When Obama wanted to defend his ties to Jeremiah Wright, he began his
speech by denouncing America's "original sin of slavery". The phrase is
widely and unthinkingly used. And its consequences are the 1619 Project
and critical race theory. If slavery is America’s original sin, then the
purpose of America and her people becomes striving to atone for that
primal sin.
Suburban Democrat housewives reading Robin DiAngelo
and corporate struggle sessions forcing members to affiliate by race are
just striving to atone for America’s “original sin”.
And if they resemble a cult, it’s because civil rights moved from the legal to the spiritual.
Dismantling
the legal infrastructure of segregation took on religious and
psychological overtones. The legitimacy of ending school segregation was
tainted by psychosocial nonsense like the ‘Doll Study’ which found that
children preferred white dolls to black dolls. Even then the original
sin of civil rights was that its more academic proponents could not
properly define rights, and sought affirmative remedies that transformed
how we thought rather than what we did.
What we do can be in the
legitimate purview of government, what we think is not. And yet over
the years civil rights became obsessed with the origins of
discrimination in the human mind.
Countless tests were devised,
many absurd, (“What color is a gorilla’s skin underneath the fur?” one
particularly awkward racist test for racism asked) that were meant to
measure our thoughts.
The less racist our society became in
function, the more civil rights fixated on a gestalt of psychosocial
racism which explained racial disparities by blaming hidden thoughts
leading to assumptions that perpetrated systemic racism even as its
white perpetrators remained unaware.
The truly dangerous part of
this conclusion was that the focus of discrimination had moved from
actions to thoughts. Critical race theory is being imposed on everyone
from schoolchildren to soldiers because civil rights violations had been
redefined from the physical to the mental. Civil rights was no longer
fighting separate drinking fountains, but unconscious and implicit
biases.
The National Guard wasn’t being sent to open up schools, but to open up the human mind.
When
the government tells you what to do, it risks becoming a tyranny, but
when it starts telling you what to think, it becomes a theocracy.
Critical race theory, like most of America’s experiments in secular
theocracy, came out of academia whose experts have failed miserably when
it comes to tangible policy results, but excel at telling people what
to think.
The original sin of academia is constructing grand
theories. The social sciences found the root causes for its grand
theories in the interface between society and psychology. Their
solutions begin with having the government change how people live and
then when that doesn’t work, changing how they think.
The
sociologists who wrecked the black industrial communities of the north
with welfare refused to accept responsibility for the disaster they
helped cause and instead began blaming racial disparities on the hidden
workings of society and the human mind.
While academic civil
rights was psychoanalyzing America, the civil rights movement had soured
from Martin Luther King Jr’s Christian emphasis on national redemption
across racial lines to the Islamic tribalism of Malcolm X and the Nation
of Islam in whose mythology black people were chosen and white people
were a tainted race created through eugenic breeding. America was an
evil empire doomed to be destroyed by the arrival of UFOs protecting the
master race.
The next generation of activist clergy was
outwardly Christian, but had come either directly, like Jeremiah Wright,
Obama’s mentor, or indirectly like James Hal Cone,
Warnock’s mentor,
through the racist ideology of the Nation of Islam. When Jeremiah
Wright shrieked, "God Damn America! That’s in the Bible," he meant it
literally with America as Babylon and Rome. To the Black Hebrew
Israelites, whose movement has been linked to a number of recent
terrorist attacks, America is Edom. The common theme is that America is a
mythic evil to be destroyed.
The set of ideas that people
associate with critical race theory fuses the two corrupt successors of
the civil rights movement, academic racial psychoanalysis and racial
nationalism, through the writings of second generation black
nationalists who had come through academia, like Ibram X. Kendi, and
journalism, like Ta-Nehisi Coates and the 1619 Project’s Nikole
Hannah-Jones.
The modern proponents of critical race theory fuse
academic beliefs in subconscious systemic racism and black nationalist
convictions that America and white people are inherently evil.
That’s where critical race theory becomes critical race theocracy.
This
brand of ‘wokeness’ is legitimately theological because its origins lie
as much in black religious identitarian movements as in the academic
jargon in which it cloaks its racism. The synthesis of the two very
different literary genres results in strange poetry, personal
confessionals wrapped in bad sociology and worse history, mythic appeals
and nonsense jargon, that runs through everything from the 1619 Project
to ‘Between the World and Me’.
Critical race theory’s defenders
insist that it’s an academic movement, that its proponents are experts,
and that it just wants to discuss its ideas, but it operates like a
theocracy, silencing and suppressing opponents, critics, and even
insufficiently radical supporters. Its entire rationale is built on
denying that anyone can legitimately disagree with it or that debate is
even possible. A movement that dismisses reason and objectivity as forms
of oppressive whiteness has no interest in dialogue, only in
terrorizing its way to power as racial nationalists seek to do.
The
Nazis decreed theories and creative works off limits because they
believed that ideas could not be separated from the race of their
creators. Critical race activists agree that theories and works carry
the race of their creators in their intellectual DNA. The Nazis banned
some works over ‘Jewishness’ while critical race theory activists seek
to ban them over their ‘whiteness’.
The most brutal theocracies
are those which are the most pessimistic about human nature. The Nazis
believed that people were animals who could never transcend their
biology, Islamists believe that people must be ruthlessly conquered and
ruled to bring peace, and leftists believe that power relations doom
humanity to cycles of exploitation without an enlightened tyranny.
Critical
race theory is infused with the academic pessimism of the Left, the
identitarian racial pessimism of black nationalists, and the spiritual
pessimism of black nationalist theology. It exists in a perpetual state
of struggle and its exceptionalism is rooted in its victimhood. It needs
white people as an ultimate enemy whose existence gives it its negative
meaning.
Whiteness abstracts white people as a perpetual enemy for a racial and a spiritual struggle.
America’s
fall into the grip of this racist theocracy obsessed with a struggle
against whiteness, driven by racial paranoia and moral despair, is a
direct legacy of the intellectual and moral failings of the aftermath of
the civil rights era. These failings were as much white as they were
black. While the black family disintegrated in the grip of the welfare
state, white elites lost their religion and built an alternative culture
whose meaning came from politics and pop culture.
Wokeness is
just the horrid synthesis of white secularism and black nationalism, of a
society where music is worship, politics is religion, self-medicating
is meditation, and activism is faith. The endless narcissistic
refractions only produced a victimhood culture whose great crusade is
enforcing conformity through the only means possible in a fragmented
society that has lost its moral and intellectual underpinnings: online
bullying and political terrorism.
Kingian civil rights is
inaccessible to a secular society with no concept of forgiveness or
humility. It’s also inaccessible to people whose warped version of
religion teaches them to hate others.
To paraphrase John Adams,
"Civil rights was made only for a moral and religious people, it is
wholly inadequate for any other." Critical race theory is the inadequacy
of a political society trying to come to grips with moral and religious
questions, but with no other tools than power and the abstractions of a
scientism that is suited to studying distant galaxies, but not people.
The
Founding Fathers, now the enemies of critical race theory whose statues
are being torn down, were humble enough to limit the ambit of
government to the realm of government. And they made it clear that it
was not their role to tell people what to think or to believe.
America
held together through conflicts that should have torn the country apart
because we fought over the nature of government, not over the nature of
man. The Confederate statues that have occasioned so much ire were the
legacy of a country that was able to knit together its wounds as former
enemies forgave and honored each other in the aftermath of its worst
war.
Even when we were a moral and religious people, we did not
go to war over what was in our souls. The leftist theocracy terrorizing
millions of Americans is particularly unfit to judge souls, but the
intellectual failures of academia and the moral failures of elite
culture and leftist clergy has localized the failures of the black
community in the psychosocial gestalt of systemic racism.
The only way to save black people then becomes controlling how everyone thinks.
Liberal
theology had made the civil rights movement into the epochal moral
event of America as their ancestors had made the civil war the defining
event that transformed the soul of the nation. This was exactly the
brand of moral narcissism that Lincoln found so frustrating about the
abolitionists long before their distant descendants put on black and
began toppling his statues.
Civil rights became a force that gave
white liberals meaning. And that was another way of saying that civil
rights became a religion. The devolution of civil rights legislation
from inhibiting state discrimination based on race to enforcing state
discrimination based on race was the trajectory of a theocracy based on
the same sort of realpolitik that corrupts religions.
The
Founding Fathers removed government restraint while the new theology of
civil rights imposes government restraint, first over actions, then over
ideas, and finally over thoughts.
Equality has made way for
equity and the human mind is the new lunch counter. The only way to
achieve civil rights is, as in the Soviet Union, Communist China, Cuba,
and every leftist tyranny, by removing civil rights from all and
distributing them to the most deserving. The hypocritical corruption of
the system demands not just tyranny, but theocracy, not just control
over bodies, but over the minds whose owners might question this
self-serving arrangement.
What was once a supremely achievable
goal, the end of government restraint, has made way for the usual
unachievable utopian goal of an ideal society of the supremely
enlightened.
The paradoxes of critical race theory come from its
paradoxical intellectual origins through the social science academics
who believe that everyone can be reeducated and the black nationalists
who believe that white people are inescapably evil. They compromise by
believing that white people are inescapably evil and must be constantly
reeducated anyway.
It’s a compromise that allows white leftists
to pursue meaning through civil rights and black nationalists to pursue
racial identitarianism while leaving out non-misanthropes of all races.
Ending
this nightmare will require confronting the corruption of civil rights.
Positive rights lead to tyranny and negative rights to freedom. When we
define rights as things the government does for us, rather than things
the government stops doing to us, we all end up as slaves. Civil rights
cannot and should not be used to achieve equity by chasing racial
disparities. That sociological and theological rabbit hole inevitably
takes us into the realms of psychology and sin.
Those are places where the government does not belong and should not be allowed to venture.
Critical
race theory is less a theory than a theocracy, but both a theory and a
theocracy can be torn down by attacking its fundamental assumptions. The
failure to challenge theories leads to theocracies. If we want to
defeat this theocracy, we need to start with its fundamental assumptions
about white evil and black victimhood, and about an original sin that
passes not only from fathers to sons, but from plantation owners to
recent immigrants.
America and Europe did not invent slavery, but
they were the first to comprehensively destroy it. The presumption of
guilt that traces every Third World blight or domestic inadequacy to
some combination of colonialism, imperialism, and other nonsensical
‘ism’ is false and wrong. We do not need to constantly redeem ourselves
for doing what no other civilization managed to do.
We already have.
There
is no room for a racial theocracy in America, not in our colleges, our
institutions, or our military. Its existence is a declaration of war on
not only our past, but our present and our future.
Destroying a village won’t save it and destroying civil rights in the name of civil rights is a farce.
When
civil rights isn’t regulating how you treat others, but how you think
about them, and how you think about the theories that explain why
they’re the victims, that’s an uncivil theocracy.
