JUNETEENTH, CRITICAL RACE THEORY AND ITS REVERBERATIONS

Dr. Common Good

The efforts by Republicans such as Ron Johnson, Ted Cruz, Matt Gaetz, Tucker Carlson and others on the right to cast Critical Race Theory (CRT) as, of all things, “racist” – as racist as the Klan itself, said Cruz – would be laughable, absurdist theater, except that these efforts are part of a broader, insidious narrative perpetrated by the right that is creeping across the media-space like a biblical miasma. Even the newly elected head of the Southern Baptist Convention, Ed Litton, a staunch conservative, knows better, and to his credit, said so in public. So did General Lloyd Austin, Secretary of Defense, and General Mark Milley, Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in response to inane political questioning by Gaetz.  Get it straight. Critical Race Theory is not racist. That is a patent falsehood that needs to be countered. It is the idea that race is a social, not a meaningful biological category, together with the simple acknowledgment that racism has infested the very structure of our society and its mechanisms of social well-being for a long, long time, and that to achieve the goals embedded in the Constitution, these structural impediments to equality need to be eliminated. There is nothing in CRT that calls all white people racists, or that seeks to pit racial groups against each other.  CRT does not advocate violence, terror, hatred or racial/ethnic subjugation as did the Klan.  

Aside from the obvious history of slavery and Jim Crow, who can dispute, for example, that African Americans were denied the opportunity to buy homes through redlining and segregated housing policies – even policies implemented by the Federal Housing Administration? For generations, owning a home has been the most basic means of accumulating wealth and passing it on. Who can deny that African American farmers in the South were explicitly denied loans and credit (including by the US Department of Agriculture) that would have supported the sustainability and thriving of their farming enterprises, driving most African Americans out of farming entirely? Who can deny school segregation and inequality, whether de jure or de facto, curtailing the ability of African Americans to attain the academic credentials that contribute to better income and the ability to influence the generation of knowledge? Who can deny the racial bias that has pervaded the criminal justice system for years, resulting in vastly disparate incarceration rates and far higher rates of police violence victimization for African Americans and other peoples of color? Who can deny the discrimination, explicit and hidden, that has existed in so many of the basic institutions of society, from recreational spaces, to media and entertainment, to workplaces, to civic organizations and clubs – all part of the network of social and cultural capital through which people gain access to resources, social position, political power, and jobs? You can’t deny it. Period. You just can’t.

In fact, I dare you, Ron Johnson, Ted Cruz, Matt Gaetz, Tucker Carlson and all the rest, to deny any of that, and to back it up with any facts. This is not about being “woke” or whatever other distorted label you want to use to divert attention from historical truth.

So what are the Cruzes, Johnsons, Gaetz’s and Carlsons doing? They are throwing up smoke and lies in order to ride a political bandwagon that is, at its core, largely driven by white racial revanchism, the effort to re-assert dominance and control in a world where some people believe that they are being pushed out, that they are losing control of a way of life that has always been predicated on a racialized social hierarchy. Moreover, this broader, and dangerous right-wing narrative that includes the effort to label CRT as racist and an affront to our history is of a piece with the attempt to portray the January 6 insurrectionists as mere “tourists” (e.g., comments by Republican Rep. Andrew Clyde) or as patriots in some way, the conspiracy theories that seek to blame “antifa” or even now the FBI for January 6, the attempt to whitewash the destructive Trump presidency, the dogged attempt to perpetrate the mendacious lie that the 2020 election was a fraud and must be overturned, the concerted attempt to restrict voting rights as an undemocratic means of ensuring political power, and the perpetration of ugly claims that immigrants are dangerous, and that they pollute the cultural purity of a white, Protestant-based society (by the way, where does the Constitution characterize the United States as constituted by one religion? It, of course, does the opposite).   

This broader narrative is anti-democratic, racist, culturally bigoted, and a threat to the future of this country. Yet because it undergirds the politics of the right and all its media handmaidens, and because, for utterly selfish and venal purposes so many politicians and media charlatans on the right have chosen to stick to this message, it is gaining a kind of currency it in no way deserves. Enough is enough.