Apologies for the delay, folks; I had this post scheduled for PM instead of AM. Oops! —TPP
For all the insufferableness of “Pride” and its gyrating acolytes, America’s original pagan deity was, and will always be, race. There will come a time—and it’s already manifesting—when Americans will turn on LGBTQIA2+etc. movements with a vengeance. At a certain point, there’s only so much pederasty a people can take.
But race is a far more intractable problem. It is the dark (no pun intended) elder god come back to wreak havoc on Americans. In exchange for cheap cotton and cloth in the 1800s, we now pay a thousand invisible taxes in tribute to appease this insatiable monster.
Gavin McInnes argues that we’re living in a “black theocracy,” at least in a cultural sense. The gatekeepers of popular culture can’t seem to resist recasting traditionally European characters—like Anne Boleyn!—as ebony goddesses who somehow held twenty-first-century sensibilities in Tudor England. We’ve all seen the endless television commercials that seem suspiciously absent of anyone with a drop of European ancestry.
Contrast that with Night of the Living Dead (1968). The main character in that film, Ben, is played by Duane Jones, a black actor and university professor. George Romero cast Jones for the part not because he was trying to “make history” (although in 1968 it actually was rare and controversial to cast a black man as the lead in a film), but because Jones was simply the best man for the job. Jones himself backs up this assertion—it was never about race; he’s just a great actor.
I remember seeing Night of the Living Dead sometime in high school. It was one of the most powerful films I’d seen up to that point in my life—terrifying, yes, but also dramatic, with such a disastrous (in a good way) ending. I was on the edge of my seat. Not once did I think, “oh, man, they cast a black dude for diversity points.” I’m sure I recognized that Jones was black, but it did nothing to enhance or detract from the story—he simply was; in this case, he was Ben He was perfect for that role.
Interesting and original black characters are great. Black Panther (2018) was way overrated, but it wasn’t terrible; the late Chadwick Boseman was impressive in the title role. Miles Morales in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-verse (2018) was a clever way to introduce an “ethnic” variant on Spider-Man that didn’t simply steal an existing intellectual property. Who else but Sidney Poitier could pull off Mark Thackeray in To Sir, with Love (1967)?
The examples are endless. It’s possible to write compelling black characters without turning (to use the most recent outrage) Ariel into a washed-out black girl with eyes on either side of her head.
But who am I? I’m an evil, white, cisgender man. Let this articulate black gentleman explain it:
I’ll stop here before I end up in the breadline.
With that, here is 23 June 2022’s “TBT: Fighting Back Against Critical Race Theory“:
We observed Juneteenth, the new Independence Day for black Americans, here in the United States this week. The “national” holiday is an extremely regional celebration that dates back to 1866 in Texas.
To state the obvious but controversial: the only reason we have Juneteenth is because of a summer of racial violence two years ago. Apparently, our entire political system and culture has to bend over backwards to accommodate a handful of disgruntled race-baiters.
But all of that traces back to Critical Race Theory (CRT), which I described last year as an odious blend of “identity politics, Foucaultean power dynamics, Cultural Marxism, and Nineties-style corporate diversity training.”
Race-baiting isn’t anything new in America, but now it’s taken on a quasi-systematic, pseudo-intellectual, cult-like quality that has major corporations and government entities at all levels cowed.
But appeasement clearly doesn’t work. Indeed, I’d argue it undermines CRT’s alleged goal of racial reconciliation.
I said as much in 16 June 2021’s “Fighting Back Against Critical Race Theory“:
In the waning years of the Obama Administration, a strident new form of race hustling emerged. Combining elements of identity politics, Foucaultean power dynamics, Cultural Marxism, and Nineties-style corporate diversity training, Critical Race Theory (CRT) emerged as a powerful ideological bludgeon with which to batter anyone with the audacity to be white.
At its core, CRT proposes a simple thesis: any person of color, in any material or spiritual condition, is automatically oppressed compared to white people, because white people benefit from inherent privilege due to their whiteness. Alternatively, black and brown people face systemic racism—racism present in the very structure of the West’s various institutions—so even when not facing overt acts of racism, they are still suffering from racism nonetheless. The source of white people’s “privilege” is that systemic racism benefits them at the expense of black people.
The problem is easy to spot: any personal accountability is jettisoned in favor of group identities, so any personal setbacks for a darker-skinned individual are not the result of that individual’s agency, but rather the outcome of sinister, invisible forces at play within society’s institutions themselves. Similarly, any success on the part of a lighter-skinned individual is due to the privilege that individual enjoys.
In such a worldview, there are literal black hats and white hats, with one group allegedly seeking to exploit the other. Such a worldview inevitably breeds jealousy, envy, and hatred. Black Americans who accept CRT come to hate white Americans prima facie; white Americans come to hate themselves for their inherent “sinfulness.”
It also breeds a dizzying, impossible set of shifting standards: on the one hand, whites are instructed to “educate themselves” and to “do the work” to account for their inherent racism. But doing so—say, by reading black American literature, or listening to black American music—is denounced as “cultural appropriation” (a ludicrous concept in and of itself; we should encourage cultural exchange, and the adaptation of cultural elements into artistic works). The task is impossible, just as atonement for the original sin of “whiteness” is impossible.
Taken to its logical extreme, CRT would demand nothing less than the annihilation of whiteness—in other words, white people. Indeed, some apostles of CRT have called for just that.
Healing and racial harmony—the ostensible goals of CRT—cannot be achieved within the framework of CRT. Indeed, the introduction of this malicious Weltanshauung accounts for the swift deterioration of race relations in the United States.
Fortunately, there is some pushback, as the nation is slowly waking up to the insidious influence of this destructive ideology. Columbia University linguistics professor John McWhorter (it shouldn’t matter, but he’s black) decried CRT, calling it a concept “that sees life as nothing but abuse of power, and teaches that cringing, hostile group identity against oppression is the essence of a self.” He also praised Dana Stangel-Plowe, a teacher at Dwight-Englewood School in Englewood, New Jersey, who resigned her position over the brain-deadening impact of CRT in her classroom. The Blaze.com features some key excerpts from her resignation letter, in which she spelled out the corrosive effect CRT had on her student:
In a lengthy letter, the former English teacher revealed her fears over the “hostile culture” that she said has overtaken the school.
“I reject the hostile culture of conformity and fear that has taken hold of our school,” a portion of her letter stated, and added that the school demands “students to see themselves not as individuals, but as representatives of a group, forcing them to adopt the status of privilege or victimhood.”
A portion of the letter also added, “[S]tudents arrive in my classroom accepting this theory as fact: People born with less melanin in their skin are oppressors, and people born with more melanin in their skin are oppressed. Men are oppressors, women are oppressed, and so on. This is the dominant and divisive ideology that is guiding our adolescent students.”
“One student did not want to develop her personal essay — about an experience she had in another country — for fear that it might mean that she was, without even realizing it, racist,” Stengel-Plowe added. “In her fear, she actually stopped herself from thinking. This is the very definition of self-censorship.”
Even more good news: Florida Governor Ron DeSantis—who is really on top of things right now—urged his State’s Board of Education to ban CRT from schools across the Sunshine State. The Florida Board of Education approved his rule. The rule does not require public school history teachers to ignore the reality of racism and the legacy of slavery and segregation in American history, but it insists that the nation’s history be taught accurately, not as a lurid morality tale in which white people were out to get blacks the minute they arrived in Jamestown in 1619.
Put more bluntly, in March DeSantis said that “Teaching kids to hate their country and to hate each other is not worth one red cent of taxpayer money.”
In addition to Florida, Idaho, Iowa, Oklahoma, and Tennessee have also barred CRT from their curricula. Anecdotally, I know of several parents who have shifted to homeschooling their children, or have opted for parochial or private school educations, so their children won’t endure the mind-numbing, hateful effects of CRT.
Let’s hope that more States will follow suit. I can anticipate that some critics will encourage freedom of though, freedom of speech, etc., for educators. But CRT actively strangles those very things. At best, it should be taught as a theory to avoid, the same way we teach high school students about fascism and communism, not so they will emulate those ideologies, but so they better understand the concepts and tactics behind them.
End CRT, and let true freedom of thought and racial healing flourish.