ANTI-RACISM IS A TOOL OF THE BOSSES.

Perhaps Reason's Robby Soave deserves a Friday short Take for his

Alarm about critical race theory—a previously obscure field of study pioneered by far-left legal scholars and sociologists—has suddenly gripped the political right. This development has forced the right's adversaries on Team Blue to defend a theory that very few people on either side of this increasingly silly debate could accurately define if challenged to do so.

He captures the positive elements of the theory adequately enough.

Critical race theory is the idea that structural racism is embedded in many U.S. institutions. Slavery was the reality when the country was founded, and segregation endured for a century following the Civil War. It would thus be naive to assume that supposedly race-neutral policies are actually race-neutral—there's nothing neutral about America and race. Working from this assumption, adherents of critical race theory tend toward a kind of progressive activism that views post-Enlightenment classical liberalism and its notions of equal opportunity, the prioritization of individual rights over group rights, and colorblindness with hostility.

It's in that normative twist we see in the final sentence where things start to go wrong.  "It is thus not entirely unfair for conservatives to use [critical theory] as shorthand for the sorts of things to which they object." For instance, "Punctuality and whiteness have nothing to do with each other. People who strongly cling to the idea that there is such a thing as whiteness, and that it has to do with punctuality, objectivity, and hard-work, are actually promoting harmful and inaccurate racial stereotypes."

It's still a good idea to point out the silliness of that sort of essentialism, which only gives white nationalists a talking point.  It's equally silly to suggest that the substitution of oppression by race for oppression by class and using similar militant jargon makes critical studies some sort of Marxism.  Critical studies are a new form of "divide and conquer."

Those who are supposed to champion the working class — the left — have fully and completely linked socio-economic disenfranchisement to skin colour.  What a travesty. Every person who still considers themselves to be on the left will have to reckon at some point with this ignorant and immoral stance.

This is not just an inadequate and misinformed reading of history, it manages to be racist to both people of colour and white people. It is a deliberately malign framing. And it serves a very specific and dangerous purpose.

What is that purpose? To divide us.

Us, the people. Us, the middle, lower middle, and working class folks who work normal jobs and try to live normal lives while being ruled over by wholly unaccountable elites. Us, people of all races and ethnicities who are feeling ever-more threatened by a neo-racism that is now sanctioned by corporations and pushed by the highest levels of government.

Jenny Holland might write "of the left," and yet a libertarian populist fed up with the corona tyranny and the woke social media overlords and their desire to render us under an absolute despotism would agree with each word of that last paragraph.

It is my fear that the most powerful corporations of today are pushing us towards a digital feudalism. And to do so, they are using the oldest trick in the book: divide and conquer.

Critical race theory is the new divide and conquer.

As Tom Watson, American populist leader in the late 19th century, said:

“You are made to hate each other because upon that hatred is rested the keystone of the arch of financial despotism which enslaves you both.”

History comes back wearing different outfits, but there is nothing new under the sun. There are many echoes of past battles in today’s struggle for justice — they are just not what all of the media elites and educational establishment tell you they are.

While the chattering classes and misguided college kids continue to virtue signal their allyship with the toxic CRT religion — which is masquerading as morally just but is in fact tyrannical and racist— more and more regular people are pushing back with basic common decency and fairness.

That is to say, the bourgeois norms that confer evolutionary advantage.

But because Critical Theory takes an oppositional stance to bourgeois norms does not proletarian internationalism make.  "These racialist politics share one common feature: They leave untouched the actual source of social inequality for workers of all races—capitalism."  That's unclear: are the woke corporations acting as freebooting capitalists, or as rent-seeking grifters on a Chinese style corporatist state?  To a true Marxist, there is a lot of immiserisation, whether you attempt to disaggregate by ethnic origin or not.

The United States is a sea of multi-racial destitution. According to the analysis of [Federal Reserve] data by Matt Bruenig with the People’s Policy Project, the poorest 10 percent of the US population is about 54 percent white, 27 percent black, 12 percent Hispanic, and 3 percent some other group. The next most impoverished layer is 42 percent white, 32 percent black, 20 percent Hispanic, and 5 percent other. And the third one up from the bottom is 53 percent white, 20 percent black, 20 percent Hispanic and 7 percent other. When one gets to the top three deciles of wealth holders, the racial composition begins to strongly favor whites. The largest imbalance exists in the highest tier. The racial wealth gap is primarily meaningful for elite African Americans, who are frustrated at being underrepresented where the vast majority of net worth is concentrated.

Read on, and you find additional areas of agreement between Marxists, this time, and libertarian populists. "According to the racial wealth gap proponents, having $151,200—which as Federal Reserve data show will be largely comprised of a partially paid off mortgage and a small retirement fund—is an incredible level of 'white privilege.'" That would be the Garden of Eden Itself to many a resident of the third world, but it reminds me of a comment an economist called Gelvin Stevenson made years ago about how if you built a pyramid of blocks representing wealth holding, the pyramid would have a skinny, very tall top, but the average man, including this individual with a net worth of $151K, would live within a foot of the bottom.  (And there aren't enough blocks on that skinny top to do much about raising the height of those low wealth individuals, but I digress.)  "While some white households are in a better position to hold out against financial blows for a longer period of time, in the event of a job loss, unexpected medical bill, major home repair, or similar disaster, tens of thousands of dollars can swiftly evaporate."

The essay concludes by reading the Critical Theory advocates out of the Marxist congregation.  "The capitalist class foments divisions among workers in order to exercise its rule. All those who insist that the racial wealth gap, not the class gap, is most important division in society do the same."  Class struggle without end, Amen.