighting back at the point of attack is the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, which recently launched its Equality under the Law Project to defend victims of woke discrimination. Under president Rick Esenberg, WILL has scored one victory after another in courts across the country. But for every such victory, dozens of violations of the Equal Protection Clause go unchallenged, virtually every one a victory for race-Marxism.
Campaigning for Democrats in Virginia, President Obama recently weighed in to denounce “phony culture wars.” Amazingly enough, he was not referring to the phony culture war over “white supremacy” in a country where nobody knows any actual white supremacists, and Democrats have to invent them just to keep the phony culture war over white supremacy going.
Instead, Obama was referring to parents’ fears that — after a year of unnecessary school closures and other devastating pandemic measures — their children are now being indoctrinated in a new anti-American hybrid of racism and socialism.
As public schools get progressively infected with race-Marxist indoctrination, more parents will be exploring alternatives. Increasingly, those parents will be from middle- and lower-income families who have neither the means nor the inclination to pay private-school tuition on top of the taxes they are already paying to support nearby public schools. Those parents should not be shut out of the school choices available to rich people simply because of their means. It’s not right. School-choice reforms are long overdue and may now be politically feasible in many areas where they weren’t just a year ago.
The race-Marxist agenda is destined to fail, because it hurts everyone — its supposed beneficiaries most of all. For all the airtime and ink spent on our “national reckoning on race,” the movement has produced little tangible improvement for people of color. The reason should be obvious: The discussion has focused on “white supremacy” and “systemic racism” everywhere they aren’t.
Indeed, while the “race-Marxists” are explicitly racist, it is a deeply incoherent racism that can’t even keep the meaning of “white” and “black” straight. They label as “white nationalist” or “white supremacist” anybody who is conservative or even middle-of-the-road, regardless of their actual race. Ask Condoleezza Rice. And on the other side, the BLM and CRT agenda has a lot in common with the antisocial attitudes of far-left, affluent urban whites. But ask actual black people whether they have any interest in defunding the police, and you will find that few of them do.
The race-Marxists simply don’t represent the black and brown voices they claim to represent — not their voices, and certainly not their interests.
There is systemic racism in America, but it has little to do with police procedures or practice. What drives disproportionate encounters with police is the same as what drives urban blight, low educational attainment, and low labor-force participation. It is the systemic racism of social-welfare and minimum-wage laws that have grossly disparate impacts on social mobility for blacks and Hispanics. Programs designed to shield them from the ravages of a competitive economy in fact do little more than exclude them from its benefits, trapping them in cycles of dependency on ruling elites.
With the best of intentions, Democrats have managed to resurrect a version of the Three-Fifths Clause, increasing their voting power in proportion to the number of blacks who depend on them, a consistent feature of Democratic politics going from the present day back through segregation, Reconstruction, and slavery, to the founding of the Republic.
A reckoning with the systemic racism of progressive policies won’t happen in this generation, obviously. But it really feels as if America turned some kind of corner last week, when the parents of Virginia schoolchildren rose up as if to ask the race-Marxists, “Have you left no sense of decency?”
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Mario Loyola is a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the director of the Environmental Finance and Risk Management Program of Florida International University, and a visiting fellow at the National Security Institute of George Mason University. The opinions expressed in this column
Comment - not much to add to Mr. Loyola's article.
only this - the democraticommunist party - in pursuit of communist tyranny - has NO Sense of Decency!
