Resisting Critical Race Theory Workshop, Session 2 of 5
What is Critical Race Theory? What does it believe? Where does it come from? How does it work? And what can we do about it? These are core questions to understanding our times. In this series of lectures, originally delivered in Tampa, Florida, in July of 2021, James Lindsay, the founder of New Discourses, gives thorough, deep answers to these questions.
In the second of these insightful lectures, Lindsay takes us into the “proximate ideological roots” of Critical Race Theory. These twentieth-century ideological antecedents to CRT include the Critical Legal Studies movement in law, the New Left and its radical activism (as it went first into the streets and then into the classroom), neo-Marxism (also known as Critical Marxism or Critical Theory), Cultural Marxism, and postmodern Theory. Critical Race Theory, you’ll learn in this lecture, did not arise in a vacuum, out of nowhere. It arose from Marxists who needed to answer certain questions about why their Theory had failed in so many disastrous ways and how they might get to their glorious Revolution by other means. Critical Race Theory turns out to be one of those means, and in this lecture, Lindsay makes it clear where these lines of thought came from and how they separated and then recombined to give us the Identity Marxist and Woke Marxist Theories we see today, especially including Critical Race Theory. In this lecture, it will become absolutely clear why Lindsay characterizes Critical Race Theory simply as “a neo-Marxist conflict theory of race, i.e., Race Marxism.” You will also come away understanding the twentieth century history of Marxist thought better than ever. Join him in this and the other lectures in the series to understand Critical Race Theory like you never have before!
For those interested in learning even more, Lindsay’s newest book, Race Marxism: The Truth About Critical Race Theory and Praxis, was developed out of the notes for this series of lectures. His notes for this lecture served as the basis for the very detailed third chapter of the book. Get the book and follow along with the lectures!
Session 1: What is Critical Race Theory?
Session 3: The Deep Ideological Origins of Critical Race Theory
Session 4: How Critical Race Theory Operates
Session 5: What to Do About Critical Race Theory
The audio version of this presentation is available on SoundCloud, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or by RSS.
3 comments
Critical theory, the great opposer. I think someone else has been called that before, but not by you.
That Angela Davis had a spot on “F8nding Your Roots”.
Of course they painted her as some civil rights pioneer, while conviently leaving out her past history of holding people at gunpoint and supporting a mass murderer cultist.
Though this section is intended to explicate the origins of CRT, I was most captivated by the discussion of Repressive Tolerance. The very phrase is discordant. But there is one “cultural” group which can very faithfully swear by this way of thinking: The criminals.
I don’t mean people who get parking tickets or even those who find themselves cheating on their wife. I am talking about people who live and breath a life of deceit and – in a just society – are in constant fear of being caught and exposed. They walk around in all manner of professions, but woe be to the society that allows them to take over!
If there is one constant in any society it is its distaste for the criminal. And if there is one complaint the criminal could level at any society with total certainty, it is that it oppresses him. (And for good reason!) I see this as the underlying genesis for Marxism and related “theories.” They simply attempt to justify the criminal’s attempts to “get even.”