A friend of mine told me a true apocryphal story. He is an old-fashioned “liberal” and a strong advocate of public education.
The Covid-19 lockdowns left him additional time to inconspicuously sit in on his sixth-grade son’s online classes. One afternoon, he observed an assignment in an English class in which all the white students were required to place their arms beside a brown paper bag.
The teacher, a white woman, asked if they noticed a difference in color between their skin and the brown paper bag. The white students verbally assented. The teacher then asked if the color of the bag looked close to the skin color of some classmates who identify as black.
The teacher then announced: “If your skin color is different from the color of the paper bag, then you are part of an American problem known as ‘systemic racism’ that does irreparable harm to all black and brown people. Further, if you identify as white, you enjoy something called ‘white privilege,’ which means you are practicing racism every day without knowing it.” The teacher then went on to ask the class if they had ever heard the term “reparations.”
Out of some sense of visceral paternal protection, my friend slammed down his son’s computer and told him to go to his room. He told me that he stood there, shaking with incredulity.
This Is Called Murdering Someone’s Soul
I told him his son was being held hostage by a new national philosophy called critical race theory, a moral eugenics program. His son was being re-socialized to be an enemy of his family, himself, and the state. The murder of his son’s soul was taking place before his eyes.
At age 12, this young man had committed no egregious harm against any black person, yet he was being taught to feel that he was the cause of all harms inflicted on black people. His son, I said, would grow to feel resentment towards blacks and self-hatred.
By the power of his whiteness, he could cause much harm yet also alleviate blacks’ misery and suffering. He would be made to feel like a monster for holding that power. Simultaneously, he would be made to feel like the Devil for not exercising this power to rectify every asymmetry between blacks and whites regardless of whether the disparities were caused by racism.
It would not be enough for him to not be a racist. He would have to prove that he was also an “anti-racist.” This child’s curriculum would continue to include a phalanx of progressive nihilists who would call for the annihilation of “whiteness,” which his mind would come to understand as the annihilation of all white people, including himself.
I told my friend his son ran the risk of not only becoming a racist, but a self-hating white supremacist. He could come to believe that becoming a white supremacist would be his only default position from which to protect his life from this assault.
Whatever You Call This, It’s Evil
Many practitioners of critical race theory would like us to believe they are not part of the moral eugenics programs suffusing the learning domains from K-12 to universities. Yet the calls to abolish “whiteness,” expurgate courses of all European thinkers, and the attacks against free speech are part of their agenda.
They call for equity, which means equality of outcomes plus reparations; inclusion, which is restricted speech banning anything some find offensive; and diversity, which is a violation of individual identity and enforced intellectual conformity. “Cultural competence” and “relevance” means catering to stereotypes of identity groups that results in a blank check to inform people they are not “culturally aware” and that they must modify their behavior. They believe dissent is proof of racial bigotry.
This is a form of mass indoctrination. These are the strategies to indoctrinate people into critical race theory (CRT).
Critical Race Theory Is Scaring People Stiff
I taught CRT as a graduate student while pursuing my Ph.D. more than 25 years ago. I can say confidently that, like any idea pathogen, CRT has morphed several mutant variants.
People from Ta-Nehisi Coates to Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo promulgate a variant of CRT. They insist people of European descent make society racist for their own benefit. They insist racism is systemic, and that it is present even if no one is racist. They claim all disparities in group outcomes are due to racist systems.
The application of all these iterations of CRT has a lot of people scared. A former vice president at JP Morgan told me his company had given millions of dollars to Black Lives Matter, which spouts CRT language to bolster its claims, so that when the massacres come, the people in charge there hope they’ll be the last to be shredded—or, at best, they might obtain a point of entry to negotiate for their lives.
I cannot walk anywhere in several cities in any American neighborhood without seeing a BLM poster etched in store windows. I’m hard pressed to believe that folks who run such enterprises really support the radically pro-Marxist socialist-communist axis of BLM.
Americans are experiencing real fear and intimidation. It is a fear that a war is brewing. When the mobs return to again loot and burn down our cities and wage an economic insurrection inside our republic, some folks hope they can escape the carnage with bribes.
Nuclear-Weaponizing Shame
The goals of CRT are to annihilate the souls of white people, to morally paralyze them via a protracted process of induced guilt, shame, embarrassment, and extortion. The call to abolish “whiteness,” a staple now of “whiteness studies,” CRT, and all social justice programs in our schools, is a euphemistic moniker—a death metaphor with a wide berth.
CRT promotes its death agenda by handing your soul over to any race pimp and hustler who uses his body and feelings arguments against the pigmentation of your own skin. It is a racial extinction plan. It is the Final Solution of people who recused themselves from a significant portion of humanity, making themselves into misanthropes.
Our new national philosophy deploys moral relativism and the suppression of dissent by criminalizing reason and logic as proper adjudicators of truth claims. To hate yourself for being white, even if such an ascriptive identity might mean nothing to you personally, is, in the end, to get you to dehumanize your life.
If they can accuse young white children of “spirit murdering” black children, as is a popular canard of CRT, then children will end up thinking that their values and thinking, none of which can be redistributed, are the products of their original sin. not their virtues.
The End Goal of This Is Collectivist Tyranny
They whose souls are being nationalized right now in our institutions will be the manufacturers of socialism-communism. Racially scapegoated and expected to atone for every social and economic disparity between themselves and blacks, they will be convinced communism is the grand elixir for all the maladies they and their ancestors inflicted upon a competitor race.
Until people realize that CRT is an extinction doctrine with the sole goal of stripping every white person of every defense they have to protect their self-esteem, agency, and free will, they will be prey for every American hating, Marxist-loving social ballast masquerading as an agent of change for the good.
A sixth grader can feel self-doubt when told such things because of the lack of an emergent identity that can track his successes in the world against forces that would seek to obliterate it. That child’s self-esteem can be destroyed by telling him that, by a process of chemical predestination, he genetically harbors the seeds of an oppressor. He is the carrier of a genetic pathogen—whiteness.
This whiteness is deterministic, and destructive of others’ agency. He must “democratize” his natural and cultivated talents that others do not possess. He must at some point see merit as a con game his ancestors built to keep blacks outside the domain of universal inclusion.
Is it any wonder that I, as a college professor of 24 years, observe students enter college convinced that the universe is stacked against them, and that college life a useless holding pen that will further suck whatever joy and vitality for life they might once have possessed when they knew who they were before the nefarious CRT left told them who they had to be?
These children suffer from the trauma of being subjected to social eugenics that encourage them to feel hatred for themselves based on the color of their skin. This is our republic. And these are our children, regardless of color.
It’s time to rescue them from the soul killers obsessed with remaking them into clones for the creation of an America few of us want to live in. The world they desire can be won. It is up to us to slay the dragons and re-gift the children their beautiful souls.