Rather, the campaign against critical race theory is doing exactly what Rufo wanted it to: taking inchoate anger about what’s often derided as wokeness and directing it onto public education. I’ve seen the risible training for school administrators calling worship of the written word “white supremacy culture.” There’s a version of antiracism based on white people’s narcissistic self-flagellation that seems to me to accomplish very little.īut I’m highly skeptical that many public schools are teaching that “every white child and family today is invariably complicit” in white supremacy.
that strikes me as ridiculous and harmful. There’s certainly some material that critics lump in with C.R.T. My own position is basically anti-anti-critical race theory, in that I disagree with some ideas associated with C.R.T., especially around limiting speech, but am extremely alarmed by efforts to demonize and ban it. It’s nearly impossible to have a straightforward discussion of the educational content that’s being labeled critical race theory precisely because people like Rufo have succeeded in turning critical race theory into a catchall term for discussions of race that conservatives don’t like. That someone as smart as Linker, author of an essential book on the Catholic right, would analogize Communism to critical race theory strikes me as a sign of a moral panic, but leave that aside for a moment. Parents protesting critical race theory, he wrote, “do not want their children taught in state-run and state-funded schools that the country was founded on an ideology of white supremacy in which every white child and family today is invariably complicit regardless of their personal views of their Black fellow citizens.” He compared the anti-anti-critical race theory camp to leftists in the 1950s who, while condemning McCarthyism, dismissed justified concerns about Soviet Communism. In a recent piece in The Week, Damon Linker criticized the left for being what he called “anti-anti-critical race theory,” sidestepping legitimate objections to what he described as a “pernicious” phenomenon. But even some people who oppose bans on critical race theory insist that this misses the point. Progressives argue, correctly, that teachers aren’t instructing young kids in law school scholarship about structural racism. The debate about critical race theory has become circular and maddening because the phrase itself has been unmoored from any fixed meaning. “The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory.’ We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans,” he wrote.Ĭredit where due: Rufo has pretty much succeeded. Christopher Rufo, a clever propagandist who has done more than anyone else to whip up the national uproar over critical race theory, tweeted out in March an explanation of how he was redefining the term.
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