I’ve followed Chloe Valdary on Twitter for many months. She is nuanced and kind-hearted, the diametric opposite of most advocates of critical race theory. In her hour-long discussion with journalist Christopher Rufo, Valdary compared and contrasted the typical training in critical race theory to the training Valdary developed, which she calls “Theory of Enchantment.” She describes her program as having the mission “to combat racism and bigotry by teaching society how to love.”

It’s not that CRT is ill-intended. CRT is good to the extent that it raises awareness of access of desperate people to material goods, jobs and healthcare. That said, Valdary accuses CRT of reducing human beings to their race. CRT claims that it is seeking equity, but it actually seeks “raw material power.” According to Valdary, CRT’s objectives are different than the objectives of the civil rights generation, which was interested in the inner lives of human beings that transcended race. For CRT, race is the “end all and be all.” CRT is defective in that it tries to reduce society to material things and disparities, ignoring transcendence—the capacity to feel empathy and the recognition of community bonding. CRT ignores the sacredness of life, the beauty of all human beings, and their imperfections and individuality that ultimately lead to “organic diversity.” Valdary points out that CRT claims to improve life, but it knows nothing about human flourishing and is thus “playing with fire.” CRT training is promoting hostile work environments that are “setting up companies for lawsuits.”

[What follows is a transcript I create for parts of the above interview. I cleaned up unnecessary or repeated words and phrases, but I have been careful to accurately preserve the flow and meaning of the conversation.]

Christopher Rufo:
Explain white fragility to me.

Chloe Valdary:
Okay, I will. I will caveat this by saying that a lot of these terms are completely incoherent. And so I will do my best to explain what my understanding of these terms are. But I think some of these are beyond explaining. White fragility is basically this idea that if you are a white person your very existence perpetuates white supremacy. You’re living in a fundamentally white supremacist environment. If you disagree with any of that, then you are just demonstrating your fragility. And so disagreement is a double bind, essentially. Disagreement is proof that you are a racist. That’s the cause of white fragility. It was made most popular by Robyn D’Angelo who wrote a book called white fragility. What happened was Robyn D’Angelo had a series of racist ideas about black people and projected them onto other white people. And she essentially said, oh, I’m having all these racist ideas about black people. I hardly know any black people. And she somewhat expressed that in some of her comments. It’s like, I’m going to go and assume that every other person that looks like me, extensively, also has these views and projects them onto other people. And if you don’t agree with it, then you just proved my point. It’s a very, somewhat pathological disposition, I think.

Christopher Rufo:
It’s like in high school, when one of your friends is like, Oh, yeah, man, you know, I’m feeling this way. Everyone feels that way, right? Everyone has this. Actually, no, it’s just you.

Chloe Valdary:
Yeah. Yeah,

Christopher Rufo:
White fragility discourse is a way for progressive, elite institutional white people to, in a kind of critical language, center their own experience. The most important thing is happening is my own kind of internal experience, my own internal deal, my own internal shame and, in a way, elevate that experience above actually anything productive or tangible.

Chloe Valdary:
I set up what I like to think of as a practice. The purpose of the practice is to teach people that, from a psychological perspective, racism often flourishes or occurs when individuals are operating from a space that is informed by a lack of holiness. What I mean by that is on a very, I say, psychological spiritual level, what we perceive often of others is what we perceive of ourselves. What we do in our program, is we train people, first, how to develop that sense of inner contentment and inner wholeness based upon three principles. First principle is to treat people like human beings, not political abstractions. We help our clients work through what it actually means to be a human being, which sounds really obvious and cliche, but it’s actually one of the most profound things, I think, one of the most beautiful things, most sophisticated things. How does one deal with this thing that is the human condition? How do you deal with vulnerability? How do you deal with mortality? How do you deal with imperfection? How do you make peace with these things so that they don’t control you? And how do you deal with emotional regulation? We teach stoicism for example, in the course and how you reckon with your own potential. You are trying to live up to your own potential. So the first third of the full training is really about teaching people how to make peace with these things, make peace with themselves and the human condition

The remaining two-thirds is all about, okay, now that you know this about yourself, understand that every single human being you meet is dealing with these same issues, because this is what is universal. So human experience. Now we can work on developing that capacity for empathy, developing that capacity for compassion, for curiosity even for people you meet who don’t look like you and have different opinions from you, because diversity comes in many different forms. Diversity is itself a very diverse thing, right? So that’s really the process. And then the actual pedagogical experience is very rich because it uses pop culture to teach all these things. I believe in bringing the past with the present, having the past in conversation with the present. We use articles and essays written by James Baldwin, speeches from Dr. King, Maya Angelou, you know, folks who came before us who were part of that civil rights generation who had a lot to teach us, not merely about race, but about the human condition itself. And working through issues on race, being rooted in an understanding of the sacredness of the human being. This is what these great leaders brought to us. There’s also stoicism. We also bring in a really multicultural, I’d say, curation of different things. So there’s snippets of Disney films that folks have to say, in words, to understand human condition. There is music, a study of different aspects of theme song and hip hop. There’s a rich conversation between the past and the present that transforms the client’s relationship to both, transforms the client’s relationship to themselves, and to their neighbors, and to those around them. That’s what the process is like.

Christopher Rufo:
How do you how do you deal with race? This is a fraught concept, something that is difficult to discuss, and for most folks, even more difficult to discuss, as it’s been highly politicized. How do you address it in a way that cuts through in a way that is rooted in the kind of the kind of philosophical foundation that you’ve described, but then actually gets to this as an issue.

Chloe Valdary:
We tackle race by specifically using texts. I’ll just give you a quick example. James Baldwin’s essays are taught in the very first part of the training. Our clients study the essays, which are on race, but are again, rooted in that understanding that something transcends race and that something is sacred about the human being. And that works through the challenges of race, through that paradigm of understanding the sacredness of the human being. By absorbing those texts by these individuals, knock on wood, James Baldwin doesn’t get canceled by these individuals. We thread the needle by using people whose work on race is already accepted. And we use that to help people think through race in the contemporary way and in this more holistic way that’s grounded in the transcendent. The Baldwin piece isn’t separate from this idea of treating people like human beings, not abstractions, isn’t separate from the race question, right? It is a critical piece of how you address race, because then you begin to understand I need to stop assuming people’s lived experiences, whether they’re white, black or otherwise, just because of their skin color. And what’s ironic is that critical race theory actually foments that scarcity and foments that insecurity in such a way that it makes racism more likely, not less.

Why is it so powerful, though? What is so seductive about this narrative critical race theory that denies the transcendent, elevates the material, elevates the biological? To me it seems a dark ideology, but also one that’s extremely pessimistic. It really says cast doubt on the idea that a kind of successful multiracial society can even exist. But despite that, what is so attractive about it to large groups of very educated and very smart people?

Part of me wonders if critical race theory is just is not just a byproduct of our already hyper-mechanized society. It’s just not one more example of the crisis of modernity that we’re experiencing, right? I’m not sure it’s a bug in as much as it may be the product of the the trend that we’ve been seeing in the country, which leads to the hyper atomization, alienation, and fractionalization of individuals and communities, I think there could have been another aspect of that. And, and I don’t think that that necessarily speaks to its popularity. I’ve been approached by companies who brought it in to their teams and saw that it wreaks havoc and are now trying to bring in something different. And so, you know, Justice Brandeis said that sunlight is the best disinfectant. And part of me also wonders whether or not this current trend is needed in order to get it out of our system.

Christopher Rufo:
Yeah, I think it in my mind, that’s exactly right. I think that it is really lived this kind of subterranean life where it has existed in kind of obscure institutions and journals and op-ed pages that have circulated and amongst itself, and now that it is out there and having an impact, the evidence is pretty clear. I don’t feel like the country is going towards more unity, more humanity, more integration. I think it actually gets more powerful, the more those things break apart. And my thought, too, is that it really is, in some ways, and this is maybe overstated, but it takes the categories of biological determinism. It takes the categories of this kind of racial hierarchy. And rather than saying what are some ways where we can treat people as individuals, what are some ways where we can transcend these hierarchies? [It is] saying, the hierarchies will always be there We just need to flip them in a way that conforms to our political objectives. And it in a way, acknowledging hierarchies do exist. It’s important that we take them into consideration. But it seems so fatalistic and I’m surprised that especially in the corporate environment, that companies that are highly dynamic, creative, entrepreneurial, optimistic, would adopt this ideology, essentially, as part of their corporate culture. In your experience with companies, what motivates [them to] say, hey, we want to really bring this stuff in. In your experience, especially, maybe you could share some details of what happens, or what companies have said has happened, when they try this experiment.

Chloe Valdary:
I actually think most companies are bringing this not knowing what they’re bringing in. And there’s sort of a notion of popularity around critical race theory on the internet. And so it could be that if you’re a leader and you’re not like doing the digging through the pedagogical contents of critical race theory, there are people on our team that want to bring a diversity training, this is what exists. A lot of people are saying it’s good. So now I’m going to bring it in. I don’t think that they’re into the details like you are, so I suspect there’s much more ignorance that informs it than not. And in terms of what happens, oftentimes, leaders, CEOs get anonymous responses, I’ve been told, from different members of their team saying, I don’t feel comfortable with this. Please don’t express that I expressed this to anyone, but I’m just letting you know that I don’t feel comfortable about this. And then oftentimes, there’s also a chilling effect as well, where folks don’t feel like they have any room to speak out against it at all.

But to your point about the entrepreneurial spirit, I actually do think it’s alive and well in a lot of these companies, and I tend to think in terms of, maybe for better or for worse centuries. And so, I don’t see critical race theory actually having a long life cycle. I think there are enough aspects of the culture and, in particular, African American culture, that are very much antithetical to the spirit of critical race theory and those two things are bound to clash at some point. And so that’s going to have an effect. That’s going to have implications in the world of business and then the world of schools as well. But those are some of the things that I’ve been told by higher ups that happen when they bring in the stuff that causes a lot of division.

And also, I’ve been told by people of color that they’ve been asked to do crazy things like critical race theory, as they come in, like write this thing on your name tag on your shirt that says I am an oppressed black woman, or I am an oppressed black man. It’s like, whose idea was it to design? Just aesthetic? I think it’s so bad. Okay, this is having its field day right now. But I suspect that this just creates, you know, an opportunity for better things to come into fruition.

We teach an essay that James Baldwin wrote in 1949, called “Everybody’s Protest Novel” that speaks to this issue, where he criticizes this impulse on the part of certain authors to produce what was essentially touted to be anti-racist novels. And he criticizes them as being as having nothing to do with the lived experiences of human beings, black or white alike. And he talks about how it comes from these caricature human beings, this misunderstanding of the human beings, the depth of the human being, the complexity of the human being. And just very flattening effects. I don’t know where it comes from. I think maybe it has something to do with being in academia for too long or even sort of an ivory tower syndrome. But I will also remark on the fact that Baldwin noted in another essay called “Fire Next Time,” he talks about the fact that a lot of racist people lack sensuality, and by that he meant just like a very present relationship with life, with life itself.

It sounds difficult to understand, but it has a lot to do with our hyper-mechanized society, how everything has to do with the cult of progress. Everything has to do with reducing human beings to a statistic, as opposed to honoring human beings for the sake of being just a human being and celebrating the beauty of being alive. And he said that this inability to do that, to exist from a relationship with life that could be captured in the sensual. led to this hyper-mechanized relationship with life that caused people or that influenced people to look at others as characters, and indeed look at themselves as characters. So I think that’s part of the issue. And this, again, has to do with the atomization of society.

You know, when I talk about individualism, I think it’s important that I stress that I learned a lot from Timothy Carney’s book Alienated America on this. We talk about atomization. Healthy individualism actually requires community because no man is an island, as the saying goes. So healthy individualism requires this balance of understanding the sacredness of the individual in the singular sense, but also understanding that an individual cannot flourish without a community. And we’re seeing some of that bear itself out with the byproducts of COVID-19 and the mental health crises we’re seeing arise as a result. I’ve said a lot here, but I think it has a lot to do with atomization, ivory tower effect and a lack of a healthy relationship with life itself.