Critical Race Theory Is Behind Campus Rioting
The month of May has mercifully arrived. That means the end of the spring semester nationwide at our university asylums. It also means that the campus crazies are heading home to harangue their parents and hometowns with the crackpot theories they’ve learned at their liberal colleges over the last year. Mom and Dad can see what that $60K tuition bought them. Maybe it will purchase the vandalizing of a statue in the town square this summer.
The guys and gals and various other gender identities at places like Columbia, UCLA, and George Washington University can now gear up for the next grand event on the activist calendar: Pride Month.
This year, however, they added a new “ism” to their roster of activism: antisemitism. They might be tempted to list that new skill in their resume under the heading “DEI,” but I suggest they list it under “CRT.” After all, critical race theory has provided the critical superstructure for this new antisemitism.
The Not-So-Secret Marxist Roots of CRT
Critical race theory hails from Marxist critical theory. In the text of the Wikipedia definition of CRT, you won’t see a single mention of Marxism, though the first paragraph correctly notes that CRT derives from critical theory. It states: “The word critical in the name is an academic reference to critical theory.” Interestingly, if you click the “critical theory” hyperlink in that definition, you’ll magically discover dozens of references to Marxism there. That’s because, critical theory comes out of Marxism, namely, the Frankfurt School, and so does its bastard son, critical race theory. The Wikipedia makers can do their damnedest to purge mentions of Marxism from their whitewashed definition of CRT; in fact, quite strikingly. Nonetheless, that concealment eventually falls apart under the truth of reality. (Watch this discussion of CRT and its Marxist roots that we did at Grove City College in September 2022.)
CRT borrows from Marxism simply and clearly: It takes the basic model of oppressed vs. oppressor in classical Marxism, which was the proletariat vs. the bourgeoisie, and replaces the two classes with two races, white vs. black. (RELATED: Tragic Farce: The Origins and Destiny of Critical Theory)
That’s the Marxist framework. It’s acknowledged by anyone who non-emotionally studies this stuff — and those who do should be very troubled by its current application to the Jewish people of Israel and their struggle against Hamas terrorism.
The Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Jews, and especially liberal Jews in universities, are distraught to discover that they’re being hammered into this simplistic Marxist binary by CRT advocates. Because CRT simpletons are such, well, idiotic simpletons, they shoehorn you into one of two skin-color categories, which is difficult to impossible to do for the vast majority of 21st-century homo sapiens who are products of multiple ethnic backgrounds going back centuries and millennia. Nonetheless, the framework is the framework, and the CRT crazy is hellbent on the model. Thus, following the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, Jews have been aghast to find themselves curiously shoved into the white/oppressor category, whereas their attackers from Hamas/Gaza have been inserted into the other racial category (the approved/victim category) by our intrepid university liberals. The category for Hamas/Gazans wouldn’t be “black” but it’s some form of “brown” or “person of color” or, one surmises, “non-white.”
Hence, Jews/Israel, are bad; they are the oppressors. Hamas/Gazans, are good; they are the oppressed. To borrow from the inane work of the late Brazilian Marxist maniac Paulo Freire, read by every education major over the last 50 years, this is their pedagogy of the oppressed.
Candidly, many of the college kids in the mobs aren’t even fully aware that they’re part of a movement that borrows from this broader Marxist framework. They’re the naive innocents that communists would call the “popular front” or dupes or useful idiots. For them to fully comprehend what they’re doing, the Marxists would say that they need careful “consciousness-raising.”
If you’re late to this theater and somewhat incredulous at how this is happening on campuses right now with Jews in the crosshairs, I suggest some reading and research from those who have been sniffing out this ideological rot. Some really good work is being done by liberal Jewish scholars who have been tracking this phenomenon and trying to warn the world. I especially recommend a superb journal article by Suzanna Sherry, a prominent, liberal professor at Vanderbilt University Law School. Her scholarly paper, “DEI and Antisemitism: Bred in the Bone,” is a must-read. You can also read the work by George Mason University Law Professor David Bernstein (here and here), by attorney Russell A. Shalev of the International Legal Forum, and (among others) pieces in the Jewish Times and Jerusalem Post. All of this work exposes the antisemitism in both CRT and DEI. To quote just one, Russell Shalev’s legal paper explains it succinctly:
Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Intersectionality understand society as comprised of overlapping and interconnected levels of racial oppression. Critical Race Theory simplistically erases the uniqueness of the Jewish experience and identifies Jews as “white”, CRT’s oppressor class. In fact, CRT often considers Jews to the be the epitome of white privilege and supremacy…. Jews are considered as beneficiaries of white privilege, and not a minority group, so attacks on them do not merit the same concern as on other groups. In fact, attacks on Jewish self-determination and self-identification are seen as anti-racist.
What’s especially absurd about this new project that places Jews as oppressors is that there has never been any group of people in the history of humanity who have been persecuted more than Jews. They’re not history’s oppressors; they’re history’s victims, of pogroms, of purges, of the Holocaust. There are only about 15 million of them in the world today. Hitler killed almost half of them in less than 10 years.
This Isn’t About the Oppressed. It’s About Race.
Jews had a healthy, vigorous population at the time of the ancient Roman empire. If not for repeated rounds of persecution, exile, and outright “liquidation” over thousands of years, there surely would be hundreds of millions of Jews today (one estimate is that there would be 32 million Jews today if not for Hitler’s Holocaust, which I think is a very conservative figure). But there’s not, because they’ve been targeted for annihilation throughout history. The only truly safe haven that Jews ever had was the United States of America and the modern nation-state of Israel created in May 1948 with the approval of the United Nations.
If you want to play the oppressor vs. oppressed game, Jews would absolutely merit the latter category.
But that’s not the game played by CRT. For the critical race theorist, what matters most is your race. That’s the determinative, decisive factor — just as for Marx and Engels and Lenin your class was the determinative, decisive factor (ironically the same was true for Hitler). Jews today are handily dubbed “white” in this convenient calculus.
Think about the absurdity: Our “higher” educated, enlightened “anti-racists” look at the peoples of Palestine, Jews and Arabs alike, with all of their incredible history, filled with nuance and complexity and a million machinations, and boil them down to white vs. non-white. Can you imagine anything more demeaning, more dehumanizing, more simplistic, and more racist?
Critical race theory is just that. It is rotten, toxic, idiotic. It divides people, quite literally, into hostile, opposing, antagonistic camps pitted against one another based on skin color. It assumes you think and behave and exist a certain way because of the color of your skin. It’s downright racist — yes, ironically, it’s precisely what it claims to oppose. As I’ve noted, it’s exacted what the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. opposed, as he wanted all of God’s children to be judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin. (RELATED: Teach MLK, Not CRT)
Yet, it’s raging among the ideological mobs at the universities. When you feed this bile to college students, don’t be surprised when angry mobs erupt on campus.
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