Here's What CRT (Critical Race Theory) CENSORS: The Anti-Working Class PURPOSE of the Systemic Racial Discrimination it Describes
The URL of this article is https://www.pdrboston.org/what-crt-censors ; please share it widely
By John Spritzler
August 25, 2021
[Also please see "The 1619 Project: A Double-Edged Sword"]
[Also see "Racial Discrimination Against Non-Whites is Rampant and Harms Working Class People of ALL Races"]
[Read "Is it a 'Privilege' Not to be Discriminated Against?"]
[Also see "Most Southern Whites HATED the Confederacy"]
[Also see "The Southern Tenant Farmers Union"]
[Also, just for the record, you might want to read "Did Black People Own Slaves?"]
& read about this very recent event:
"Reparations the GOOD Way, Not the Bad Way"
Is Cornel West our Big Leader?
PHONEY LIBERAL MEDIA "ANTI-RACISM"
The bitter racial conflict in the United States over the teaching of CRT has been deliberately fomented by the American ruling class in a very sophisticated manner, which is the subject of this article.
Critical Race Theory, as the phrase is nowadays being used by many people in popular discourse, refers to the current teaching about race, anywhere from elementary schools to law schools, that describes the centuries of systemic racial discrimination against non-whites in the American colonies and subsequent United States.
THE CONNECTION BETWEEN THE CRT LAW SCHOOL THEORY AND K-12 CLASSROOM TEACHING
Here's why something taught in K-12 schools today is being referred to by many people as CRT, a somewhat obscure theory only taught in some law schools, a theory that emphasizes the fact that laws could promote systemic racial discrimination against non-whites even when it was not obvious that they did so or that they were intended by the law-writers to do so. The connection between this CRT law school theory and K-12 classroom instruction about racial discrimination by teachers who seldom have even heard of the law school theory, is this: in both cases something (laws in former case, white working class people [supposedly] enjoying "white privilege" in the latter case) is said to be racist (oppressive of non-whites) even though the racism is not necessarily intentional or even consciously known by the law-makers or by the white working class people [supposedly] enjoying "white privilege." (Read here why "supposedly.") Here is how this happens.
This teaching about the fact of systemic racial discrimination against non-whites (yes, it is a fact and there are still racist laws today!) in K-12 schools CENSORS any mention of the PURPOSE--the anti-working class purpose--of this racial discrimination.[3] At the same time, this teaching about race takes place in the context of the U.S. ruling class (via its liberal wing) having very widely and successfully promoted the very false view that the purpose of this racial discrimination was/is to benefit working class whites (which is shown in great detail below to be false).
In past decades the phrase "racial discrimination (against non-whites)" was used in the mass media and elsewhere to refer to the fact of this racial discrimination; this phrase was a good one because it pointed the accusing finger correctly at the person or institution that did, or was doing, the discriminating. But in recent decades the ruling class has virtually eliminated the phrase "racial discrimination (against non-whites)" from public discourse and replaced it with the phrase "white privilege," which refers to the same thing that the earlier phrase referred to but--and this is key!--wrongly points the accusing finger at working class white people just because they are white, on the false grounds that racial discrimination against non-whites benefits white working class people.
Because the ruling class has so successfully promoted the idea that racial discrimination against non-whites benefits white working class people, the result is that ANY teaching about the fact of such racial discrimination, when its anti-working class actual purpose is censored as it invariably is today in K-12 schools (because teachers either don't know its anti-working class purpose or fear being fired if they teach it), implicitly says that white working class people were/are the beneficiaries of this racial discrimination and hence were/are guilty of being oppressors of non-whites, of being (knowingly or not, deliberately or not) racist oppressors.
The reason why many white working class people object to what they refer to as CRT is not because they don't want the truth about past and current racial discrimination to be taught; it is because they very understandably don't want the lie--that white working class people are/were guilty racist oppressors simply because they have white skin-- to be taught.
What is wrong is not white working class people being angry at being falsely accused of being racist oppressors; what's wrong is the teaching about the fact of past and current racial discrimination against non-whites in a context that falsely says this discrimination did and does benefit white working class people and teaching this with the contrary truth--that it HARMED white working class people--censored.
CRT (both the law school version and the K-12 version) censors the parts of our history that shed light on the purpose of systemic racial discrimination against non-whites: to enforce the oppression of ALL races of working class people by the upper class. This censored history--what was censored is presented below--shows that systemic racial discrimination was begun by the late 17th and early 18th century upper class in the North American British colonies to destroy the working class solidarity among all races of laborers that existed then, solidarity that scared the living daylights out of the upper class. The new (it was totally unprecedented) systemic racial discrimination was designed to harm, not benefit, the laborers of European descent (who would come to be called "white"), by ensuring that they would not be able to successfully challenge the power of the upper class that oppressed them terribly.
Specifically, the new (in the 17th century) racial discrimination--new in that it was against the entire race of people of African descent, not just individuals--was designed to destroy the solidarity that had existed between laborers of European descent and laborers of African descent by creating fear and resentment between them and, by forcing the latter to live in a dehumanized and humiliating condition, to make the former have contempt for them. This KEY truth is absent (deliberately so) from the CRT curriculums. CRT's "The 1619 Project" devotes one single sentence (out of more than 80 pages of dense print) to the fact that slavery happened to drive down white wages, but presents this fact as if it were an unintended consequence; there is no mention of the fact that it was the deliberate purpose of chattel slavery to destroy the solidarity of the slave and non-slave laborers so that the upper class could oppress them both by, among other things, keeping wages low for both.[8]
MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. AND FREDERICK DOUGLASS TOLD THE KEY TRUTH ABOUT THE PURPOSE OF SYSTEMIC RACIAL DISCRIMINATION AGAINST NON-WHITES, BUT CRT CENSORS THIS KEY FACT
In CRT's virtual bible, "The 1619 Project," there is no mention of the fact that Martin Luther King, Jr., in his 1965 Selma, Alabama speech (read it and listen to it here), explicitly explained this purpose of Jim Crow: to enable the upper class in the South to oppress both blacks and poor whites.
"The 1619 Project" mentions Frederick Douglass twice, but never even hints that he said this in his My Bondage and My Freedom:
"The slaveholders, with a craftiness peculiar to themselves, by encouraging the enmity of the poor, laboring white man against the blacks, succeeds in making the said white man almost as much a slave as the black slave himself. The difference between the white slave, and the black slave, is this: the latter belongs to one slaveholder, and the former belongs to all the slaveholders, collectively. The white slave has taken from him, by indirection, what the black slave has taken from him directly, and without ceremony. Both are plundered, and by the same plunderers. The slave is robbed, by his master, of all his earnings, above what is required for his bare physical necessities; and the white man is robbed by the slave system, of the just results of his labor, because he is flung into open competition with a class of laborers who work without wages."
Nor does "The 1619 Project" mention what Angela Davis said in this 1972 video (it's also here at time 3:52).
"Racism, in terms of its material base, means super-exploitation. Economically it means that black people get the worst of the entire lot economically. It also means that the capitalist, the boss, is able to divide black workers from white workers. Why? Because he tells the white worker that his problem is not those who control his life, those who take his labor and turn it into profit for themselves, but his problem is the black man who's trying to get his job. And so racism is operated as a divisive force to prevent the emergence of a real revolution in this country."
Nor does "The 1619 Project" mention that the white slave-owners admitted that slavery kept the poor whites poor. Read about one typical slave-owner admitting this, as reported by the Northern visitor he admitted it to in a book reviewed in an 1862 publication, when, after the slave--owner explained to the author that the slave-owners' power relied mainly on getting the poor whites to vote for the pro-slavery politicians [both major parties, the Democratic and Whig, were pro-slavery] was asked by the author, "Then free-schools and education would destroy slavery?" and the slave-owner replied:
"Of course they would. If the poor whites realized that slavery kept them poor would they not vote it down?" [Pg. 541]
By thus censoring the true purpose of systemic racial discrimination, CRT implicitly sends the false message that the purpose was to benefit all white people at the expense of non-white suffering. This implicit message is a false accusation against ordinary white people, an accusation that says they and their forebears are (were) all guilty of being racist oppressors.
When censored this way, especially when used as a curriculum in K-12 public schools [6], CRT pits white working class people against non-whites; it causes the whites to oppose the teaching of CRT in our schools because it implies that they are all guilty racist oppressors, and it causes non-whites to demand that CRT be taught because it describes the reality of systemic racial discrimination in our history. This is how CRT is used by the ruling class for divide-and-rule along race lines, something that it has been doing in different ways for centuries.
Here's some of the KEY history of the origin of racial chattel slavery and systemic racial discrimination that CRT has censored, the history that makes the purpose of systemic racial discrimination evident by examining how and WHY it originated.
THE CENSORED HISTORY
In 1676-7 there was a rebellion of English and African descended bond laborers (indentured servants and slaves [1]) against the ruling class of Virginia, known as Bacon's Rebellion. Few Americans have heard about this momentous event and how the upper class responded to it because the ruling class in charge of our education today knows that if Americans knew about this event they would understand how racial discrimination is a weapon used by the rich against all working class people regardless of the color of their skin.
Nathaniel Bacon was a member of the ruling elite who launched a rebellion for aims that did not involve liberating bonded laborers [1] from their bondage. Bacon, however, relied on bonded laborers for his armed uprising and in the course of it, in order to maintain the support of his followers, he was obliged to do the unthinkable: he "proclam'd liberty to all Servants and Negro's" [this and the following accounts are from T.W. Allen's The Invention of the White Race, volume 2, pp 213-14 (and other indicated pages for the quotations below; the book provides the primary source references)].
"The Royal Commissioners noted that "sundry servants and other persons of desperate fortunes in Virginia during the late rebellions deserted from their masters and ran into rebellion on the encouragement of liberty...It became clear, in the words of one Virginia account, 'the name of Authority had but little power to [w]ring the Sword out of these Mad fellows hands.' Authority failing, [Captain Thomas] Grantham [of the thirty gun Concord] 'resalved to acoste them with never to be performed promises" of pardon for the freemen [former indentured servants] and freedom for the bond-laborers, English and Negroes, such as had constituted the rebel army from the time of the burning of Jamestown [by the rebels]...Grantham described the historic encounter:
'I went to Colonel West's house about three miles further, which was their Cheife Garrison and Magazine; I there mett about foure hundred English and Negroes in Armes, who were much dissatisfied at the Surrender of the Point, saying I had betray'd them, and thereupon some were for shooting mee, and others were for cutting mee in peeces; I told them I would willingly surrender myselfe to them, till they were satisfied from his Majestie, and did ingage to the Negroes and Servants, that they were all pardoned and freed from their Slavery: and with faire promises and Rundletts of Brandy, I pacified them, giving them severall Noates under my hand, that what I did was by the Order of His Majestie and the Governor...Most of them I persuaded to goe to their Homes...except about Eighty Negroes and Twenty English which would not deliver Armes.'
"Grantham's testament has significance that is beyond exaggeration: in Virginia, 128 years before William Lloyd Garrison was born, laboring-class African-Americans and European-Americans fought side by side for the abolition of slavery. In so doing they provided the supreme proof that the white race [as a concept designed to achieve social control by the ruling class] did not then exist."
The solidarity between laboring-class African-Americans and European-Americans [1] fighting alongside each other against the upper class that exploited them both, demanding the abolition of bond labor, frightened the Virginia ruling class extremely. It was precisely to prevent such solidarity--to destroy it!--and thereby secure their domination over all laboring people, that the ruling class did something drastic. They instituted overt racial discrimination in order to make working class people of European descent view those of African descent as less than fully human and thereby foment mistrust and resentment and even fear between the former and latter groups of working class people.
They broke with centuries of English common law to create an entirely novel system of social control based on creating something that had not previously existed--a "white race" defined as people of European descent who, no matter how poor, would, by newly enacted law, hold a higher social position than absolutely every person of African descent, no matter how wealthy. Heretofore individual people had been deprived of their liberty, as were indentured servants, and some people of African descent had been made indentured servants for life (which is one definition of slavery), but not yet had an entire race of people been dehumanized by being made thoroughly inferior under the law to people of European descent. For the British upper class, however, this was a case of desperate times requiring desperate measures.
As recounted by T.W. Allen in his book, the British ruling class in the American colonies had enormous fear of solidarity existing among all the bond-laborers, both of European and African descent, and for that reason knew that they needed to use a new and very different method to control the bond-laborers: explicit discrimination based on race rather than property.
"In January 1677 the Lieutenant Governor of Maryland, Thomas Notley, watching with understandable anxiety the unfolding events in Virginia, had sounded a warning. 'There must be an alteration though not of the Government yet in the Government[;] new men should be put in power. the old men will never agree with the common people, and if that not be done, His majesty will never find a well settled Government in that Colony.' Four months later, Notley again made the point in a letter to Lord Baltimore. If a new leader came forward ready to risk his life in the cause, he said, 'the Commons of Virginia would Emmire themselves as deep in Rebellion as ever they did in Bacon's time.' The plantation bourgeoise must find a new strategy for social control, for 'if the Ould Course be taken, and if Coll. Jeoffreys [Herbert Jeffreys, Berkeley's successor as Royal Governor of Virginia] build his proceedings upon the Ould foundation its neither him nor all his Majesties Souldiers in Virginia will either satisfy or Rule these people.'" [pg. 221-2]
"The [Bacon's] rebellion was over, but the rebelliousness of bond-laborers was not. In 1698, Francis Nicholas, then Governor of Maryland, reported to the Board of Trade the arrival of 326 'Negro' bond-laborers directly from Africa, and 70 more from Virginia and Pennsylvania....[H]e estimated that another 600 or 700 bond-laborers had arrived from Europe, 'Chiefly Irish.., most if not all, papists.' If that trend were to continue, he said, the two groups might join forces in both Virginia and Maryland to make 'great disturbances, if not a rebellion.' The following year, 1699, the Virginia House of Burgesses rejected the Board of Trade's idea of arming their 'servants' against the possibility of a French invasion should war be renewed. With the signing of the Peace of Ryswick, a lull in the war with France had begun, but a by-product of the peace was that too many ungovernable Irish veterans were being shipped as bond-laborers to the Chesapeake. 'If they were armed...we have just reason to fear they may rise upon us,' said the Burgesses. Although of one mind with the Board of Trade on the possibility of a French invasion, the Burgesse feared the bond-laborers, 'from the sake of their freedom and the difference of the religion, a great many of them (especially the Irish) and for other reasons...would rather be our enemies than contribute to our assistance.'" [pg. 218-19]
"What was to be done? What was the 'alteration in the government, but not of the government' that would exorcise the ghost of Bacon's Rebellion? How was laboring-class solidarity to be undone? Back to first principles, never better enunciated by an English statesman than by Sir Francis Bacon [not to be confused with Nathaniel Bacon who led "Bacon's Rebellion" described above--J.S.]. '[I]t is a certain sign of wise government," Sir Francis advised, "...when it can hold men's hearts by hopes, when it cannot by satisfaction.' And, with acknowledgment to Machiavelli, [Sir Francis] Bacon advocated 'dividing and breaking of all factions and combinations that are adverse to the state, and setting them at distance or at least distrust among themselves.'...The solution was to establish a new birthright not only for Anglos but for every Euro-American, the 'white' identity that 'set them at a distance,' to use Sir Francis's phrase, from the laboring-class African-Americans, and enlisted them as active, or at least passive, supporters of lifetime bondage of African-Americans.[2] Edmund S. Morgan [another scholar Allen cited earlier] introduces a catalogue of these white-skin privilege laws, with the assertion that "The answer to the problem [of preventing a replay of Bacon's Rebellion]...was racism, to separate dangerous free whites from dangerous slave blacks by a screen of racial contempt." In this way, he emphasizes, 'the [Virginia] assembly deliberately did what it could to foster contempt of whites for blacks and Indians." Bruce [another scholar Allen cited] attests that '[t]oward the end of the seventeenth century' there occurred 'a marked tendency to promote a pride of race among members of every class of white people, to be white gave the distinction of color even to the agricultural [European-American bond-]servants, whose condition, in some respects, was not much removed from that of actual slavery; to be white and also to be free, combined the distinction of liberty.'" [pg. 248-9]
Allen discusses how the ruling class aimed to, as Sir Francis Bacon advised, "hold men's hearts by hopes, when it cannot by satisfaction" to obtain a loyal 'intermediate stratum' with which to make governance of the laboring class sustainable:
"The exclusion of free African-Americans from the intermediate stratum was a corollary of the establishment of 'white' identity as a mark of social status for masses of European-Americans without real prospects of upward social mobility, and yet induce them to abandon their opposition to the plantocracy and enlist them actively, or at least passively, in keeping down the Negro bond-laborer with whom they had made common cause in the course of Bacon's Rebellion, the presumption of liberty had to be denied to free African-Americans." [2] [pg 249]
In 1723, a British lawyer named Richard West was the Attorney-General who, on behalf of the British Crown, was "responsible for advising the Lords of Trade and Plantations whether laws passed in colonial legislatures merited approval, or should be rejected in whole or in part as being prejudicial or contradictory to the laws of England. In due course, West had occasion to examine a measure that was passed by the Virginia Assembly in May 1723 entitled 'An Act directing the trial of Slaves committing capital crimes; and for the more effectual punishing conspiracies and insurrections of them; and for the better government of Negros, Mulattos, and Indians, bond or free.' Article 23 of that 24-article law provided that:
'...no free negro, mulatto, or indian whatsoever, shall have any vote at the election of burgesses, or any other election whatsoever.'
"The Attorney-General made the following categoric objection:
'I cannot see why one freeman should be used worse than another, merely upon account of his complexion..., to vote at elections of officers, either for a county, or parish, etc., is incident to every freeman, who is possessed of a certain proportion of property, and, therefore, when several negroes have merited their freedom, and obtained it, and by their industry, have acquired that proportion of property, so that the above-mentioned incidental rights of liberty are actually vested in them, for my own part, am persuaded, that it cannot be just, by a general law, without any allegation of crime, or other demerit whatsoever, to strip all free persons, of a black complexion (some of whom may, perhaps be of considerable substance,) from those rights, which are so justly valuable to every freeman.' [ pg. 241]
Note that this rejection of racial discrimination was made by a presumably typical upper class Briton a full twenty years before Thomas Jefferson was born. So much for the notion that "back then people just didn't know any better."
At this time, class (as opposed to racial) inequality was an established part of "respectable" thinking in England and its colonies, with people of both European and African descent literally owned as property and made to work for no pay and denied the freedom to leave their master [which is what "bond labor" meant]. In 1640, Virginia, for the first time, punished such an indentured servant--an African American named John Punch--by extending his period of indenture to life, while punishing the two European-American bond laborers who ran away with him with lesser punishments. Thus began what became the slavery of African-Americans in the colonies. But in 1723 the concept of an entire race of people, regardless of their economic (i.e, class) status, being inferior and undeserving of rights enjoyed by another race of people was only just being introduced by the propertied class, for reasons of social control that are discussed in fascinating detail by T.W. Allen in the above referenced book. An interesting proof of the fact that in 17th century England being black did not prevent one from being as upper class as a white person is the 17th century painting of two upper class women, one white and one black, shown in this Guardian article.
As it turned out, Attorney-General Richard West's views, no doubt shared by others in his social class, were jettisoned by "respectable" property owners in order to create what became known as the "white race"--a concept designed specifically by the propertied class to persuade people of European descent, no matter how much they were exploited as tenant farmers or even chattel bond laborers themselves, to believe it was morally right, and in their best interest, to help the propertied class enslave or at least deny basic rights to all people of African descent. The point is that the propertied class invented the idea of racial discrimination knowing full well how morally wrong the idea was, and how thoroughly it violated extant cultural norms. Attorney-General Richard West is proof of this.
Allen adds:
"Thus when Virginia Governor William Gooch was asked in 1723 by the Lords of Trade and Plantations what were the reasons that induced the Assembly to pass the act, articles of which Attorney-General Richard West said "cannot be just," the Governor said that the racially discriminatory curtailment of the franchise was in order "to fix a perpetual Brand upon Free Negros and Mulattos." Allen notes that this "proceeded from a conscious decision in the process of establishing a system of racial oppression, even though it meant repealing an electoral principle that had existed in Virginia for more than a century...[The] hallmark [of this system of racial oppression] is the insistence on the social distinction between the poorest member of the oppressor group and any member, however propertied, of the oppressed group." [pg. 242-3]
Another break with centuries of prior English common law was also necessary to enforce white superiority. A child's social status had always heretofore been inherited from the father; now it was changed to be inherited from the mother so that the children of a slave would be a slave even if the father was "white"; otherwise the child of a slave owner father and a slave mother would have been both "white" and of African descent, which had to be made impossible. If a "white" woman ever had a child by a non-white man, then according to the law at the time the child would be both "white" and of African descent, which would again threaten the system of social control. This is probably the origin of the ruling elite's overwrought fear in the American South of a black man having relations with a white woman.
Please read the historian, David Williams's, account of this origin of the systemic discrimination against the entire race of African-descended people; it is the footnote at the end my article about Southern whites here.
THE LESSON HISTORY TEACHES, BUT THAT CRT CENSORS
Absent solidarity between all working class people regardless of skin color, there is no way any working class people of any color can mount a successful fight against ruling class domination and exploitation. Being exploited (i.e., being made to work to produce wealth to enrich a wealthy upper class while, oneself, remaining much poorer) less than others is not a benefit, as the word "privilege" implies in the phrase "white skin privilege." Being exploited less than others is the opposite of a benefit; it is an injury because being exploited at all is an injury.
The English bond laborers in Bacon's Rebellion knew that even though African-Americans were worse off as slaves for life, nonetheless English bond laborers were suffering oppression, not enjoying a benefit or a "privilege." This is why the English- and African-American bond laborers were able to mount a struggle that seriously threatened to end the ruling class's domination of society. The imposition of "white race" laws that denied rights to, and dehumanized, people of African descent based on skin color, and the fact that these racist laws resulted in substantial numbers of European-American working class people believing the lie that these laws benefited them and believing that people with darker skin were less than fully human and even on occasions violently attacking them, is the chief cause of the impoverishment of American working class people of all shades of skin color; it is the chief reason that the tiny minority of the richest Americans (people such as the Founding Fathers early on and today, a billionaire ruling plutocracy) have been able to dominate ALL the have-nots of ALL races and treat them like dirt. For more discussion of this, please see "True or False: An Injury to One Is an Injury to All?" and "Is it a 'Privilege' Not to be Discriminated Against?" and Martin Luther King, Jr.s speech about why the Jim Crow laws HARMED, not benefited the poor whites.
WHY DO MANY BLACK PEOPLE ALSO OPPOSE CRT?
Many black people have spoken out against CRT because they dislike the way it tells blacks (in particular black children in K-12 school) that their dark skin-color means that they are victims of systemic racial discrimination and hence, since they are victims and nothing more than that--this next part is what makes many black people so angry!--that there is nothing they can do to achieve any kind of success in this world by relying on the strength of their personal character.
What dark-skinned person in their right mind would want to be told this absurd and demoralizing lie, or have their child told it? It's a lie because--obviously--the fact of systemic racial discrimination is not the ONLY fact; non-white people today achieve all kinds of success in life, from creating healthy families and raising great children, to rising in business, trades, entertainment, academic, political and professional fields.
CRT, however, paints a picture of the world in which 1) white people--all white people--are on the top because they are white, 2) non-white people--all non-white people--are on the bottom because they are non-white, 3) all whites benefit from this racial discrimination whether they realize it or acknowledge it or not, 4) all whites and all non-whites are thus mutual enemies whether they realize it or not, and thus 5) the color of one's skin is the only important thing. (This is why some people say that CRT is a form of Marxism.[9])
This CRT picture of the world, in which skin color is the chief factor of a person, makes a mockery of the words of MLK, Jr. who famously said, "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." But it is the words of MLK, Jr. that inspire the vast majority of people of ALL races today, not the false words of CRT.
The biggest obstacle to achieving the world that MLK, Jr. dreamed of is the determined effort of the ruling billionaire plutocracy to prevent it from emerging, by using things such as CRT to foment mutual anger and resentment and even fear between the have-nots of different races.
WHO SPEAKS THE TRUTH TODAY?
The last prominent intellectual or leader in the United States who spoke the truth about racial discrimination against non-whites--that it harms not only the obvious non-white victims but ALSO white working class people, that it does NOT benefit white working class people--was Martin Luther King, Jr. King gave a powerful speech in Selma, Alabama about how the Jim Crow laws harmed, not benefited, the poor whites, about how these racist laws were an instrument of upper class domination of the entire working class. The U.S. government killed MLK, Jr. And since that day, not a single prominent [7] intellectual or leader in the United States has dared to utter and explain the KEY truth about systemic racial discrimination--its anti-working class PURPOSE--for the expression of which the government killed MLK, Jr. (Read about Howard Zinn's failure to express the key truth in this footnote [10].)
Any author who writes about systemic racial discrimination in the United States today knows that they can be a successful, widely published and mass-media-interviewed author by describing in detail racial discrimination in the United States today and in the past, and by discussing at great length the extremely negative psychological effect on people (of all races and classes) of this racial discrimination at both the individual and the group level, and by analyzing racial discrimination in all sorts of ways, such as comparing it to--or casting it as--the U.S. version of a caste society as in India.
But authors also know that if they include the KEY truth in their book--the fact that systemic racial [4] discrimination, from its inception to the present day, has been NECESSARY for the upper class to impose in order to remain in power, despite whatever negative effects it may have on upper class people [5]; that systemic racial discrimination was and is an instrument used by the upper class to destroy working class solidarity and thereby dominate and oppress ALL races of working class people and NOT to benefit white working class people--then it will not get published by a big publisher that can get the book read by lots of people, and it will never win a Pulitzer Prize or be included in Oprah Winfrey's Book Club, or be reviewed in major newspapers or magazines, or lead to interviews by the mass media.
Any politician who wants to succeed in a political career (not to mention remain alive) knows that it is just too dangerous, and certainly a career killer (not because ordinary people wouldn't vote for them but because the rich would not fund their election campaigns and the mass media would marginalize or ridicule them or character-assassinate them), to speak about this KEY truth about systemic racial discrimination; and so none do. Any academic who wants to have a presence in the mass media knows that expressing this KEY truth about systemic racial discrimination--its anti-working class purpose--is not an option, and so none of the academics with, or desirous of, a mass media presence do it.
For the truth about systemic racial discrimination to be widely known it will require ordinary people to spread it. There will not likely be a Big Leader to do it.
A NOTE ABOUT HOW SOME NON-WHITE AND WHITE PEOPLE HAVE SPOKEN OUT AGAINST CRT
Whites:
For the very understandable reason discussed above--i.e., not wanting to be falsely accused of benefiting from racial discrimination against non-whites and hence of being a racist oppressor simply because of the "white" color of one's skin--many white working class people have expressed anger at CRT. Such people typically express their anger but do not make the persuasive argument to defend that anger.
For example, the angry white person will say--truthfully--that none of his or her ancestors were slave owners, and--again truthfully--that he or she today is oppressed with low wages and other similar hardships. But in response to these points, the people who defend CRT and who refer to racial discrimination against non-whites as "white privilege," say to this angry white person, "It makes no difference who your ancestors were and it makes no difference that you suffer from low wages and similar hardships because you still benefit from the worse suffering experienced by non-whites."
What the angry white person must say in order to refute this "white privilege" lie is this: "No, the discrimination against non-whites does not benefit white working class people, it harms us, as is not only explained by MLK, Jr. and Frederick Douglass (quoted above) but also in "Is it a 'Privilege' Not to be Discriminated Against?" and in "Racial Discrimination Against Non-Whites is Rampant and Harms Working Class People of ALL Races." Unfortunately, the angry white person typically does not refute the "white privilege" lie effectively this way. CRT censorship is designed to prevent them from doing so.
Blacks:
Many black people have spoken out against CRT in very understandable anger (as discussed above) at its implied, if not always explicit, message that systemic racial discrimination against non-whites today makes it impossible for a non-white person to succeed in life and therefore they should not even try. See one example of this here. The way that CRT sends this false message (it's false because while currently existing systemic discrimination against non-whites is a real fact that makes it more difficult for non-whites to succeed, it does not make it impossible) is by falsely telling (implicitly if not explicitly) non-whites that they live in a majority-white society in which ALL whites oppress non-whites and therefore the minority of non-whites don't have a chance to succeed in life.
Typically the angry black person will say--truthfully--that they personally managed to succeed in life (became a physician or something similar) and that they don't want their child to be taught in school that he or she cannot succeed that way. Often the angry black person will, in order to strengthen their point, deny that there even is today any systemic racial discrimination against non-whites.
The weakness of this kind of anti-CRT expression is this. First, it is not true that systemic discrimination against non-whites no longer exists today, as shown here and here. Just because some non-whites become physicians (and similar successes in life) does not take away from the fact that non-whites on average face more obstacles in this regard than whites. The effective way to refute the false CRT message is to refute what is actually false about it, namely the notion that white working class people benefit from systemic discrimination against non-whites (MLK, Jr. refuted this false notion here and it is also done here) and are thus all oppressors of non-whites and, because they are the majority, whites prevent all non-whites from succeeding in life. CRT censorship is designed to prevent non-white critics of CRT from doing this.
All CRT Critics:
Virtually all critics of CRT very properly express anger at how it pits people against each other along race lines by declaring whites to be oppressors simply for being white and non-whites to be oppressed by whites. What's needed is for critics of CRT to successfully refute the key CRT lie (that systemic discrimination against non-whites benefits white working class people) and thereby successfully win over the many good people who currently defend CRT because they don't understand that it is lying (implicitly with censorship of the truth) about the purpose of the systemic racial discrimination it talks about.
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1. Read here about bond labor versus slave labor at this time; the distinction had not yet become as sharp as it did later.
2. Obviously, to anybody who has read Critical Race Theory (CRT) literature or studied the history of race in the United States, the ruling class has been very successful in getting working class whites on numerous occasions to attack, often very violently, black people just because they were black. The entire point of this article is to show that this was deliberately fomented by the ruling class, using systemic racial discrimination, for divide-and-rule of the entire working class of all races.
3. To see evidence of this censorship, read the Brookings Institution article about why parents are so hostile to CRT, and note that it contains not a hint that systemic racial discrimination has, from its inception, been created and used by the ruling upper class to dominate and oppress working class people off ALL races, and not to benefit white working class people. Instead, the Brookings Institution (a very ruling class organization) article is all about how the parents hostile to CRT are simply mistaken in thinking that CRT says white people are racist oppressors.
The article says these parents just don't understand that laws and institutions can be racially discriminatory without white people being, personally, racist in their beliefs or attitudes. The authors of this Brookings article are presumably not stupid and nor do they live on another planet. They certainly know that for many years now the ruling class has been using its mass media and politicians to tell white working class people that they enjoy (presumably not fairly so, either) "white privilege" (note that a "privilege" is by definition a benefit) because of systemic racial discrimination against non-whites. This has thoroughly framed the issue of race as "what harms non-whites benefits--as a 'privilege'--whites."
The authors of the Brookings article must know--they can't be so stupid as not to know--that in the current discourse about race in the U.S. if one describes an example of systemic racial discrimination against non-whites without explicitly saying that it HARMS, not benefits, working class whites as well as harms the obvious non-white victims (as Martin Luther King, Jr. famously explained in a key speech) then the implicit and very clear message will be that ordinary white people BENEFIT from that systemic racial discrimination against non-whites, i.e., that working class whites are racist oppressors of non-whites.
The Brookings article's authors disingenuously pretend not to know this. They pretend to believe that there is no implicit message about working class white guilt conveyed by the CRT descriptions of systemic racial discrimination with its anti-working class purpose censored. They pretend to believe that the CRT content (with its censorship of the anti-working class purpose of systemic racial discrimination, a censorship they pretend not to even notice!) is just fine, and that the only problem is the stupidity of white working class parents. This article reflects the utter contempt that the ruling class has for the working class, as it promotes its deliberate divide-and-rule-along-race-lines strategy.
4. In countries other than the United States, of course, the upper class divides-and-rules the have-nots by whatever means are appropriate to the circumstances, which may involve not race (skin color) but other features, either genetic or cultural or a combination. For example, the Belgian colonial rulers of Rwanda pitted the Hutu Africans against the Tutsi Africans so diabolically that it lead to a massive genocide subsequently; yet the visible physical differences between the two groups are very slight or even non-existent.
5. Some such authors write about how systemic racial discrimination harms all people in this or that way, but they do not make the key point that the upper ruling class imposes this systemic racial discrimination because it needs to do so in order to remain in power and in order to dominate and oppress working class whites, despite any harm it may cause to members of the upper ruling class. For example, Isabel Wilkerson in her book, CASTE, in which she discusses systemic racial discrimination in the United States as a specific example of the more general phenomenon of caste hierarchy in a society, writes:
"Without an enlightened recognition of the price we all pay for a caste system, the hierarchy will likely shape-shift as it has in the past to ensure that the structure remains intact."
and
"It turns out that everyone benefits when society meets the needs of the disadvantaged."
This kind of writing obscures the fact that while the systemic discrimination may have some negative consequences for members of the ruling elite, the ruling oppressive elite nonetheless NEEDS this systemic discrimination in order to remain the ruling oppressive elite, and as a ruling oppressive elite it oppresses ALL the other woking class people, including those not in the lowest rung of the social hierarchy.
6. Whenever a K-12 school teacher teaches about the fact of racial discrimination in the history or current reality of the United States or assigns a children's book on that theme or makes it available in the school library (and this is quite common), it happens in a larger social context that invariably makes it reasonable to say that the teacher or school is "teaching CRT." Here's why.
The larger social context in the United States is this. The mass media and establishment liberals have succeeded in establishing a framework for public discourse about racial discrimination. In this framework, racial discrimination against non-whites harms non-whites (which is obviously true) and benefits all whites including working class whites (which is actually false.) The ruling upper class in the U.S. has replaced the phrase "racial discrimination" (which properly points the accusing finger at the person or institution that does the discriminating) with the phrase "white privilege" (which wrongly points the accusing finger at white people just because they are white by asserting that they enjoy a benefit [the word 'privilege' means, by definition, a benefit] from the existence of the racial discrimination.) Indeed many young people today can only refer to racial discrimination against non-whites with the phrase "white privilege" and have no clue that, for example, the racist Jim Crow laws harmed, not benefited, the poor whites, and have no clue that people such as MLK, Jr. and Frederick Douglass and Angela Davis taught this fact.
Because of the fact that the framework for public discourse says that racial discrimination against non-whites benefits whites, it follows that whenever a teacher or school teaches students about a particular example of racial discrimination against non-whites without also explaining that the purpose of this discrimination is/was to enable the very rich to oppress ALL the have-nots including the white have-nots, then the message that is implicitly taught is that this example of racial discrimination benefits/benefitted white working class people who are therefore guilty of being oppressors just because they are white. This implicit (false!) message is the CRT implicit message, and it really is immaterial whether or not the teacher or school even mentions the phrase "critical race theory" or even whether the teacher or school understands the connection between what they are teaching and official "CRT" as taught in law schools.
Those who say, "CRT is not being taught in K-12 schools," on the grounds that K-12 schools are not using law school literature completely miss the point. Even when CRT is not mentioned explicitly in a K-12 school, it is frequently nonetheless being taught. The only way the fact of past or current systemic racial discrimination can be taught without it being a form of CRT is if the lesson includes the truth about the anti-working class PURPOSE of the systemic racial discrimination. The ruling class works hard to ensure that schools will not do this.
Still, CRT is in fact mentioned explicitly in some cases:
Here is just some of the evidence that CRT is being used as part of the curriculum in K-12 public schools in the U.S.:
a. The CRT-based book, Not My Idea, A Book about Whiteness, is being used in at least 35 elementary schools that are listed here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Ao7SenoBTRgs_1ibcpIh-HzSaNB6Eb8LdlMhbxEVwc4/edit#gid=0 .
b. The theme of the book is described by two of the reviewers of it on Amazon.com this way: "This book does a phenomenal job of explaining how power and privilege affect us from birth, and how we can educate ourselves...Not My Idea is an incredibly important book, one that we should all be using as a catalyst for our anti-racist education. —THE TINY ACTIVIST"; and "An honest explanation about how power and privilege factor into the lives of white children, at the expense of other groups, and how they can help seek justice. —THE NEW YORK TIMES."
c. These themes are from CRT, as one can see from this Harvard Law Review commentary about Critical Race Theory titled "Whiteness as Property": "In this article, Professor Harris contributes to this discussion by positing that racial identity and property are deeply interrelated concepts. Professor Harris examines how whiteness, initially constructed as a form of racial identity, evolved into a form of property, historically and presently acknowledged and protected in American law. Professor Harris traces the origins of whiteness as property in the parallel systems of domination of Black and Native American peoples out of which were created racially contingent forms of property and property rights. Following the period of slavery and conquest, whiteness became the basis of racialized privilege — a type of status in which white racial identity provided the basis for allocating societal benefits both private and public in character. These arrangements were ratified and legitimated in law as a type of status property. Even as legal segregation was overturned, whiteness as property continued to serve as a barrier to effective change as the system of racial classification operated to protect entrenched power."
d. View here a memo from the Virginia state department of education recommending that its teachers read Foundations of Critical Race Theory in Education, by Edward Taylor et al, and view here a description of the book's contents.
e. Read here about a CRT-informed lesson in an elementary school.
Note that the problem is not that CRT describes systemic racial discrimination; the problem is that it censors the key fact, which is that its purpose is to enable the haves to dominate and oppress the have-nots of ALL races, i.e. the entire working class.
7. In 1972 Angela Davis spoke the truth about this (see the linked video and quotation of her above), but a) she was not then and is not now a particularly prominent individual with a truly large audience, and b) I'm not sure she still speaks this key truth today; if you know where she has done so recently please let me know about it. Based on this article Angela Davis signed, co-authored by the author of The 1619 Project, which is the bible of the CRT folks, it would appear that Davis is part of the problem now, not part of the solution, because she is silent about the key fact that CRT censors.
Bob Dylan's song, Only a Pawn in Their Game, written in 1963 and last performed by him in 1964, made the point that the white upper class that enforced racial discrimination against blacks also harmed and used--not benefited!--white working class people. Unfortunately, Dylan's song made this true point by saying, quite wrongly, of the white racist who fatally shot the black Civil Rights activist, Medgar Evers, "But he can't be blamed. He's only a pawn in their game." [h/t to J.K. for bringing this song to my attention.]
On June 19, 1968, before 50,000 people at a rally called by the Poor People's Campaign in Washington, D.C., Peggy Terry, a white working class activist and later candidate for Vice President nominated by the Peace and Freedom Party, gave a speech in which she said:
"We, the poor whites of the United States, today demand an end to racism, for our own self-interest and well being, as well as for the well being of black, brown and red Americans who, I repeat, are our natural allies in the struggle for real freedom and real democracy in these, OUR, United States of America." [source: Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power: Interracial Solidarity in 1960s-70s New Left Organizing, by Amy Sonnie and James Tracy, pg. 55]
8. Let's look closely at how the 1619 Project authors censor the PURPOSE of racial discrimination even when they briefly (very briefly!) mention a negative effect on white working class wages. Here is what the 1619 Project says about white wages and racial discrimination:
"Slavery did supplement white workers with what W. E. B. Du Bois called a ‘‘public and psychological wage,’’ which allowed them to roam freely and feel a sense of entitlement. But this, too, served the interests of money. Slavery pulled down all workers’ wages. Both in the cities and countryside, employers had access to a large and flexible labor pool made up of enslaved and free people."
Clearly the 1619 Project authors were familiar with the particular passage of W. E. B. Du Bois's book, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880, in which he used the phrase "public and psychological wage." Let's look at that full passage; it reads:
“Most persons do not realize how far [the view that common oppression would create interracial solidarity] failed to work in the South, and it failed to work because the theory of race was supplemented by a carefully planned and slowly evolved method, which drove such a wedge between the white and black workers that there probably are not today in the world two groups of workers with practically identical interests who hate and fear each other so deeply and persistently and who are kept so far apart that neither sees anything of common interest.
“It must be remembered that the white group of laborers, while they received a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage. They were given public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white. They were admitted freely with all classes of white people to public functions, public parks, and the best schools. The police were drawn from their ranks, and the courts, dependent on their votes, treated them with such leniency as to encourage lawlessness. Their vote selected public officials, and while this had small effect upon the economic situation, it had great effect upon their personal treatment and the deference shown them. White schoolhouses were the best in the community, and conspicuously placed, and they cost anywhere from twice to ten times as much per capita as the colored schools. The newspapers specialized on news that flattered the poor whites and almost utterly ignored the Negro except in crime and ridicule.” (Black Reconstruction [1935], 700-701) found at https://nonsite.org/du-bois-and-the-wages-of-whiteness/
Du Bois, in contrast to the 1619 Project authors, makes it crystal clear that the racial discrimination (the new Jim Crow laws that came after chattel slavery) was a deliberate ("carefully planned and slowly evolved") strategy to destroy solidarity between workers who shared a common ("practically identical") interest, a strategy that "drove such a wedge between the white and black workers that there probably are not today in the world two groups of workers with practically identical interests who hate and fear each other so deeply and persistently and who are kept so far apart that neither sees anything of common interest."
The authors of the 1619 Project snipped out the part of DuBois's passage that showed the deliberate anti-working class (divide-and-rule) purpose of Jim Crow, and emphasized the part (the "public and psychological wage") that focused on the way white working class people were less oppressed than blacks under Jim Crow (or, as the 1619 Project authors would misleadingly state it, were "beneficiaries" of the Jim Crow laws due to their "public and psychological wage" even if their dollar wage was a bit lower.) The 1619 Project spins everything to fit in its wrong and divisive framework that says racial discrimination against non-whites harms non-whites and BENEFITS all whites.
9. The reason some say that CRT is a form of Marxism is this. Marxism and CRT both argue that what people subjectively think and actually do is not important, that what is important is something else about a person.
In Marxist theory, it is not important that (as Marxists wrongly believe) ordinary working class people have no subjective desire for a classless society and are often stupid or have no class-consciousness and only have what Lenin called a "trade union mentality" (wanting just more wages); what is important is only the fact that working class people do not own the means of production. And likewise, the only important thing about a wealthy person is that he/she owns the means of production.
In CRT theory, similarly, it is not important whether or not a white person is subjectively aware of and opposed to racial discrimination; what is important is only the fact that he/she is white. And likewise, the only important thing about a non-white person is that they are non-white. See "Values Matter, Not Race or Class."
10. Howard Zinn, in pages 37-38 (paperback) in his book A Peoples History of the United States writes about Bacon's Rebellion. He explains that the Virginia Colony rulers feared solidarity of the "white" and African bonded laborers, and that they created systemic racial discrimination against the blacks in order to prevent this solidarity. Fine. This is an important point. And Zinn furthermore draws the important conclusion that racist ideas held by whites against blacks are not innate to whites (since they acted in solidarity with blacks during and before Bacon's Rebellion) but rather were fomented by the upper class to destroy the solidarity of the white and black laborers.
But Zinn describes this as the rulers making things better for the white laborers, i.e., he says that the rulers bought the loyalty of the white laborers with something that benefited, not harmed, them, with what people today would call "white privilege" (and which was back then things such as the 50 acres of land given to white laborers when the indenture period ended.) Zinn writes,
"Virginia's ruling class, having proclaimed that all white men were superior to black, went on to offer their social (but white) inferiors a number of benefits previously denied them. In 1705 a law was passed requiring masters to provide white servants whose indenture time was up with ten bushels of corn, thirty shillings, and a gun, while women servants were to get 15 bushels of corn and forty shillings. Also, the newly freed servants were to get 50 acres of land." [my emphasis--J.S.]
These words of Zinn do not at all state that the systemic racial discrimination HARMED, not benefited, the white laborers. The only word Zinn uses in this context is "benefits."
The harm to the white laborers was, of course, this: that without having anymore their solidarity with the black laborers, they were now at the mercy of the upper class and paid dearly for that by being oppressed in countless ways they would not otherwise have suffered if they had had working class solidarity to fight against the rulers attacks on them. Zinn does not make this KEY point. As a result he implicitly suggests that what Virginia's ruling class did with systemic racial discrimination against backs was a benefit to the white laborers.