This one’s for all the critics of Critical race Theory…even those who don’t know what CRT is, or think it’s a method of teaching white children to feel badly about themselves and their own race (it isn’t).
To actually understand CRT, try answering the following admittedly hypothetical questions, honestly — it should be easy todo, as both court cases involved are very much in the news. I am purposely writing this before any verdict is rendered in either trial.
1) In the Kenosha, WI murder trail of young Kyle Rittenhouse, imagine that the defendant is the same age, also from out-of-state, bearing an AR-15 automatic weapon he has no legal right to carry, with the same purpose in mind that Rittenhouse has testified he had, and that the defendant took exactly the same actions as Rittenhouse did, shooting two white men and wounding another and justifying his actions in the basis that the white men were threatening him so that he feared for his life — but the defendant in the hypothetical case is Black. What do you think the jury would decide? And would the police on the scene have failed to apprehend the black perpetrator when he approached their vehicles — more than once — with hands up showing his weapon and let him leave the scene of the shootings and simply go home?
2) Three white men are charged with the murder in Brunswick, GA of a Black male jogger they tracked through their neighborhood, armed in a pickup truck, claiming a right to make a citizen’s arrest under then-existing Georgia law due to their suspicion that the jogger — having looked into and entered a house under construction on his route — had engaged in criminal behavior: but now imagine that the trackers and shooter were Black, it was their own neighborhood, and the jogger was white. In the hypothetical, what do you think the jury would decide? And would the police on the scene have shown far more support and even outright sympathy for the shooter and his companions than the victim lying bleeding to death on the pavement?
As you think about your answer, you will confront — willy-nilly — the realities that Critical Race Theory seeks to bring to the fore and force all of us to process. Do we still, despite our progress in terms of racial equality since our Constitution officially assigned a 3/5 value to the life an of Black individual as compared with a white person’s, retain a sense that a Black person’s life is judicially worth less than a white’s so that if affects a our “institutional” as well as individual judgments.
Have we indeed come far enough as a society to eliminate institutional racism through the cumulative effect of the Civil War Emancipation Proclamation outlawing slavery in the United States, later codified in the Constitution’s 13th Amendment; the passage of further Amendments granting Black men and later (derivatively) Black women the right to vote, and protecting the rights of all persons (with no fractional dilution) the rights to due process and the equal protection of the law; the Brown v. Board of Education decision that ‘separate but equal” public school systems for Black’s and white were no longer Constitutional; and Federal legislation protecting Black persons right to vote (later materially repealed by the Supreme Court based on the majority’s view that such protections were no longer needed), as well as protecting Black persons from discrimination in employment, public accommodations and private housing?
Have these measures effectively eliminated the effects of de facto housing segregation effected first Jim Crow laws, then private restrictive covenants and now by restrictive zoning codes? Or the official Federal denial of GI benefits like government -subsidized FHA mortgages after World war II for Black GI’s that kept Black’s out of Levittown and suburbs like it all over the country for two generations? Has the legal doctrine of “qualified immunity” for police officers who treat Black person’s statistically worse than white persons in terms of traffic stops, stop-and-frisk” laws, and use of deadly force, unless the persons so treated can show that the police action is exactly, precisely the same — detail for detail — as has been held in the past by a final court decision to be unworthy of such immunity? Have they counteracted the effects of elite American higher education — private and public — that demonstrably dedicates far more money, time and effort to recruit and admit rich white applicants than even its most publicized efforts to attract lower-income minorities who have the ability to succeed in college and break through the opportunity and related income disparity that pervades US society?
Trying answering these questions after you answer honestly the hypotheticals about the two trials. Then try considering whether you really agree with many critics of CRT who want to burn books that deal with the reality of slavery and its well over-a-century institutional progeny; or who say that Blacks should just be grateful (“Shut up and dribble!) that a (previously) predominantly white Christian society has granted them the freedom to make their own way — and then do a better job of controlling their “own kind” when they get out of line so the police don’t have to take the violent actions that they sometimes must.
The broader “qualified immunity” from confronting the existence of institutional racism that many whites seem to preach and practice actually proves the case that Critical Race Theory advances.