Imagine you own a small shop, perhaps something like a tailor shop where you have to assist each customer individually, and you find yourself in the situation where two people have entered at almost exactly the same time. One is white, and the other is black. You’re a sole proprietor, so you’re working alone. You are now faced with a decision: which of these two customers do you approach and help first?
Had you been confronted with this simple, everyday scenario a few months ago, you might not have thought much about it. You probably would have laughed and said it doesn’t matter; considering this a thought experiment would likely have seemed impertinent or even race-baiting. Maybe you still feel the same way now, but there’s also a good chance that you don’t. Though you may struggle to explain why, the thought of finding yourself in this perfectly ordinary situation may seem rather discomforting. There is a reason for this discomfort; you’re not just being paranoid.
The reason you’re uncomfortable is because a style of thought—indeed, an entire worldview—called Critical Race Theory has suddenly become mainstream. To be fair, this once-obscure way of thinking about the world has been in development for over 40 years, and has been seeping into our culture for the last decade in particular. In a sense, if you feel uncomfortable by the idea of being caught in the situation described here, it’s because you can feel the critical eye and fear its being turned on you. In a sense, you’re aware that the weight of your decision depends entirely on a factor completely outside of your control: whether or not one of the people who entered your shop, or someone who might end up a bystander to what happens next, has imbibed Critical Race Theory.
Critical Race Theory proceeds upon a number of core tenets, the first and most central of which is that racism is the ordinary state of affairs in our society. It is not aberrational, and therefore it is assumed to be present in all phenomena and interactions. The Critical Race Theorist’s job is to find it and “make its oppression visible” so that it might be “disrupted and dismantled.” This societal presupposition has been further distilled to a single operational question for those who accept the Critical Race Theory view of the world: “The question is not ‘did racism take place?’ but ‘how did racism manifest in this situation?’” as phrased by the now world-famous critical whiteness educator and bestselling author Robin DiAngelo.
That is, as you imagine yourself coming out from behind the counter to greet one or the other of these two customers—one white and one black—racism is present in your decision. If anyone involved accepts the tenets of Critical Race Theory, it will be that person’s job to identify your racism and make a stink of it (which might result, if you’re in certain American cities today, in your shop being vandalized, looted, and burned down in the coming nights). In some sense, everything in your life hinges upon you making the right decision in a situation that doesn’t allow for such a thing.
Why not? Consider your options.
If you choose the black person, say, racism is present in that situation. A Critical Race Theorist will ask how it manifested, try to find it, and will then call it out to disrupt and dismantle it. In this case, it is clear that you don’t trust the black person to be in your shop unattended while you help another customer, which is based in racist stereotypes and upholds racism. If you choose the black customer, you have chosen poorly.
If you choose the white person instead, though, racism is present in that situation. A Critical Race Theorist will ask how it manifested, try to find it, and will then call it out to disrupt and dismantle it. In this case, you clearly favor white people, who you view as first-class citizens over black people, who you see as second-class citizens, because you’re a racist. If you choose the white customer, you have chosen poorly.
Because Critical Race Theory begins with the assumption that racism is ordinary, present, and intolerable, there is no right choice in this plain, everyday circumstance. The only way to remedy this problem, to someone who accepts Critical Race Theory’s premises, is to find the racism embedded in the situation and then to call it out, so that it might be disrupted and dismantled. This is the world according to Critical Race Theory, and in such a world, you’re always wrong (and notice—your race never had to be assumed for these situations to play out to the inevitable conclusion of present racism: the conclusion was simply to be and was assumed from the outset).
A world that operates like this cannot be functional, and it certainly cannot achieve Critical Race Theory’s stated objective: to achieve “racial healing” by ending racism and making society more just and fair. If we want to achieve those goals, which I believe are possible, it begins by rejecting, not accepting and mainstreaming, Critical Race Theory.
This article was originally published at Roca News.
28 comments
Eenie, meenie, minie, mo…
What a lot of hot air….A friend sent me this website and asked me what I thought….Well ; I don’t know. As an amateur history buff with a degree in American History. I find a lot of the reasoning in some of the responses questionable. I’ll read more . I wasn’t aware of the entity CRT and will continue to research it. This continent that was once dominated by Native American people was overrun and dominated by white Anglo Saxon ,French and Hispanic invaders. We are still in the assimilation stage and will eventually be a nation of color. ie; Black,Hispanic,Asian, Native , Arabic etc; Then perhaps we will achieve the goal “One nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”
War amongst tribes was the norm before Europeans came to North America. Slavery between North American tribes was common practice, as was conflict over scarce resources needed to survive. It wasn’t some nirvana. Europeans had their tribalism as well. It’s the human condition. Life was short and brutal and war and slavery were normal.
It took liberalism and capitalism to overcome the deprivation that drove zero sum tribalism.
It’s better today in the United States , for people of all ethnicities, than it has ever been for humans.
CRT is an arrogance and ignorant of history or reasoning about the human condition. Plus, critical theorists don’t know how to do anything of enduring value. They can’t build so they destroy.
Which Native American tribes? Was there only one? Which tribes at which fixed point in time given lands they controlled were always shifting? What about the tribes which displaced the Clovis?
Lots of hot air indeed:-(
Reading your post, I don’t think you really have a grasp on history.
Well done! Fabulous. I love it.
Critical Race theory pours napalm on a bonfire and then claims to be firemen.
They have no solutions.
The scenario in James Lindsay’s article is not, in my opinion, supposed to elicit a ‘right or wrong’ solution. It is actually a picture of a fact of existence in the current climate : if one is white and male to boot, then one is already guilty just by existing in one’s white skin – as if that were a choice. And the implied extension if that is that this class of persons (i.e. they are not individuals with unique characteristics) are necessarily either active racists or the undeserving and slyly smug beneficiaries of white supremacist systemic ‘privilege’. Have none of these people ever read Dickens or Solzhenitsyn or any other writer who chronicles the horrific conditions of life for the average white person under various systems of economic organisation, or studied the history of the abolition of slavery in America where hundreds of thousands of whites paid with their own lives for their belief in the right to freedom of all persons ? If they had they may have got some sense of the relative ‘privilege’ of their own contemporary lives compared to that of their forebears and indeed the whites’ forebears. Unless people are prepared to really educate themselves in the details of history instead of jumping on a bandwagon of broad-slather generalizations made without knowledge of the facts, this movement will be just like all fundamentalist movements of the past: oppressive, steeped in ignorance, and pandering to the perceived ‘might’ of a small elite of ‘leaders’ – think nazism, fascism, extreme right Christianity, communism, and radical Islam as some examples from recent history. I all comes to nothing but the propensity to spread more human misery in its execution. Until we practice true compassion and egalitarianism as individuals, it’s all just more of the same …. and we move one step further away as a race from living in a world where our best natures can develop and blossom for the good of all.
Critical Race Theory is not a theory at all. In science, a theory is a set of principles that explain a phenomenon already supported by data. The phenomenon being explained in CRT is “systemic racism”. There is no data to support the existence of the phenomenon being explained, and most of the principles proposed to explain it are unfalsifiable. If an idea cannot be tested it cannot be proven or disproven. CRT uses unfalsifiable ideas to explain a phenomenon that has never been shown to exist. The entire field of study doesn’t even qualify as a valid hypothesis. Even in the “soft” sciences, methods and standards apply.
Thanks. Very insightful
Brief and telling. Nice work. I didn’t see it coming.
The words stereotype, prejudice, discrimination and racism all have distinct meanings, though often one comes with several of the others. Racism technically means to hate or dislike someone for their race. I’m not sure who has the authority to change the meaning of a word, but it seems Orwellian to do so. If we use the word racism for something besides hate, we lose the ability to talk about hate. And it seems to me to be cheating to take a word that describes some overt meanness and and use it to describe lesser actions, however much value their is in thinking about those other things.
The Pew Research Center has been polling Americans about their perceptions of race over time and their data show a vast difference in perceptions over the last 12 years. For example, in 2013 Pew found that 12% of Americans felt race relations were getting worse and 35% felt they were getting better. However in 2019 the numbers are sharply different, where 53% saw race relations worsening and only 17% believed they were improving. Of course the Pew reports over the last few years have indicated that most people attribute this increase to Trump’s election and given their choice in framing that question it presupposes that cause rather than other possibilities.
I assume the Critical Race Theorists see these changes in perception in a positive light, where Americans are beginning to wake up to the presumed reality that racism is ever present and proliferates every aspect of society. I suspect perception does not match reality and would be interested to see actual incidence of racism, insomuch as it can be quantified, measured versus these perceptions of racism. My assumption is that in pushing Americans to view the world through the lens of race, their default reaction is to attribute anything which can not be explicitly explained as being a result of racism. I believe this has had no positive effects and has only increased hostility among Americans independent of race.
This is how it was until recently: violence was violence. Then it changed to include “words are violent”, then it changed to “not only real violence, but also words, and now even thoughts” are violence, and it’s later iteration: even silence! is violence.
All this crap is derived from the critical liberties-erasing theory. It’s purpose is to punish every single non black person with self-guilt, remorse and atonement.
I don’t even try to make decisions about how to “act” around black people anymore. I simply avoid the situation all together every time I can. In the imaginary situation above, id ask name and serve alphabetically.
🤓 great ideia. I agree.
Maybe ask them who has arrived first. Let them decide.
Critical race theory is another leftist heads I win, tails you lose proposition.
To solve the Two Customers quandry, let them make the choice: as a Sole Proprietor, I’m likely already working on another customer’s order and cannot get to either immediately– or, barring that at the present moment, will have encountered it in the past and anticipate it again in the future. Therefore, there is a sign-in sheet on the counter for each customer entering my shop to write his name upon, and the first name written will be the first customer served. In the meantime, there are chairs and a selection of light reading by the window.
I would offer to flip a coin and let one of them take a call.
If you should act according to the so-called Critical Race Theory, it’s sadly because you probably have given in to that hateful ideology spread by @blklivesmatter and Antifa.
#NoMorePSUV_MUD
#ForceIsNeededToCrushMaduro
#TransitionWithoutChavistas
#SeeYouInFreedom
Critical Race Theory is Marxism in black face.
The only thing motivating me in the hypothetical scenario is not whether or not I am a racist, it is whether or not someone else might THINK I am a racist. I don’t want to appear to be a racist, so I make my choice based off of that.
I said this one time and got funny looks…..I DO actually feel awkward in certain situations around Black people…….but it is not because I have a problem with THEM, its because I worry that they might have a problem with ME (legit or not). Technically that is racist of me. I am judging (or worrying) based on their race. But it not because of their race really, its because of what society has told me about the relationship between the races. That doesn’t mean we should pretend there are no negative aspects to the relationships, but it does seem to me that focusing on all the negativity creates its own problems.
So much of this is that someone is telling someone else ‘what they are thinking’. Robin diAngelo seems to spend all her time telling people what they are thinking. But diA can never actually walk in someone else’s shoes, be they black — or white.
RdA is a huckster like Sharpton and Jackson.
You hit the nail on the head.
Thank you for the article! My solution is perhaps too simplistic but I’d simply ask them both for the first letter of their first name. The one earlier in the alphabet goes first.
If I didn’t see who came in the shop first, I would simply ask who entered first and then help them. I think most people would be honest about it. However, if there was a disagreement, I would just kick both of them out. Lol.
I would ask who came in first. Problem solved. If I got hung up on serving the white or black person first, then perhaps I would have racist sentiments.
Perfect.