Critical Race Theory and Black Lives Matter

June 8, 2021 SOS Editorial Board 1 Comment

Critical Race Theory (CRT)’s main political manifestation is the unruly Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, which started in 2013 by agitating on behalf of black Americans shot by police, irrespective of court proceedings and facts contrary to the “police hunt blacks” narrative. True to a roughly 4-year, cyclic period of activity, BLM reemerged in the summer of 2020, following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, MN.

In a worldwide series of violent riots, BLM activists destroyed an estimated $2 billion worth of property and killed no fewer than 19 people. While the media were sanguine about the riots, calling them “mostly peaceful protests,” BLM burned small businesses, vandalized historical monuments, harassed innocent bystanders, and assaulted police with rocks, bottles, and bricks. District attorneys in Los Angeles, New York, Dallas, Minneapolis, and Philadelphia have declined to prosecute the great majority of those arrested while committing such acts, being sympathetic to the cause of so-called “racial  justice.” On a broader scale, BLM has successfully made “defunding the police” and legislating reparations for slavery live issues in the 2020 elections and beyond.

The orgy of violence perpetrated by BLM in the summer of 2020 is only the tip of the iceberg regarding CRT’s presence in American politics. In Seattle, a horde of armed thugs inspired by “social justice” ideology seized control of 5 city blocks, erected barricades, evicted police officers, and declared themselves a sovereign territory within the United States borders. Known as the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ), American taxpayers unlucky enough to reside within this Marxist colony were intimidated by nightly violence and a complete lack of police protection. In three weeks, CHAZ residents experienced four shootings and several unsolved robberies and sexual assaults. Seattle police eventually disbanded the CHAZ territory in an early morning raid. The construction team tasked with cleaning up the occupation’s wreckage had to remove numerous cement barriers tagged with “ACAB” – an acronym for “All Cops Are Bastards.”

There have been attempts to smuggle in support for BLM in the public schools. Recently, a Clarkstown Board of Education meeting erupted in a heated discussion over an allegedly “student-run” presentation on BLM. Residents were split over whether the presentation was appropriate. Many who supported the presentation were confused as to the true nature of BLM and believed that its adherents merely seek to rectify discrimination in America. They are wrong, but this is understandable; the media are sycophants when it comes to BLM.

In the 2020 American presidential election, debate moderator Chris Wallace raised the issue of what he referred to as “racial sensitivity training” in the federal bureaucracy. He was, of course, referring to the implementation of CRT-based training programs, particularly in the U.S. military. Wallace’s framing of the question downplayed CRT’s Marxist roots and positioned it as a program for racial harmony in the United States, but this is a lie.

The educators in Wallace’s “racial sensitivity training” classes, funded by American taxpayers, see America as a prototypical capitalist country, and they believe that capitalism is doomed to fail. As Marxists, they think this is inevitable because they are determinists: they believe that people do not have free will and are conditioned by their environment (or, in this case, their biology) to believe certain things. Of course, few ask the critical theorists the question as to how they, as critics of capitalism and “systemic racism,” managed to step out of the conditioning that we all allegedly undergo to see true reality. In other words, how can they claim objective truth when everything is subjectively based on one’s “lived experiences”? How are science and logic possible in a world where reality depends on whether you are white or black? To my knowledge, the critical theorists have no answer to these questions, nor did their orthodox Marxist predecessors.

When confronted with men and women who are themselves black and yet dissent from CRT, such as Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, Candace Owens, Larry Elder, Clarence Thomas, or Glenn Loury, critical race theorists seek refuge in the idea that these people have been brainwashed by “right-wing propaganda.” In essence, CRT advocates believe that black conservatives are not really black because they are conservative. Such a dishonest ideology is not interested in facts or prosperity but political power at any cost.

In reading the critical race theorists or attending their rallies, it doesn’t take long to discover their true agenda: the destruction of capitalism and the imposition of some variant of racialized socialism — with some anarchy in the interim in order to destabilize what remains of the capitalist American order. Ibram Kendi has stated in print that “to be truly antiracist, you also have to be truly anti-capitalist.” In a rare moment of candor, Black Lives Matter D.C. openly declared on its website that they seek to create “the conditions for Black Liberation through the abolition of systems and institutions of white supremacy, capitalism, patriarchy, and colonialism.” Thus we have the true goals for CRT advocates: racial conflict as a means to the end of socialism.