When critical race theory was a manifesto proposed by Black lawyers and other Black intellectuals in 1980 to set straight American history, claiming that Black people were the backbone for creating American society and yet its endemic racism had turned the tables and victimized Black people and it was time to restore to Black people the rightful historical and present order of things, I thought the theory, though it was not worked out well enough to award that term of praise, was both jejune and meretricious, and I thought the so-called theory destined to fall on its own weight and to be overtaken by more enlightened Black intellectuals because its success would turn back race relations for generations. The movement it has inspired, however, has become hallowed in its brief history and has inspired a counter movement to abolish it, in school boards and state houses, both the advocates and their opponents neither of them appreciating history as the way to see history is complicated but instead think of history as a way to take sides on peoples and races and so the controversy has indeed set back a more enlightened view of race relations and so there is indeed a need to point out the shortcomings and malice of the movement and the same of its opponents. It is just another case of bad ideas continuing to fester and we would all be best rid of it, which is also the case of Naziismand Qanon. Bad ideas, after all, do matter. I will grant, however, that the two sides are ignorant rather than as meanspirited or vicious as those other benighted movements.
The major premise of Critical Race Theory is that racism, both structurally and psychologically, is ever present and is the main mechanism for understanding American history. Not only is racism ordinary rather than an aberration, the American interest in maintaining its racist nature is multiply determined from all quarters of economic and social life, and the way to answer the racist story is to tell a counter story of a people partly freed but always embattled. The Black experience is the central story of the American experience.
I disagree. The wealth of the United States was created in the northern states in that the ingenuity of the English and Scottish and Dutch residents made fields plentiful and cities prosperous because of trade and commerce, and that up and down the atlantic coast was a spirit of innovation that led to innumerable inventions or, else, to some extent, the stealing of British ones. The same happened after the Civil War. Pennsylvania discovered oil and imported the latest German inventions in creating steel and imported Slovaks and others from Europe to provide the labor and skills to work the factories while Scottish industrialists such as Andrew Carnegie crafted the financial resources and the industrial organizations that made it work, as would also happen in a later generation when Edison and Ford also revolutionized industry and invention.The lot of the slaves and the ex slaves was to provide lifetime indentiture and then sharecroppers in agricultural work that was odiously difficult while producing much less abundant foodstuffs than were created by the agriculture of the North and the Midwest. The South was backward financially and agriculturally and industrially because it was organized around its caste system, working more to control its social inferiors than to produce abundance. The South was a backwater until the time of air conditioning and civil rights freed people to engage themselves in doing something other than manufacturing oppression.
The same is true with spiritual and political matters. The Declaration of Independence was a truly revolutionary doctrine that freshly summarizes the findings of the English and Sottish Enlightenment as to the relation between human nature and government: government was a servant of the people, meaning that each individual had rights that were inalienable in the sense that the loss of these attributes would leave people as being other than human and government would assure that these rights were to be protected. The source of government lay in those rights rather than in aristocrats or religious folk, this in a world where such governments had previously been few and far between and regarded as possible only in small maritime countries or cities, like Venice or the Dutch Republic, not in such a mighty nation as the United States that was, even when its population was situated only on the Atlantic Coast, was a mighty endeavor. Subsequently, the franchise and the spirit of inclusion was broadened to increase women, Blacks and other persons previously regarded as offensive or inferior categories of people.
What we might call this standard model of how the United States evolved had become only recently established by the Seventies in that recent historical scholarship had filled out, by Eugene Genovese and others, how the Black population had fared during its long period of subjection, documenting how the lives of people under Jim Crow, for example, might have even been worse than they had been under slavery because there were no protections of law or custom to protect sharecroppers from being subject to capitalist exploitation. Rather, the major trajectory of United States history was towards ever greater inclusion and prosperity. That seemed the new Manifest Destiny.
As far as I am aware, those propounding Critical Race Theory did not engage in new historical investigations to achieve a new view on the relation between whites and Blacks in American history. Rather, it referred to old Marxist ideas about, first, imperialism. Colonies are very different from the relation of the various parts within a nation. Colonies are distant in geography, have a different and less developed culture and a different nationality with different languages and they supply only extractive and agricultural industries to the homeland. They also have different legal systems and foci of identity. That is true of the African colonies of the European nations. It was not true of the American colonies which despite being a long voyage away had the same ethnic stock of the mother country and were by the mid eighteenth century accomplished in politics and literature and so willing to challenge English authority. It could be said that the American South was a colony in that the plantation and Jim Crow economies were backward, the people largely uneducated both white and Black, and that the legal system in the South acted independently of the north. But there was a single national identity, a common language and heritage, and the ties increased when radio and television became the common experience, and were part of what transformed the South. The point I was making was that, in fact, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan started calculating it, the monies sent South from the taxes collected by Northern states shored up the Southern states and so it was impious for them to complain about the South being interfered with by the North. The South wanted the money so as to reduce financial disparities, which was also the case with Puerto Rico or most African countries which got more money from the home countries than from the home countries ever extracted from them. To say otherwise is to fall into Lenin's premise about imperialism, which is that colonial powers made money by exploiting the natives. Imperialism had other reasons, such as national pride, sort of like Olympic competition or the Space race. So the Critical Race theory that rests on Leninist cliches seems to me to be just wrong.so that Blacks were exploited in the same way Cuba was exploited by the American Fruit Company, disregarding the fact that areas within the United States might be impoverished but were still responsible to the Federal government as a whole, and in fact southern states received much more money per capita than did the northern states that paid the burden of the federal treasury. Second, the idea of capital was in the Marxist way as fungible in that the wealth accumulated could go from one source to another. So the surplus value of the slaves and the ex-slaves were somehow transmitted to the steel barons and the railroad magnates, though it is not clear that this ever happened. Instead, what happens is that money never remunerated just disappears, as it did for the slaves and ex-slaves, just as happened to the wealth women would have accumulated if they had been paid for raising children and working within families. The health of women was in the human capital that came from being raised in the classes of the families from which they were raised.
The issues and emotions concerning Critical Race Theory go deeper than ideology and history. The movement seems no less than to eradicate or cancel American history by negating what is valuable about it and reminding everyone about how awful America was to its Black people, and so it is no wonder that white people are also out to cancel out what are the real evils of slavery and Jim Crow so as to assert that the United States is basically all right rather than a plague on mankind. I cite the recent Black intellectual Clint Smith in his book “How the Word is Passed”. He is offended and perhaps embarrassed by the fact that the marks of oppression remain present everywhere in the United States and in particular in the South, where there are old slave markets and streets and monuments still dedicated to the Confederate past. We should be beyond that though I think that museumizing the Confederacyis to make sure that it is past rather than a living force in America, Germany having museumized the Nazi era so as to overcome it, to make Naziism clearly from the past rather than the present.
The question is the attitude a person takes to having been an oppressor by finding a way to recognize one is no longer an oppressor even if there are reminders, such as byu the George Floyd killing, that oppression has by no means been abolished. Every person has to come to terms with their past. Puerto Rican grandparents remember having washed their clothes in a stream, and so can think of how much they have progressed. This goes way back to when my putative ancestors were nomadic sheepherders who wandered into what is now Israel and it took a millennium for them to make Jerusalem their capital city and so part of a nation among nations. Usually, there is triumph in seeing adversity overcome, but the Critical Race Theory people want to attenuate the suffering rather than point to figures like Frederic Douglas, W. E. B. Debois and Martin Luther King as well as stellar events such as the civil rights acts of the Sixties and the widespread success of Black people in business and government and the creation of a solid middle class as achievements rather than presenting the apparent successes as a sly way to cover up just how bad things really are-- there being enough incidents, as I say, to encourage that. There is a mindset that is self destructive which spurns success and posits only failures as real.
A recent article in the New Yorker that discusses the Texas bill to protect young people from being treated as inferior because they are white is treated by the author, who opposes that bill, of just advocating for letting students acknowledge that there is a collective responsibility for the past, for what indeed had been done during and after slavery and the present situation in which Black people are disadvantaged in pursuing their gifts. That is to make Critical Race Theory innocuous and judicious when, in fact, the doctrine asserts that racism remains as endemic and so regards the advances in civil rights in the last half century as superficial and not to the core of the matter when, in fact, there has been a great advance in race relations during this time, and there is nothing wrong in acknowledging it, something the entire population can regard with some pride. Critical Race Theory therefore strikes at the heart of the American ideology that every generation somewhat overcomes adversity, whether with the working class, or with women, or with Blacks. Collective responsibility is a useful idea but it holds whether the nation is ameliorating suffering rather than sustaining suffering. There are plaudits and not just atrocities in the Black experience. Getting the balance wrong is very serious business, even if some of the opponents of Critical Race Theory are just soft soaping bad things that happened way back.
However deep are the divisions between Critical Race Theory and a more positive view of American history, there is an even deeper cleavage in the nature of American education that is not largely discussed. Education for Black people means learning about Black history, and historically Black institutions provide people with the knowledge and even the subtleties of their own ethnic experience. But that seems to me to be severely misguided. The purpose of education is not to learn about yourselves but to learn about other people and peoples. That way you become liberated into the cosmopolitan world rather than just a member of your own background. That is certainly the view held by W. E. B. Debois who was a fully free person because there was no author he could not sample and study while, to the contrary, history professors when I was a student were amused when some student would always find a paper to write about Lincoln and the Jewish question, as if they could not free themselves from only parochial concerns. It might take a few terms for a student to invest in broader oceans, not just those of his heritage. Then they got educated. Similarly, engagement in Black history is to reap only one field in the many pastures available for scholarship. We learn from differences, from a foreign spirit, and not from just familiar ones. Study Conrad’s “The Heart of Darkness” not to inveigle against imperialism or racism but to get Conrad’s sense of the evil that lurks in everyone as that is symbolized in Africa but also present in England. Oh, how dark is Conrad’s view of human nature, much worse than what Critical Race Theory can imagine, which is that one group exploits another, when Conrad thought every person had tangled himself into self-contradiction and frustration. But we all trivialize history when we make it just a way to take sides rather than see how complex it is. It may be that history is something for politicians to castigate because they don't really care about it. Humbug to both sides. History and literature are treated as battering rams by which to assault the citadels when they are more rightly understood and so should be honored and treated with respect as the queens of the sciences.