At the close of the first installment of this series, I pose the following questions. Given Martin Luther King, Jr.’s reasonable and peaceful call for harmony by appealing to morality and to the nation’s founding principles concerning the equality of all before the law, what incited the radical shift discernible among activists like the Black Lives Matter with its commitment to Marxism and its accompanying violence, who on cue, whenever a black individual dies during an encounter with police, ravage the United States with anti-White rage, rioting, more violent deaths, fires, looting, and deepened racial animosities? Martin Luther King, Jr.’s appeal to morality and the equality of all humans before the law as guaranteed by the Constitution for peaceful harmony among Americans has been abandoned. For example, Ibram X. Kendi insists that Americans must become “antiracists,” by which he means Americans must embrace racism directed against Whites to dismantle the alleged White Supremacy. How did such an illogical pivot come about?
It is crucial to acknowledge the irrationality of the turn from King’s argument for America to act on its principles of morality and equality to Kendi’s demand that America’s white population must embrace his remedy for racism, namely “racist discrimination” against themselves. Lest anyone think that I exaggerate when I call this an irrational pivot, ponder how Kendi extols discrimination against America’s white population.
The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination (How to Be an Antiracist, 19).
How have so many people come to embrace this irrationality? Usually, at this point, critiques tend to explain that Critical Race Theory stands behind this shift. For example, recently, Ray Sanchez explains:
Antiracism, as defined and described by Ibram X. Kendi and others, should be resisted because it is a morally bankrupt idea built upon Critical Race Theory.
Critical Race Theory is hostile to free inquiry and doesn’t allow critique. Rather, it asserts a Marxist ideology that pits races against each other: whites are complicit in a comprehensive, universal, systemic racism and blacks belong to an oppressed class.
The ideology which undergirds antiracism is Critical Race Theory, which is fundamentally neo-Marxist in that it bifurcates society into white oppressors and the black oppressed. It seeks to destroy societal unity and the American culture of opportunity and meritocracy. Every person, regardless of race or ethnicity, can create their own success—not so, according to the antiracists.
Any phrase, concept, or term that has Critical Race Theory as its intellectual scaffolding is defunct and morally bankrupt.
Everything that Sanchez states is accurate and indisputable. Certainly, the “intellectual scaffolding” of Critical Race Theory is located among academics of the 1970s who provide the requisite pretense of scholarship to win uncritical approval among academia’s administrators and professors alike. The latter are activists who repressively advocate this ideology in university and college classrooms of public and private institutions as well as non-religious and religious ones, including Christian universities.
However, to attain a fuller historical perspective on Critical Race Theory as an academic ideology, one needs to acknowledge the origins of its non-academic cultural force. The historical roots of the Critical Race Theory, including Kendi’s “antiracist” demand for “racist discrimination” against white Americans as the remedy for past discrimination against blacks, reach back to the militant Black Power leaders of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement. Black Power gave rise to Black Pride which together provided the cultural fodder that academics formulated into Critical Race Theory during the 1970s.
Kendi connects his appeal for “racist discrimination” against Whites with the 1960s Black leaders’ turn to militance and their forsaking of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s pleas for Blacks to be regarded as equals grounded in moral reasoning and the Constitution. His call for “racist discrimination” against Whites is no less immoral, combative, and militant.
Since the 1960s, racist power has commandeered the term “racial discrimination,” transforming the act of discriminating on the basis of race into an inherently racist act. But if racial discrimination is defined as treating, considering, or making a distinction in favor or against an individual based on that person’s race, then racial discrimination is not inherently racist. The defining question is whether the discrimination is creating equity or inequity. If discrimination is creating equity, then it is antiracist. If discrimination is creating inequity, then it is racist. Someone reproducing inequity by permanently assisting an overrepresented racial group into wealth and power is entirely different than someone challenging that inequity by temporarily assisting an underrepresented racial group into relative wealth and power until equity is reached. The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination. As President Lyndon B. Johnson said in 1965, “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘You are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.” As U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun wrote in 1978, “In order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race. There is no other way. And in order to treat some persons equally, we must treat them differently” (How to Be an Antiracist, 19).
One need not agree with Kendi’s worldview to acknowledge the derivation of his call for the reversal of “racial discrimination” to be imposed upon America’s white population. His observations compel readers to think beyond Critical Race Theory, which to the average American sounds academic and off-putting. True, the birth of Critical Race Theory among academics of the 1970s is significant to its ascendancy and to its current domination of America’s society and culture. Nevertheless, the loss of America’s moral authority and the rise of Black Power with its rejection of King’s appeals to ideas that predate Critical Race Theory’s conception by a decade must not be overlooked. During the 1960s a massive sea change took place in America’s social-cultural-political realm. It was a cultural revolution due largely to the mishandling and squandering of America’s moral authority by elected politicians, particularly by senators from southern states, but also by President Lyndon B. Johnson and later by the Supreme Court of the United States.
The next installment will comment on the various forces and personalities that powerfully shaped America’s culture to give rise to the academic formulation of an ideology carried by racial activists that now threatens to banish, even cancel, from our society the very principles of morality and equality on which Martin Luther King, Jr. grounded his call for the end of racial discrimination against America’s black population. For now, Ibram Kendi’s immoral and irrational “racial discrimination” against America’s white population is being embraced as virtuous by Blacks and Whites alike.