Critical Race Theory Compared to the Civil Rights Ideals of the 1960s

Critical Race Theory claims to be the new improved way to deal with racial issues. How does the Woke doctrine, spreading through American schools and workplaces, compare to the principles of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960's?

The creator of the above image is Woke Temple at Twitter. The "original document" above doesn't exist (I confirmed this through personal communication with "Woke Temple"), but it accurately serves as a summary of some of Martin Luther King's core teachings.  The "corrections" in the graphic accurately reflect commonly espoused principles of Critical Race Theory (For more on CRT, consider the lectures and writings of prominent CRT advocates Robin DiAngelo and Ibram Kendi).  See also this glossary entry for CRT at New Discourses.

It should be apparent that one cannot honor the memory and teachings of Martin Luther King and, at the same time, support Critical Race Theory. They are mutually exclusive, so each of us needs to decide where we stand on this clash of ideas.

In the early 1960s, I was a young boy.  I barely watched the news back then and I didn't appreciate the importance of the civil rights movement. That said, I always knew it was a bad idea to judge each other based on the way we looked. It made deep visceral sense, as did the platitude: "Don't judge a book by its cover."  Now that I'm much older, I sometimes imagine going back in time to march with Martin Luther King to make a strong show of support for the real Civil Rights Movement.

For those of us who were too young to march with MLK, 2021 is our second chance to stand up for true Civil Rights Movement.  Are you willing to be called names like "racist" by a loud group of zealots in order to take this strong moral stand? That would be such a small price to pay compared to what MLK had to endure.  Are you willing to allow people to call you names to help keep this country from decaying back to days where we judge each other by immutable physical characteristics like color of skin?  Where millions of people obsess about what "race" someone is?  To a system of categorizing each other that makes no more sense than astrology or phrenology? Again, this is your chance - - your voice is needed, and all you need to do is to say out loud those thoughts you are already thinking.  Judging each other by the way we look is an outrageously dysfunctional approach to interact with each other.

The longer we don't take a strong stand against Critical Race Theory, the more entrenched CRT will become in numerous schools (grade schools and colleges and see here), media outlets and governmental offices. Here's how bad it recently got at a major national museum.  See also John McWhorter's  analysis: CRT is a new fundamentalist religion.

You know what is at stake.  We've already set aside a national holiday in his honor.  Are you ready to speak up in support of Martin Luther King?

--

Quotes of Martin Luther King that bear on the principles set forth in the "document" above:

[Don't Judge Others by the Color of their Skin]

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today.

[Violence, Hatred, Love]

Hate begets hate; violence begets violence; toughness begets a greater toughness. We must meet the forces of hate with the power of love... Our aim must never be to defeat or humiliate the white man, but to win his friendship and understanding.

The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy, instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate. Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

[Segregation]

Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children

[More . . . ]

Continue ReadingCritical Race Theory Compared to the Civil Rights Ideals of the 1960s

Bari Weiss: Affluent Parents Who are Afraid to Speak Out When Their Kids’ Private Schools Turn Woke

Here's a short excerpt from a long detailed article by Bari Weiss. She does not name her sources because they told her they are afraid of being named. They also told her that these stories need to be told. Weiss titled her article "The Miseducation of America's Elites Affluent parents, terrified of running afoul of the new orthodoxy in their children’s private schools, organize in secret."

These are two-career couples who credit their own success not to family connections or inherited wealth but to their own education. So it strikes them as something more than ironic that a school that costs more than $40,000 a year — a school with Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s right hand, and Sarah Murdoch, wife of Lachlan and Rupert’s daughter-in-law, on its board — is teaching students that capitalism is evil.

For most parents, the demonization of capitalism is the least of it. They say that their children tell them they’re afraid to speak up in class. Most of all, they worry that the school’s new plan to become an “anti-racist institution” — unveiled this July, in a 20-page document — is making their kids fixate on race and attach importance to it in ways that strike them as grotesque.

. . .

But physics looks different these days. “We don’t call them Newton’s laws anymore,” an upperclassman at the school informs me. “We call them the three fundamental laws of physics. They say we need to ‘decenter whiteness,’ and we need to acknowledge that there’s more than just Newton in physics.”

Continue ReadingBari Weiss: Affluent Parents Who are Afraid to Speak Out When Their Kids’ Private Schools Turn Woke

MLK: You Die When You Fail to Speak Up for What is Right and True

Martin Luther King spoke from the pulpit at Selma on March 8, 1965:

A man dies when he refuses to stand up for that which is right. A man dies when he refuses to stand up for justice. A man dies when he refuses to take a stand for that which is true.

I am thinking of MLK's words, week by week, as I watch the moral rot of Critical Race Theory (CRT) spread through our sense-making institutions:  our colleges, media outlets and government bodies.  And more recently, we can see this at Amazon and Ebay and in the censorship policies of huge social media corporations that attempt to control what we share with each other.

The sad irony is that what is now passing as a continuation of the Civil Rights Movement is the opposite of the Civil Rights Movement.  The Woke movement demands that we judge each other's character and legal rights by irrelevant characteristics, not by the content of our character.

It's time to stand up and publicly declare that this Woke ideology, this Woke religion, is a fraud. Critical Race Theory divides us and spreads suspicion and hatred.  Critical Race Theory attacks the central teachings of Martin Luther King.

It might be uncomfortable for you to stand up to state these obvious things publicly, but there are many important reasons to summon the courage to speak up. Who do you want to see when you look in the mirror in the morning?  Do you see a person who is courageous or do you see a person who is afraid to speak truth to a misguided mob?  Are you willing to sit in silence while that mob smears the teachings of Martin Luther King, a man whose ideas are so treasured that we set aside a national holiday in his honor?

It's time to speak up, even (and especially) if you are the only person in the room willing to speak up.

Continue ReadingMLK: You Die When You Fail to Speak Up for What is Right and True

No Thanks, [Formerly Prestigious American University]. I Need to Go To School Elsewhere to Get a Real Education

John McWhorter has received many hundreds of emails from people who are dismayed with the Woke dismantling of American Education. Here is a recent communication he received, redacted to protect this person and published at It Bears Mentioning, McWhorter's Substack Website, part of an article titled, "If I like it, it's data; if I don't like it, it's "anecdata." No - whether you like it or not, it is neither dim nor racist to generalize on the basis of widespread and frequent events (i.e. both cop killings and Elect abuses)." McWhorter introduces this communicating by noting that this person had been "accepted into a graduate program at a prestigious institution."

It hurts so much that I have to decline your offer and several other great offers that I have received from elite universities and programs that used to be the dream schools for young people like me. I am simply very frustrated by ideology masquerading as objective science in today's higher ed. particularly humanity fields. Universities these days are trying to make young people like me feel guilty because we are white and because the whole system is filled with white racists, and me included. There is such strong moralization in the academy that is so certain that it has Science on its side in all of its proclamations. Frankly, today's academy’s ideological dogmatism is one of my major fear and hesitancies for entering it. I fear any work I do, especially in developmental or evolutionary psychology, would be evaluated not on its merit but instead on what is perceived as my politics based on how politically convenient my findings are. I have decided to move to [foreign country] to join a group of very creative and young [subject area redacted by me] on a [ibid.] research project. I want to spend the last 5 years in my 20s on something scientific, not political. But it seems that it is simply impossible to accomplish that goal in my own country.

Continue ReadingNo Thanks, [Formerly Prestigious American University]. I Need to Go To School Elsewhere to Get a Real Education

Michelle Goldberg’s False Claim that Opponents of Critical Race Theory are Refusing to Debate

At the New York Times, Michelle Goldberg dishonestly proclaims the following:

But the right, for all its chest-beating about the value of entertaining dangerous notions, is rarely interested in debating the tenets of critical race theory. It wants to eradicate them from public institutions. “

Fallacy Number One occurs in Goldberg's first three words. Goldberg knows full well CRT's critics include a large diverse group of people that includes conservatives and moderates, but that is not all. Opponents of CRT also include enormous numbers of people who consider themselves to be liberal on numerous issues. These many liberals fiercely oppose the CRT centerpiece: "fighting racism" by simplistically classifying people by color.  Goldberg and her favorite type of social justice warriors seem not to understand basic psychology and U.S. history. Classifying people by color is so incredibly off-the-mark, inefficient, hurtful and nationally dysfunctional that the U.S. fought an entire Civil War to end it, enacted a comprehensive set of civil rights laws to prosecute it and designated a National Holiday in honor of Martin Luther King in order to move forward with functional and kind-hearted ways to judge each other: by evaluating each others' content of character. The idea of moving past skin color as a way to judge each other was originally a liberal idea and this are now embraced by people across the entire political spectrum.

Fallacy Number Two. Goldbert states that "the right . . . is rarely interested in debating the tenets of critical race theory," citing to Christopher Rufo's statement: "“Critical race theory is a grave threat to the American way of life.”  Goldberg's claim is that critics of Critical Race Theory refuse to debate this issue. She makes this claim despite the fact that Rufo has been vigorously debating CRT on Twitter for the past year.  Further,

Rufo has also presented his views in the Wall Street Journal.  But perhaps Goldberg was referring to another prominent critic of Critical Race Theory, Glenn Loury? If so,

A longer version of Loury's statement is here:

And is Goldberg consciously ignoring this invitation by Coleman Hughes to debate Ibram X. Kendi? 

Or is Michelle Goldberg forgetting another (liberal) critic of CRT, John McWhorter who has shown that Ibram Kendi is incapable of honestly acknowledging McWhorter's precisely articulated critiques of Critical Race Theory?

If this is the kind of debate Goldberg seeks, bring on John McWhorter v. Ibram Kendi!

Goldberg is making her claim about the supposed refusal to debate while CRT's other rock star, Robin DiAngelo is busy grabbing exorbitant speaking fees for private events only.  DiAngelo has avoided any and all debates regarding her defective and destructive ideas.  In 2019, her speaking fees were $10,000-15,000.  And see here. How do I know that she has refused to debate her ideas in a public forum?  I invite you to run the following Google search: "robin diangelo debate."  You will not find any evidence that DiAngelo has ever subjected her ideas to public real-time scrutiny.

[More . . . ]

Continue ReadingMichelle Goldberg’s False Claim that Opponents of Critical Race Theory are Refusing to Debate