When GOP Sen. Tim Scott declared that “America is not a racist country,” liberals blew a gasket. They were so determined to prove him wrong that they launched the ugliest sort of racist attacks against him as a person, putting their paradoxically toxic and racist “anti-racism” on full display.
They must have felt a bit betrayed when, within the next 48 hours, both President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris said exactly the same thing.
“I don’t think America is racist,” said Biden.
“I don’t think America is a racist country,” said Harris, the first black female vice president.
Perhaps Biden and Harris were simply showing some common sense, rejecting the destructive academic fad known as critical race theory. If so, they are right to reject its absurd assertions that the United States is an irredeemably racist country and that white skin inherently signals that its wearer should be distrusted and denounced.
More likely, as two of the nation’s top Democratic politicians, Biden and Harris have access to polling that shows growing public hostility toward that America-hating credo that, like a toxic metallic residue leaching out of an abandoned mine, has recently oozed out of the poisoned university environment, polluting the mainstream of public discourse.
Critical race theory is decades old but, having insinuated itself just in the last few years into cable television, social media, public school systems, and the very public institution of “cancel culture,” is receiving precisely the backlash one would hope for, even from those who do not know it by its name.
Developed in academia, it combines paranoid racial conspiracy theories with a now-orphaned pro-Soviet Marxist ideology. The fingerprints of its creators show up in its singular focus on racism in one particular country and in one particular era against one particular group. This makes it a very narrow idea, whose adherents can simultaneously turn a blind eye toward actual genocide in China while making the ludicrous claim that everyday life in America is a constant genocide.
It is worth noting that critical race theorists also have nothing useful to say about recent rashes of hate crimes against Asian Americans and, before that, the high-profile attacks against New York City’s Jews. Those attacks, not committed by white supremacists, don’t fit the narrative, but they do follow the pattern of violence that leftists generally condone — attacks based on resentment toward a group for its perceived economic and social success. After all, if you’re doing well in a racist place like America, you must be doing something that deserves a beating.
The late Derrick Bell, an academic and attorney often credited as an originator of critical race theory, became famous for a clever short work of science fiction in which he insinuated that whites would eagerly sell their black neighbors to aliens if they could profit from it. (He added to this the rather insulting insinuation that Jews would try to protect blacks from that fate, but only so that they could keep in place a social or ethnic caste lower than their own.)
Bell knew of the racial progress that occurred during his lifetime, both in the law and in changing societal attitudes. Most people today revere the civil rights movement and understand that it accomplished a great deal.
But critical race theorists reject that idea. They assert that racial progress ground to a halt in the 1970s and that the nation has been sliding back into Jim Crow ever since. They argue for this preposterous idea through an incessant campaign of small lies that inevitably turns up racism as the catch-all explanation for everything, wherever one looks. The critical race theorist has only a hammer and has convinced himself that everything is a nail.
That includes you and your right to free speech. For speech, critical race theory holds, is “performative.” Speech creates racism, and, thus, it must be controlled through speech codes and hate speech laws.
At this point, perhaps the Left’s newfound aversion to the First Amendment is starting to sound familiar.
Critical race theory falls short because it is such a gross oversimplification of reality. Racism is not and never was limited to the U.S. As a theory of specifically American perfidy, it is incapable of explaining broader global realities. It motivates people not to hate racism but to hate one country for a historical period that few are even old enough to have experienced.
It is also a thoroughly racist ideology. It imputes evil to people solely based on the color of their skin. It is already bad enough to attribute faults to people based on their own ancestors’ misdeeds before they were born, but critical race theory establishes guilt based on far less than that — your vague resemblance to the long-dead suspects is sufficient for conviction.
It is important for everyone to see someone as radical as Harris, who once went so far as to call Biden a racist, repudiate this repugnant set of ideas. Only by rejecting such radicalism can people of all races join together and create a fairer, more just society in which people of all races have an equal chance to work, flourish, and seek happiness.
