DECONSTRUCT THIS.

What happens when an area of academic inquiry is not critical, not race, not theory, and not scholarship?  Quillette contributor Julian Adorney expounds.

Critical Race Theory has a scholarship problem. Many of its most prominent academics impugn the motives of anyone who disagrees with them. They refuse to consider the possibility that critics might have something to add to the discussion.

In Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, Richard Delgado (one of the founders of CRT) and Jean Stefancic characterize opposition to CRT this way: “As Thomas Kuhn has shown, paradigms resist change. It should come as no surprise, then, that critical race theory, which seeks to change the reigning paradigm of civil rights thought, has sparked stubborn resistance.” This characterization serves to dismiss their critics; rather than admitting that critics might have ideas worth grappling with, the authors write them off as simply resistant to improving our civil rights.

In a chapter titled “Critiques and Responses to Criticism,” Delgado and Stefancic list only two criticisms of CRT that come from outside the movement. One questions CRT’s univariate analysis, and the other questions CRT’s assumption that minorities cannot succeed in light of the success in America of Jews and Asians. Each of these two criticisms—the sum total of all of the external critiques that Delgado and Stefancic would admit to or grapple with—elicited a paltry one-paragraph response. The first response asserted that the critic in question had performed an “unsympathetic reading” of CRT texts. The second said that CRT wasn’t racist against Jews and Asians (no, really).

It's the "unsympathetic readings" that might do more to help a scholar focus his thinking.  Critical Studies are not, in any form, scholarship.  Too many people, though, are so easily intimidated when their motives are questioned or when they're Kafka-trapped, to properly push back.

This kind of blatant dismissal of critics might play well on Twitter, but it’s unbecoming for actual scholars. So why do Crits do this? The biggest reason is that the whole ideology is founded on a “hermeneutics of suspicion.” As Jacob Mackey, assistant professor of Classics at Occidental College, puts it, CRT is “dedicated to seeing hidden, ulterior, or unconscious motives as drivers of affairs.” This is an ideology founded on the idea that racism is systemic, that it lives in every interaction, and that it’s perpetuated by almost every member of the dominant race. That makes Crits inherently skeptical of the motives of anyone who disagrees with them. Or, as Mackey puts it, CRT “posits similar [hidden, ulterior, or unconscious] motives to individuals.”

The easiest place to see this is in Crits’ skepticism of the motives of whites. For Crits, all whites are oppressors. As Delgado and Stefancic put it, “racism is pervasive, systemic, and deeply ingrained.” As such, “no white member of society seems quite so innocent.”

Catch that "hermeneutics," a term that alludes to Biblical scholarship?  It follows, doesn't it: all have sinned, and all have fallen short of the Glory of Woke.  The worst sins?  Failure to confess the sins, or perhaps, apostasy?

Some Crits have even published papers explaining why criticisms of CRT by people with privilege can be safely ignored. In an article published in the feminist journal Hypatia, Alison Bailey, a professor at Illinois State University, coins the term “privilege-preserving epistemic pushback” to invalidate criticism of Crits’ ideas. What is “privilege-preserving epistemic pushback?” Essentially, it’s “a form of worldview protection: a willful resistance to knowing that occurs predictably in discussions that threaten a social group’s epistemic home terrain.” It manifests as “barriers made of opinions and prejudices, which are fortified by anger, shame, guilt, indifference, arrogance, jealously [sic], pride, and sometimes silence.” Essentially, privileged people object to CRT because it threatens their privilege.

It’s true that people can often get defensive when their worldviews are challenged, but for Crits like Bailey, this defensiveness only ever goes one way. Privileged people who disagree with CRT are defensive and argue from self-interest, but Crits themselves (privileged or not) would never do something so base.

But what about minorities who happen to disagree with the tenets of CRT? What about folks like John McWhorter and Wilfred Reilly and Coleman Hughes among others? Here, too, Crits manage to dismiss any criticism by impugning the critics’ motives.

If these people showed up prosetylizing at your door, you could plead something going on in the kitchen and excuse them, but doing so in the common room or doing diversity brainwashing is another matter.

The tragedy of all of this is that CRT does have some good ideas. Racism does exist in the United States. Some laws do have a racist component, especially in the criminal justice system. Intersectionality can be a useful tool to help understand certain forms of disadvantage. But too many Crits don’t see themselves as scholars searching for the truth. Instead, they see themselves as the anointed ones, in full ownership of the truth and chosen to dispense their wisdom from on high. Until they’re willing to grapple with the many sincere criticisms of their theory, their contributions to reducing racism will be limited. It’s hard to contribute to a good-faith discussion about how to solve a societal problem when your most prominent scholars won’t even admit to the existence of said discussion.

No, no more than the Cardinal Archbishop of years ago would.