On Anti CRT Apologetics

Crispus Attucks via wikimedia commons

The Federalist today published an essay by Auguste Meyrat, an English teacher, titled: It’s Not Enough To Fight Critical Race Theory In Schools. We Must Replace It With Excellence. In it is a lot of what is wrong with conservative criticism of Critical Race Theory (hereafter CRT).

Meyrat also happens to be an author at The Imaginative Conservative, where he wrote an essay called Tucker Carlson: The New G.K. Chesterton? It says a lot about Meyrat — and contemporary conservatism — that he sees Tucker Carlson, of all people, as an intellectual descendant of Gilbert Keith Chesterton. If Carlson is indeed a “new G.K. Chesterton,” as the author suggests, there is little evidence that the Fox News prime time host will ever write essays of social criticism for contemporary journals, literary criticism or works of theology and religious argument. Perhaps, someday, Tucker will regale us with an incisive (if windy) biography of St. Thomas Aquinas or, say, a long essay on the Book of Job — but I won’t hold my breath.

Meyrat begins his CRT missive with gusto and a healthy dose of good old fashioned right-wing apologetics:

Parents across the nation are protesting critical race theory (CRT) in their schools, and for good reason. CRT is a racist ideology that blames systemic racism for all disparities in outcome. It blames and shames white people (along with any other races who exhibit “whiteness”) under the pretense of lifting and affirming supposedly oppressed minority groups.

Not only does CRT cast white people as irredeemable oppressors, it stereotypes and infantilizes other people by making them helpless victims. 

There are many errors in those few opening lines. First and foremost: CRT does not blame racism for “all disparities in outcome.” That is the conservative orthodoxy on CRT, not anything actually contained within the 40-year old academic concept. CRT is not a totalizing philosophy; it is not an evil unified field theory of the cosmos as the right would have you believe. CRT does not purport to explain the paradoxes of quantum mechanics or the identity of dark matter. It is mostly an ongoing examination of the consequences of race in our legal and criminal institutions.

Meyrat is clever enough to focus on “parents across the nation” in his opening salvo. He mentions parents four times during the course of his essay. It is a strategy - aimed at making dads mad and turning moms sad — pursued with zeal by the Murdoch press as well as bad faith actors like the anti woke Bari Weiss. Conservatives critics for the past year or so have argued that CRT leads to negative dynamics, focusing more on group -- read: racial -- identity over our shared common culture as Americans. Therefore: CRT is an “un-American” idea. It will lead to a dis-uniting of America. "How are students supposed to learn and mature when they are told their destinies are fixed and cooperation with people of other races is impossible?” Meyrat asks, somewhat earnestly. If you are a committed English teacher beginning from the false premise that CRT or wokeness is to faction what air is to fire, then what other conclusion is there to draw while protecting students?

CRT, vis-a-vis the right, is only a small battle in the larger, eternal conservative culture war against progressivism. This greater war at present includes wokeness, the 1619 Project and in previous generations included school busing, the rights of women as well as desegregation (though conservatives today would not admit to it). That is largely why conservative understanding of CRT is so sketchy. If the majority of Americans understood the effects of redlining on black generational wealth, or, say, the 400 hundred year history of policing, we would almost certainly have a nationwide reckoning of sorts. CRT is but another name for the many faces of the devil — socialism, political correctness, relativists, revolutionaries, Old Scratch, what have you. And proper conservatives, to echo the opening chords of National Review, “stand athwart history yelling ‘Stop’!”

To his credit, Meyrat is not a reflexive right-wing yahoo. Although his understanding of CRT is filtered through the ideological prism darkly, he does not embrace Charles Murry’s racial pseudoscience as Tucker “GK Chesterton” Carlson does. In the final part of his essay, “Promote Real Diversity, Not Demeaning Stereotypes” he shows a real desire at finding solutions, not just demolishing any historical introspection. As an actual English teacher in the Dallas area with skin in the game, he does not discount diversity, at least not entirely. Meyrat cites the educational philosophy of Marva Collins, somewhat of a cross between Booker T. Washington’s black conservatism combined with an inner-city based form of classical education. “It’s important to have different types of students succeed and learn from one another,” Meyrat writes. “A pure cutthroat meritocracy that denies chances for social and economic mobility effectively creates a caste system. “

Unfortunately, he ends the essay by adding that CRT, too, creates a caste system. As if CRT were equal to the centuries of neglect. I myself have attended private, Catholic and inner city public schools in my lifetime. The inner city public schools in the 1980s were segregated, starved for resources and academically behind the private and Catholic schools. Any African-American who attended public schools in the 80s can tell you about Crispus Attucks. Attucks, an escaped slave, was killed in the Boston massacre, almost a century before the end of slavery. He was one of the only three African-American historical figures (along with Booker T. Washington and Fredrick Douglas) taught at my public school. Looking backwards, these highly curated omissions of American history are at best comedic, and at worst, more shameless ways to keep the rabble in line. Surely, in 20021, we have come to a more sophisticated understanding of the African-American historical contribution to the making of this country than we had in the mid 1980s.

Or is that sentiment just so much — “Critical Race Theory”?