There are a series of euphemisms deployed by its supporters to describe critical race theory, including “equity,” “social justice,” “diversity and inclusion,” and “culturally responsive teaching.” Critical race theorists, masters of language construction, realize that “neo-Marxism” would be a hard sell. Equity, on the other hand, sounds non-threatening and is easily confused with the American principle of equality. But the distinction is vast and important. Indeed, equality—the principle proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence, defended in the Civil War, and codified into law with the 14th and 15th Amendments, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965—is explicitly rejected by critical race theorists. To them, equality represents “mere nondiscrimination” and provides “camouflage” for white supremacy, patriarchy, and oppression.
Abandoning Marx’s economic dialectic of capitalists and workers, they substituted race for class and sought to create a revolutionary coalition of the dispossessed based on racial and ethnic categories.
During the 20th century, a number of regimes underwent Marxist-style revolutions, and each ended in disaster. Socialist governments in the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, Cuba, and elsewhere racked up a body count of nearly 100 million of their own people. They are remembered for their gulags, show trials, executions, and mass starvations. In practice, Marx’s ideas unleashed man’s darkest brutalities.
Diversity trainers will make an outrageous claim—such as “all whites are intrinsically oppressors” or “white teachers are guilty of spirit murdering black children”—and then when confronted with disagreement, they adopt a patronizing tone and explain that participants who feel “defensiveness” or “anger” are reacting out of guilt and shame. Dissenters are instructed to remain silent, “lean into the discomfort,” and accept their “complicity in white supremacy.”
Worried about getting mobbed on social media, fired from their jobs, or worse, they remain quiet, largely ceding the public debate to those pushing these anti-American ideologies. Consequently, the institutions themselves become monocultures: dogmatic, suspicious, and hostile to a diversity of opinion. Conservatives in both the federal government and public school systems have told me that their “equity and inclusion” departments serve as political offices, searching for and stamping out any dissent from the official orthodoxy.
An equity-based form of government would mean the end not only of private property, but also of individual rights, equality under the law, federalism, and freedom of speech. These would be replaced by race-based redistribution of wealth, group-based rights, active discrimination, and omnipotent bureaucratic authority. Historically, the accusation of “anti-Americanism” has been overused. But in this case, it’s not a matter of interpretation—critical race theory prescribes a revolutionary program that would overturn the principles of the Declaration and destroy the remaining structure of the Constitution.
n contrast to equality, equity as defined and promoted by critical race theorists is little more than reformulated Marxism. In the name of equity, UCLA Law Professor and critical race theorist Cheryl Harris has proposed suspending private property rights, seizing land and wealth and redistributing them along racial lines.
In any event, here is the example that I give if I only can give one example, and that is race. We were taught that the liberal position -- there is no other liberal position -- is that race doesn't matter, that skin color is of utter irrelevance, that if you think color matters, you're a fascist. You're a racist fascist. That's the way liberals were taught. Only racists believe race matters. We, like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., we believe character is everything. Race is nothing.
Today, race is considered everything. Race is intrinsically valuable. The last people to say this were the Nazis. Now, I never compared the left to Nazis. They're not opening up concentration camps. However, it's either a fact or I should be held accountable for telling you a lie that the last idea prior to the current left to hold that race matters is the Nazis. It's either true or not true, and if it's not true, I deserve to be called on it. But if it is true, the left needs to be called on it
Do you know that the University of California -- And this is on the internet. They are proud of it. They have issued a list of micro-aggressions, this nonsensical idea of you don't realize you're a racist, but if you say the following you really are a racist. Here is an example. It is officially a racist comment if you say, "There is only one race. The human race." That is considered to be, by the University of California, to be a racist comment. That was the quintessence of liberalism when I grew up. It is now considered right-wing racism.
The obvious problem is that these two core assumptions are diametrically opposed. Let me explain. If different groups have minds that are precisely equivalent in every respect, then those minds are functionally interchangeable, and diversity would be irrelevant to corporate competitiveness. For example, take sex differences. The usual rationale for gender diversity in corporate teams is that a balanced, 50/50 sex ratio will keep a team from being dominated by either masculine or feminine styles of thinking, feeling, and communicating. Each sex will counter-balance the other’s quirks. (That makes sense to me, by the way, and is one reason why evolutionary psychologists often value gender diversity in research teams.) But if there are no sex differences in these psychological quirks, counter-balancing would be irrelevant. A 100% female team would function exactly the same as a 50/50 team, which would function the same as a 100% male team. If men are no different from women, then the sex ratio in a team doesn’t matter at any rational business level, and there is no reason to promote gender diversity as a competitive advantage.
So, let's start with sin. So, in the book, I talked about early Christian theology. And when I say early, I mean through the 1800s. Calvinism, a lot of the theological wellsprings from which Joseph Smith threw. It had a notion of sin that was much more rich and complicated than the one we teach in primary. And we get a sense of it in some of the higher teachings in Mormonism and some of the language about being free from the sins of your generation, right? So, we get a sense of it there. But sin was understood by early Protestant theologians, as early Christian theologians, it's just something we're born into as humans. It's a condition, right? I mean, it's the natural man that's an enemy to God, right? So, as created beings, we operate in a material sphere that is flawed, that is not yet exalted, that where there are just mistakes, there are accidents, people are hurt badly, people can lose their lives, laws are broken. And that's the sphere we move in. So, sin is the condition that defines us all. And achieving redemption from sin in early theology was about covenant with a community, to look out for the community and do your best to hold each other accountable and you transact through the redemption of Jesus Christ, right? So, it was a collective understanding. In the 19th century, that gets really rationalized, as what I call it is individualized and emptied out. So, we move to an idea of sin that's less about belonging to a community that struggles than it is about you individually did something wrong. You put your hand in the cookie, you stole a cookie from the cookie jar, right? You didn't pay your tithing. You killed someone, you coveted your neighbor's spouse. That individualized notion of sin. And then, churches offered a notion of redemption. That was if you come to church in a transactional way, you'll be forgiven of that, right? You show up. You pay your tithing or give your offerings every week and be a good citizen and don't say bad words and you're safe. You're check. But the downside of that is that sin evacuates us of have a much deeper sense of moral responsibility and culpability. It makes it impossible for us to conceive of, everybody's caught up in something wrong. We're all caught up in something wrong, right? And that is the scale of moral imagination we need to understand the extent of racism, right? So, sin is the structure and condition of humankind. Racism is the structuring condition of human life in the US in the 20th and 21st centuries. It's just the way it is. And it was made that way. It came into being through a set of deliberate choices, millions of them to privilege white over black. But it's a system. It's a condition. And the only way out is through choosing out and choosing out in community.
And so, I think, just to return your original question, Tim, how do we have these conversations, how do we translate them? For me, the spirit of it that is most that makes sense for me is in a spirit of shared responsibility. These are not conversations about who’s on the Lord side who. This is not you’re in and you’re out. It’s like we have work to do. I feel we have work to do. My understanding has been changed. It’s about doing through your actions. It’s about showing up where it matters with your money and your body. Right? And others will notice and follow.
racial innocence is actually a term that comes from legal scholarship. That basically this notion of sin and innocence, the simple version that started materializing in the 19th century, is transported into legal reasoning. The idea that a white person is not responsible and shouldn’t be “harmed” in any way by legislative or judicial actions and segregation and structural inequality, right? So, we see it in the 1950s and the 1980s, around US Supreme Court decisions, around desegregation of schools, around affirmative action, where they say, “Oh, no, we can’t apply this remedy because it would hurt this white person.” And they’re innocent. They didn’t hurt anyone.
racism isn’t a character flaw. It’s a system that allocates life chances based on your race. And the idea that race is not a real thing. This is something that scholars in ethnic studies and in social sciences in the academy have been talking about for decades. Whiteness is a fake idea. These categories of racial identification understanding came into being. We can pinpoint the moments in history when they come into being, when these words start being used in the way they’re being used now. They haven’t existed from the dawn of time this way, right? They became a shorthand in the 17th and 18th centuries where people could go into a really complicated reality and sort it out, right? Imagine you’re in Virginia in 1720 and you have people from everywhere flooding into this place, and race became the shorthand through which people could say, “You play this role. You play this role. I dominate you, you dominate them,” right? So, it was color coding almost to sort out complicated social realities.
A student of mine said, “Oh, yes,” he said, “Racism is not a character flaw. It’s a system.” It’s not a character flaw. It’s not you’re a bad person because you harbor some deep dark secret. You are part of something much bigger than you unknowingly, maybe sometimes knowingly, that benefits you because of your race. We live in racist systems. They precede us.
So, but if you look at it, there’s no gene for race. Different people have counted as white over time, right? There was a time in history, in US history, when Irish people were not considered white. Southern Europeans were not considered white until they demonstrated through their actions by opting in and supporting the white majority and discriminated against or differentiating from black people that they belonged, right? So, that’s a helpful term as well.