In his most recent column at City Journal, Christopher Rufo points out the dishonest claim by NYT columnist Michelle Goldberg that opponents of critical race theory are supposedly refusing to discuss and debate the merits of CRT. Goldberg’s claim is wildly untrue. As Rufo states:

For more than a year, prominent black intellectuals, including John McWhorter, Glenn Loury, Wilfred Reilly, and Coleman Hughes have challenged the critical race theorists to debate—and none has accepted. After Goldberg published her column, I called her bluff even further, challenging to “debate any prominent critical race theorist on the floor of the New York Times.” Predictably, none responded, catching the New York Times in a fib and further exposing the critical race theorists’ refusal to submit their ideas to public scrutiny.

Rufo then challenges those like Goldberg who vaguely describe CRT school programs as encouraging “social justice.”

They present critical race theory as a benign academic discipline that seeks “social justice,” while ignoring the avalanche of reporting, including my own, that suggests that, in practice, CRT-based programs are often hateful, divisive, and filled with falsehoods; they traffic in racial stereotypes, collective guilt, racial segregation, and race-based harassment. The real test for intellectuals on the left is not to defend their ideas as abstractions but to defend the real-world consequences of their ideas.

Goldberg and Sachs should answer in specifics. Do they support public schools forcing first-graders to deconstruct their racial and sexual identities, then ranking themselves according to their “power and privilege”? Do they support a curriculum that teaches that “all white people play a part in perpetuating systemic racism”? Do they support telling white teachers that they are guilty of “spirit murdering” black children? Do they support telling white parents that they must become “white traitors” and advocate for “white abolition”? These are all real-world examples from my investigative reporting over the past two months, all of which the left-wing critics have deliberately ignored in their rebuttals.

Rufo also challenges Jeffrey Sachs who, along with Goldberg, claim that lawmakers working to restrict CRT training are impinging on free speech issue. Really?  All you need to turn the clock back to 1850 to make it clear that muzzling overt racism in a classroom is not a serious free speech issue.  Rufo explains:

To raise the stakes even further, we could also propose a counterfactual. If the Ku Klux Klan sponsored a public school curriculum that stated, “whites deserve to have the power and privilege” and “black culture is inherently violent”—a simple transposition of critical race theory’s basic tenets—would Goldberg and Sachs jump to the Klan’s defense? They would not—and for good reason. Racism, from the Right or from the Left, is wrong. However, for the critical race theorists, opposing racism is not categorical; it is instrumental. Official discrimination against blacks and Latinos is considered “bad”; official discrimination against whites and Asians is considered “good.”

I have seen many news reports (including Rufo’s) that convince me that he is accurately portraying many modern attempts to teach “racial sensitivity” or “bias” or “social justice.” That said, we need to be careful how we categorize these programs and those who are advocating for them.  There are some productive ways to talk about race, including the programs advocated by Chloe Valdary.  The programs I find offensive fall along a continuum. Some of these programs (e.g., programs based on the teachings of Robin DiAngelo) shamelessly argue that we ought to see people as “colors,” which is a dysfunctional and destructive way to interact with others.  Other programs suggest that we strive to find differences in each other where there are not relevant differences, though they don’t say it as explicitly. Every program is different and must be evaluated on its own merits.

We must also be careful in the way we politically categorize each other.  I have increasingly pushed back on the willingness of many people to categorize people as simply being on the “Left” or the “Right.”  Many people who are considered to be “progressive” on many issues and thus on the “Left” (many people would put me in this category) find many of the CRT programs to be destructive, in that CRT programs reject many Enlightenment ideals. I believe we should do the necessary work to see human beings as individuals. We shouldn’t shove them into silos, as though people are fungible.  Bottom line:  Many people (again, I am one of them) who would generally consider themselves to be on the Left or “Liberal” find CRT programs to be abhorrent. This is also true of many people who consider themselves to be “moderate.”  Michelle Goldberg pretends that only people on the political “Right” oppose CRT programs.

Then there are people who consider themselves to be politically on the far Right who overlap with CRT advocates on whether we should see people as “colors.”  They differ only with regard to their favorite “colors.”  Left, meet Right, or at least subsets of the Left and Right. Shoving people into color silos as a prerequisite to interacting with each other isa  dead-end approach that will breed more of the same forever and ever.  As a means of evaluating people, it has the same core defects as astrology and phrenology.  This approach lives on for bad reasons:  path dependence and thirst for political power. We need to put a stop to any attempt to categorize people by “color” (or any other irrelevant characteristic), staying ever vigilant in the meantime to prosecute and criticize instances of bigotry.  I’ve discussed this two-fold approach here.

To the extent that we are careful with our definitions about what particular type of racial training we are considering and who is advocating for it (and who is against it), Rufo is raising critically important points. It is time to let the sun shine on many CRT programs because they make people suspicious of each other and they are ultimately socially destructive.

Let’s all start being more careful with the way we categorize each other and each program, and then let’s start having meaningful conversations and debates about all purported remedies to racial strife, especially programs based on CRT.