Some people are comfortable with excuses for their lot in life, especially those who can's seem to get off the X and angrily envy those who do. These are people who find comfort in placing blame on others for their own actions (or lack of them).
I've always felt that way about Critical Race Theory.
CRT (actually any collectivist theory) has always seemed more of a vehicle for excuses than a legitimate theory, one examined without bias. It has always been "a black thing" - as I had it explained to me by a radical activist at a State School Board meeting, I could never understand because I'm not black.
The way she, who was mixed race, not black, explained it to me was as if the black intelligentsia (Derrick Bell) and other academicians and lawyers had created it for black people and no one else had the standing or "lived experiences" to question it, especially white people. There was no need to analyze it because black people (Ibram X. Kendi) - and white liberal allies who had the approval of the black community (Robin Di Angelo) would tell you what it means and what you are required to do.
CRT was made for black people, owned by black people, to only be used by black people.
My opinion isn't new - I've always felt that way about CRTs patriarch, the Critical Theory promulgated by the denizens of the Frankfurt School (which wound up in America at Columbia University after WWII). Derrick Bell didn't discover CRT, he more or less just adapted it from the commie zealots at the Frankfurt School, just playing the game of swapping the "oppressed" economic classes for race.
You see, if the poor were oppressed because they are poor, it follows that blacks are oppressed because they are black.
Tulsa is remembered for the race riots more than the fact it was home to the "Black Wall Street", and though segregated, the back community mirrored the white culture in Tulsa in social and economic construction. The reason was the black community adopted the Western culture model - and it worked.
CRT does not explain that - or the fact that black poverty was falling prior to white guilt overcoming reason in the Democrat Party and Johnson beginning to addict black Americans to welfare and other handouts. I personally see the "Great Society" as two things - 1) a payoff to the Civil Rights leaders of the time to quiet their radical elements and stop causing trouble (for Democrats) and 2) a way to destroy black America's growing economic success through capitalist tenets, and make them dependent upon government (and the party of government, the Democrats).
I don't think this would have happened if JFK had lived. JFK was a old-school liberal, the policies of whom aligned with the ideas and ideals of MLK. Johnson was just a machine politician and old school racist.
But all of this is history - I think people are beginning tire of being accused of things they did not do and then having any mechanism of defense stripped from them. Perhaps at a subconscious level, people are beginning to realize this is less about race and more about the long awaited communist Utopia.
Perhaps the bloom is coming off the CRT rose.
We must be getting to the lowest common denominator. I thought race was about as low as one can go, but now we are leaving race and arguing over biological reality as a way to establish yet another victim class.
Ayn Rand asserted that the individual is the smallest minority - we are reaching a point where there are so many definitions of victimized classes, the individual has become the smallest victim because everyone can claim some membership in a special "victimized" class.
If everyone is special, no one is.
And, after 150 years of arguing about it, we are right back where we began.
It is about the individual, not the class. It always has been. Our nation was founded on the idea that the individual could prosper in the freedom of not having to belong to any particular class.
That I am free to be me is something unique in history.
That's what makes America great.
5 Comments
3 more comments...No posts
People make decisions about their own lives believing more happiness and good will come to them by making those decisions. Often they are wrong. Sometimes the error is seen right away. Sometimes it takes time to show someone the error of his ways. When they see clearly they were wrong, they correct. As a result their lives improve. Seven billion people constantly correcting is the most truly progressive and invigorating force on the planet. Obama once made a statement saying how a committee of the best and brightest can make decisions better for an individual than can the individual and how that is the model society should be aiming for. I think his brilliant committee then came out with ‘Cash for Clunkers’. The more freedom, the faster we allow natural consequences to happen, the faster we grow as individuals and as a society.
We all know it would not have had the same effect for MLK to say - I have a dream...where my children are 'Victims' and we can all agree to that and its causes! Where my children can declare their victimhood and be elevated to the pinnacle of their victim class, and not be judged by those not in that class! Where my folks will know CRT and its roots and where the naysayers will eventually genuflect in their admiration. And where evil corporations will pay ($$$) homage to our causes. I have a dream!
I seriously doubt that speech would have been given the press then that it appears to be getting today!