By: Wilfred Reilly

Published: May 2022

Words have to mean things. That isn’t a glib, throwaway line. Many of the most vicious battles in modern American public life are, in their essence, purely semantic fights—often focused on postmodern attempts to redefine previously consistent terms. The Title IX debate on college campuses centers to a remarkably large extent on whether “rape” is a fair description of essentially consensual sex facilitated by alcohol or drugs, and later regretted. Even the contemporary philosophical squabble over human agency seems to boil down to the question: “We now know that people often make decisions at the conscious level of the brain/mind, on the basis of their own genetics and experiences—but is it correct to call that free will or not?”

Across these battles, the postmodern left often holds something of a natural advantage, because—speaking less than half-jokingly—they have all the English teachers on their side. And, while some of the intellectual fights in question are purely theoretical, others matter quite a lot in real-world political and social terms. Perhaps the most relevant of these is the ongoing attempt, by widely read academics and public intellectuals such as Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, to redefine the concept of racism. In foisting upon us a new understanding of such a consequential term, this campaign leaps from the semantic into the substantive and seeks to reevaluate our thoughts and actions as individuals and as a nation.

For Kendi in particular, racism is properly thought of not as simple out-group bias, but rather as any system that produces disparate outcomes between or across racial and ethnic groups. He says this openly. In his book How to Be an Antiracist and again in an interview with Vox just after he had been minted a MacArthur “genius,” Kendi argues that there are only two possible explanations for a measurable difference in performance between two large groups in a given undertaking—say, standardized testing. These are (1) some form of racism within a social “system,” no matter how hidden and subtle, or (2) actual (I read him as meaning genetic) “inferiority” on the part of the lower-performing of the two groups. “There’s only two causes of, you know, racial disparities,” Kendi said on a Vox podcast. “Either certain groups are better or worse than others, and that’s why they have more, or racist policy. Those are the only two options.”

Disparities, in the Kendi model, are de facto evidence of racist discrimination. Moreover, Kendi’s proposition sets a clever rhetorical trap: His logical implication is that anyone who argues against Explanation No. 1 is, by definition, agreeing with Explanation No. 2. If you don’t accept racism as the culprit in performance outcomes, you must be endorsing group inferiority. Thus, should we accept his framing, simply to argue against “anti-racism” is to identify oneself as a racist. For the nonconfrontational—who dodge this trap by agreeing that all group gaps are either evidence of racism or the dread thing itself—Kendi proposes some social-engineering solutions to fix our racist system. These include the formation of a federal Department of Anti-racism, tasked with ensuring proper representation of all groups across all fields of American enterprise, regardless of performance.

In order to determine the value of Kendi’s proposed definition of “racism,” we must first examine the logic of his claims. The old business-world canard that “the problem with this whole argument is that it is wrong” comes to mind. It is remarkable that such an easily disprovable idea has become so globally popular. The contention that the only factor that might explain group differences in performance, at any given time, is either genetic inferiority or hidden racism is simply wrong as a matter of fact. And if Kendi were saying that temporary cultural underperformance demonstrated genuine “inferiority” across an entire race, that too would be wrong as a matter of fact.

Serious social scientists—from Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams on the political right to William Julius Wilson and John Ogbu on the left—have pointed out for decades that large human groups differ in terms of performance because of dozens of variables. Yes, these include culture (i.e., hours of study time per day). But they also include factors such as environment, region of residence, and even stochastic chance (or luck, to state it a bit more plainly).

One particularly obvious and noncontroversial example of such an “intervening independent variable” is age. According to the Pew Research Center, the most common (modal) age of black Americans is 27, and the most common age for white Americans is 58 (the median age gap, approximately a decade, is smaller). The most common age for Hispanics in the U.S.—across all regions and among both males and females—is 11. Vast differences such as these, which have nothing to do with inferiority, are certain to be reflected in measured group outcomes.

Geography is another powerful factor. Near-majorities of both American blacks and Hispanics still live in the South or Southwest, but a far smaller percentage of whites live in the same regions. This matters because test scores for all groups living in those regions have traditionally been lower than for those elsewhere in the country. Any analysis of group outcomes—from wealth and income statistics on the left to crime rates on the right—that fails to take obvious factors like these into account is dishonest or willfully ignorant.

Almost invariably, analyses that do take such factors into account find what might seem intuitively obvious to most thinking people: These variables explain group-performance gaps far better than “invisible racism” does. While she is sympathetic to arguments about the lingering effects of past oppression, the economist June O’Neill pointed out decades ago in the Journal of Economic Perspectives that the sizable gap in raw income between American blacks and whites shrinks to just 1 to 2 percent when adjustments are made for variables such as test scores, median age, and work experience. And the business-data company PayScale came to similar conclusions just last year regarding a range of commonly discussed race and gender pay gaps. Leaving aside its reductive circularity, a definition of racism as “group gaps” fails utterly if 98 percent of the gaps in question vanish when we adjust for basic non-raced variables such as “how old people are” or “what scores on the big test look like this year.”

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One would think that analyses such as these make an airtight case against theories of overriding systemic racism. And they do—which is why those who believe in such theories make a fighting retreat toward a god-of-the-gaps argument when faced with data that shrink racism as a factor. According to this argument, perhaps even those secondary metrics (age, regional difference, and so on) reflect some still deeper and more dispersed form of racism. This is one of the reasons we are told that standardized exams that test mathematics and similar academic skills are culturally biased against blacks. This is what activists began to argue in the 1970s and what some scholars are beginning to reassert once more. They’re both wrong. Putting to one side the fact that mathematics developed historically in multicolored Mediterranean and North African regions (we still use Arabic numerals today) rather than in, say, Norway, we know what predicts test scores: They track closely with patterns of study time for members of all racial groups. This has been the core “culturalist” argument against IQ hereditarians, who believe in group differences in intelligence, for decades.

In 2017, the liberal-centrist Brookings Institution released a widely circulated article demonstrating that white high-school students study nearly twice as much as black high-school students, with Hispanic students falling in between the two. There are a variety of complex reasons for this, including social class, family stability, the prioritization of other activities such as athletics, and—no doubt—the effects of racism in the past. Perhaps unsurprisingly, grades and test scores follow exactly the same pattern. What’s more, Asian students out-study and thus outperform all white groups—an important phenomenon, in that theories such as Kendi’s provide no coherent way to explain it. Can anyone seriously argue that contemporary U.S. society is institutionally biased toward Korean or Indian-American kids (or Jews) and against blond-haired Anglo-Saxon gentry sprigs?

At least a few left-leaning thinkers are currently dealing with the confusing reality of high performance and successful minorities by hiding it. One recent method has been to formally reclassify Asian Americans as “white” in official documents. For those of us who are more confident in our theories, however, there is no mystery here to decipher: The same set of variables, influenced by past and current bias but also by many other things, explains why some minority groups are currently “beating” whites and why others are not. And one more than suspects that these factors largely explain the distribution of white income in the U.S., where wealthy white groups such as Australian Americans take in 200 to 300 percent more in annual household income than poorer ones such as Appalachian Americans. There is no coherent woke response to these points, beyond moving the causal focus of the original argument back one step and then calling anyone who still disagrees with them a racist.

In addition to its insufficient explanatory power, another weakness of the newly proposed definition and theory of racism is its lack of any coherent causal mechanism. To provide an example, Michelle Alexander argues in The New Jim Crow that black and Hispanic overrepresentation in the criminal-justice system is due to bigotry. To this claim, a quantitative scholar of political science or criminal justice would respond by saying that group crime rates explain the gap in incarceration rates. The next argument, chess-match style, would be that some form of subtle racism must explain the crime-rate gap. But we then have to ask: How? What is the mechanism that inflicts a given set of social problems on black Americans today (and often afflicts working-class whites to the same degree)? And why did this mysterious mechanism have far less influence on genuinely abused black folks in the past—with all “non-whites” making up 24 to 27 percent of sentenced prisoners even during the 1930s (blacks make up 52 percent of non-Hispanic prisoners today)? What’s more, how is it that this mechanism is ineffective when it comes to virtually all African and South Asian immigrants in the U.S. today? During the fairly typical year of 2018, all Asian Americans combined—including dark-skinned South Asians—committed just 127,651 violent crimes  in the U.S. versus 2,531,480 for non-Hispanic whites and 1,087,895 for the smaller black population? On a per capita basis, the Asian violent-crime rate breaks down to one such crime annually for every 153 citizens or residents of Asian descent, versus one crime per 79 among white Americans. And according to a somewhat classic but methodologically sound 1998 article produced by the National Bureau of Economic Research, native-born black Americans are “much more likely to be incarcerated” than black immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean. Why? Such questions are never answered, and the argument dies on the spot.

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The Kendi definition of racism so popular today simply fails when subjected to logical analysis. This leaves thinking people facing an obvious question: “So what does racism mean?” Fortunately for us, this is a query with a simple answer: Racism continues to mean what it has always meant. Tribalism is an ancient human vice, dating back to before the Bible, and virtually every dictionary, at least until the Great Awokening of the past few years, has defined “racism” in much the same way for decades: genetically or ethnically based animus against members of a human out-group. The Free Dictionary definition is typical of the genre and quite good. It says that racism is the belief that genetic race “accounts for differences in character or ability” and that “one race is superior” to one or more other races, and it is almost always combined with dislike, prejudice, or “discrimination.”

Racism, in this real sense, is not a vague synonym for reverse karma, as it often seems to be in contemporary writings on the left. It is not “that thing that makes those who have previously suffered continue to struggle today.” It is a practical phenomenon that can be quantified and opposed. Further, and significantly, it is a vice that members of all races are capable of, and that is often expressed at the level of the individual. A major, if rarely discussed, problem with defining racism as a matter of statistical output at the systemic level is that it moves society’s focus away from most actual and demonstrable manifestations of racism—the slurs, fistfights, and muggings, and the simple refusals to promote someone “not quite like us”—that citizens do occasionally face in their pursuit of a good life. Using the older and better definition, we can categorize a range of individual statements and attitudes (“blacks/whites/Jews are inferior”) as definably racist and focus on opposing them as they arise.

Real racism is evidenced not by performance gaps alone but rather by proven discrimination. And such discrimination can be measured in a multitude of ways in this era of sophisticated statistical methods. Any facially racist laws or policies that remain in place—and there may be a few—constitute unethical discrimination and demand that we rid ourselves of them. It can be argued that the same is true for statutes that seem to treat otherwise identical people of different races differently after all major nonracial characteristics have been adjusted for (urban marijuana laws might be an example of this). We, as a society, might even choose to be skeptical of policies that produce large pre-adjustment racial gaps and that do not seem to serve any necessary purpose. There’s a fascinating debate around exactly this issue as it pertains to a string of legal cases dealing with workplace qualifications such as aptitude testing. The point is, bias is bad, and we should fight it.

We’ve seen enough of the fashionable arguments about racism to know that they’re only detrimental to that fight. The claim that “we know significant racism exists because the thing we have defined as significant racism exists” is not serious. If we were to accept it wholesale, it would mean, among other things, that the United States is a Korean-supremacist country. According to the proposed definition of racism, there’s no other way to interpret the outsize success of Korean Americans. This is why words must mean something. Rather than embracing the absurd, or choosing to deny the reality of continuing residual racism, thinking liberals, centrists, and conservatives need to reclaim the classic meaning of a critical term. If not, the proposed definition will become the definition. In a haunting indication of what’s to come, Merriam-Webster revised its definition of “racism” in 2020 to include “systemic racism.”

Ibram X. Kendi was born Ibram Henry Rogers. It is time we left Mr. Rogers’s intellectual neighborhood and got back to consensus reality before the real meaning of the word becomes a cultural artifact.

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The thing to understand about Mr. Rogers is that he’s not a deep thinker. He doesn’t come from the social sciences, he doesn’t come from a domain that requires evidence, analysis or testing. He’s little more than a storyteller.

If someone says “I think we should start opening things up slowly, taking lots of safety precautions, so we can help the economy not tank” then that obviously does not mean “we should just get rid of the lockdown entirely and let 16 million people DIE.” 

Yet, no matter how many times it’s been explained, with data and everything, that’s still what they’re claiming was said. That’s still what’s being spread around. It really proves people don’t care about accuracy, they don’t care about truth, they don’t care about honest debates. When people do that, it’s because they’ve latched onto a bit of drama and they’re bored and are looking for confrontation. They’ve chosen a target and they will continue to misconstrue, twist, and skew anything said by that person, to further demonize them.

I’ve seen this countless times before, and I’m sure there are studies on it if I go looking. It’s even similar to a kafkatrap. They have decided you are this thing, the more you deny it, the more it confirms it to them. The worst I ever saw was when a woman in a “support” group I was in asked a question concerning discrimination and trauma, asking if a woman who was raped by a Middle Eastern man in a turban would have problems any time she saw someone who looked similar. 

This question offended a good number of the other women in the group, despite having legit grounds in psychology, and they began twisting the woman’s words and started claiming that she said it was fine to discriminate against people who aren’t white, and even started saying some really horrible crap about her. They chased her out of the group, followed her onto her own facebook page and bullied/harassed her there, spread lies to her friends and family.

Welcome back to Argument Analysis. A series where I try to break down common argument tactics (or commonly claimed argument tactics), including disingenuous arguments, logical fallacies and the like, and explain what they are, how to recognize them, and how to avoid making them yourself. Today’s lesson is on the Model S Kafkatrap.  

What is a Kafkatrap?

The Model S Kafkatrap is a subset of a larger type of argument-- the Kafkatrap. A Kafkatrap is a newer term for a type of argument that has become very, very common both on and off the internet. A Kafkatrap is a logical fallacy where an individual seeks to establish guilt, sin, or prove a claim despite their opponents denial of guilt, sin of the claim in question. The Kafkatrap was named after Czech author Franz Kafka and based around his book The Trial in which a man is accused of an unspecified crime and put into a system where the only way out is to admit guilt for the crime-- whether or not he committed it. The term originated to describe identity debates (debates on religion, race, sex, etc.), but has since proliferated outward to all manner of debates. 

What is a Model S Kafkatrap?

The Model S Kafkatrap is the most fallacious model of the Kafkatrap as it creates an unfalsifiable argument. The Model S Kafkatrap is when the denial of a claim is taken as proof positive of the claim in question. It’s a basic tenet of logic that disputing a claim is not done when a person wishes to confirm the claim, but the Model S Kafkatrap reverses this principle and makes the very act of resistance inherent evidence for confirmation. 

For example, Model S Kafkatrap on gender inequality might look something like this:

Person A: Women are discriminated against more than men, and this is a problem

Person B: I don’t see that in my everyday experience 

Person A: The fact that you deny this shows how huge of a problem it is! People don’t even notice! 

In this example, Person A has taken person B’s Denial of their claim as proof of their claim without the evidence to back this up. Thus, it becomes impossible for Person B not to prove Person A’s claim. If they accept the claim, they prove it by default, whereas if they deny the claim then the Model S Kafkatrap asserts that the claim is proven anyway. Thus, the Model S Kafkatrap is also logical fallacy as opposed to merely a disingenuous argument. 

How do I Recognize a Model S Kafkatrap?

In a Model S Kafkatrap, you’ll see a person try to argue that another person’s denial of their claim proves their claim. This usually a pretty good indication that the argument is a Model S Kafkatrap, but it’s not foolproof. There are some claims that this doesn’t work for. If one of the claims is that a person is acting irrationally and they respond to that claim by denying it in an irrational manner, then it is not a Model S Kafkatrap to say that their denial actually proves the claim in question. 

My personal way to differentiate between a Model S Kafkatrap and one of the exceptions is to ask if the person saying the denial proves their claim is looking at the fact that there is a denial, or if they are looking at the specific context of the denial. If they are saying that the fact someone is denying their point makes it true, then that’s a Model S Kafkatrap. If they are pointing to an element of the denial that supports their claim, then it’s probably not a Model S Kafkatrap even though it looks like it. If you use this standard, I’m confident that you’ll use the term “Kafkatrap” (or “Model S Kafkatrap” if you’re pedantic like me) more correctly and effectively. 

How do I Avoid Using a Model S Kafkatrap?

It’s pretty hard to use a Model S Kafkatrap unintentionally. But, try responding to the opponent’s argument directly rather than responding to the idea that an opponent has made an argument. If you address the opponent’s argument specifically, you’ll never run the risk of making a Model S Kafkatrap. Also, if you’re going to say that an opponent’s denial of a claim actually helps to prove it, be sure to point to something in the denial as proof. If you’ve got evidence, it’s not a Model S Kafkatrap. Finally if you’re afraid you’re potentially making a Model S Kafkatrap, ask yourself, “how can my opponent prove my wrong?” If they can’t, then you need to retool your argument. As long as they can, it’s not a Model S Kafkatrap or any kind of logical fallacy. 

Let X be the bad thing that is used (often prejudice). Let Y be a group who has been guilty of X.

A: Claiming you aren’t guilty of X confirms that you are guilty of X.

C: If you are part of Y, you are guilty of X, because you have benefited from other Y’s X.

P: If you are privileged, you are guilty of X, because you have benefited from an X system.

S: If you are sceptical of an example of X, you are guilty of X.

L: If you want to analyse X, you are guilty of X.

D: Asking for a definition of X proves you are guilty of X.

M: If you disagree with the theory of X, you are either guilty of X or don’t understand the theory of X.

T: Victims of X who doubt the theory of X have just internalised X.

“Opposition to God’s law is obviously rooted in sin and has just become the newest dog whistle for sinners.”

It couldn’t be that there are valid concerns and objections. No, it could only be every vacuous woke buzzword.

https://debate.fandom.com/wiki/Kafka_Trap

A Kafka trap is a fallacy where if someone denies being x it is taken as evidence that the person is x since someone who is x would deny being x.

https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Conspiracy-Theory

Conspiracy Theory

Description: Explaining that your claim cannot be proven or verified because the truth is being hidden and/or evidence destroyed by a group of two or more people.  When that reason is challenged as not being true or accurate, the challenge is often presented as just another attempt to cover up the truth and presented as further evidence that the original claim is true.

I’ve never seen Mr. Rogers (aka Kendi) post anything that wasn’t overtly racist, blatant sophistry, or both simultaneously.

“The heartbeat of sin is denial. And too often, the more powerful the urge to sin, the more powerful the denial.”

I was Born Again until nearly the end of graduate school, a sincere Evangelical who went to church on Sunday and Wednesday with my family and to Thursday Bible study on my own. I dialed for converts during the “I Found It” evangelism campaign, served as a counselor at Camp Good News, and graduated from Wheaton College, Billy Graham’s alma mater. I know what it is to be an earnest believer among believers.

I also know what it is to experience those same dynamics from the outside. Since my fall from grace, I’ve written a book, Trusting Doubt, and several hundred articles exposing harms from Evangelicalism—not just the content of beliefs but also how they spread and shape the psychology of individuals and behavior of communities, doing damage in particular to women, children, and religious minorities.

It occurred to me recently that my time in Evangelicalism and subsequent journey out have a lot to do with why I find myself reactive to the spread of Woke culture among colleagues, political soulmates, and friends. Christianity takes many forms, with Evangelicalism being one of the more single-minded, dogmatic, groupish and enthusiastic among them. The Woke—meaning progressives who have “awoken” to the idea that oppression is the key concept explaining the structure of society, the flow of history, and virtually all of humanity’s woes—share these qualities.

To a former Evangelical, something feels too familiar—or better said, a bunch of somethings feel too familiar.

Righteous and infidels—There are two kinds of people in the world: Saved and damned or Woke and bigots, and anyone who isn’t with you 100% is morally suspect*. Through the lens of dichotomizing ideologies, each of us is seen—first and foremost—not as a complicated individual, but as a member of a group, with moral weight attached to our status as an insider or outsider.  (*exceptions made for potential converts)

Insider jargon—Like many other groups, the saved and the Woke signal insider status by using special language. An Evangelical immediately recognizes a fellow tribe-member when he or she hears phrases like Praise the Lord, born again, backsliding, stumbling block, give a testimony, a harvest of souls, or It’s not a religion; it’s a relationship. The Woke signal their wokeness with words like intersectionality, cultural appropriation, trigger warning, microaggression, privilege, fragility, problematic, or decolonization. The language of the Woke may have more meaningful real-world referents than that of Evangelicals, but in both cases, jargon isn’t merely a tool for efficient or precise communication as it is in many professions—it is a sign of belonging and moral virtue.

Born that way—Although theoretically anyone is welcome in either group, the social hierarchies in both Evangelical culture and Woke culture are defined largely by accidents of birth. The Bible lists privileged blood lines—the Chosen People—and teaches that men (more so than women) were made in the image of God. In Woke culture, hierarchy is determined by membership in traditionally oppressed tribes, again based largely on blood lines and chromosomes. Note that this is not about individual experience of oppression or privilege, hardship or ease. Rather, generic average oppression scores get assigned to each tribe and then to each person based on intersecting tribal identities. Thus, a queer female East Indian Harvard grad with a Ph.D. and E.D. position is considered more oppressed than the unemployed third son of a white Appalachian coal miner.

Original sin—In both systems, one consequence of birth is inherited guilt. People are guilty of the sins of their fathers. In the case of Evangelicalism, we all are born sinful, deserving of eternal torture because of Eve’s folly—eating from the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden. In Woke culture, white and male people are born with blood guilt, a product of how dominant white and male people have treated other people over the ages and in modern times, (which—it must be said—often has been  unspeakably horrible). Again, though, individual guilt isn’t about individual behaviors. A person born with original sin or blood guilt can behave badly and make things worse, but they cannot erase the inborn stain. (Note that this contradicts core tenets of liberal, humanist, and traditional progressive thought.)

Orthodoxies—The Bible is the inerrant Word of God. Jesus died for your sins. Hell awaits sinners. Salvation comes through accepting Jesus as your savior. If you are an Evangelical, doctrines like these must not be questioned. Trust and obey for there’s no other way. Anyone who questions core dogmas commits heresy, and anyone who preaches against them should be de-platformed or silenced. The Woke also have tenets of faith that must not be questioned. Most if not all ills flow from racism or sexism. Only males can be sexist; only white people can be racist. Gender is culturally constructed and independent of sex. Immigration is an economic boon for everyone. Elevating the most oppressed person will solve problems all the way up. Did my challenging that list make you think you might be reading an article by a conservative? If so, that’s exactly what I’m trying to illustrate.

Denial as proof—In Evangelicalism, thinking you don’t need to accept Jesus as your savior is proof that you do. Your denial simply reveals the depth of your sin and hardness of heart. In Woke culture, any pushback is perceived as a sign of white fragility or worse, a sign that one is a racist, sexist, homophobe, Islamophobe, xenophobe, or transphobe. You say that you voted for Barack Obama and your kids are biracial so your problem with BLM isn’t racism?  LOL, that’s just what a racist would say. In both cultures, the most charitable interpretation that an insider can offer a skeptic is something along these lines, You seem like a decent, kind person. I’m sure that you just don’t understand. Since Evangelical and Woke dogmas don’t allow for honest, ethical disagreement, the only alternative hypothesis is that the skeptic must be an evildoer or bigot.

Black and white thinking—If you are not for us, you’re against us. In the Evangelical worldview we are all caught up in a spiritual war between the forces of God and Satan, which is playing out on the celestial plane. Who is on the Lord’s side? one hymn asks, because anyone else is on the other. Even mainline Christians—and especially Catholics—may be seen by Evangelicals as part of the enemy force. For many of the Woke, the equivalent of mainline Christians are old school social liberals, like women who wear pink pussy hats. Working toward colorblindness, for example, is not just considered a suboptimal way of addressing racism (which is a position that people can make arguments for). Rather, it is itself a symptom of racism. And there’s no such thing as a moderate conservative. Both Evangelicals and the Woke argue that tolerance is bad. One shouldn’t tolerate evil or fascism, they say, and most people would agree. The problem is that so many outsiders are considered either evil sinners or racist fascists. In this view, pragmatism and compromise are signs of moral taint.

Shaming and shunning—The Woke don’t tar, feather and banish sinners. Neither—mercifully—do Christian puritans anymore. But public shaming and trial by ordeal are used by both clans to keep people in line. Some Christian leaders pressure members into ritual public confession. After all, as theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, “Nothing can be more cruel than the leniency which abandons others to their sin.” Shaming and shunning have ancient roots as tools of social control, and they elevate the status of the person or group doing the shaming. Maoist struggle sessions (forced public confessions) and Soviet self-criticism are examples of extreme shaming in social-critical movements seeking to upend traditional power structures. So, it should be no surprise that some of the Woke show little hesitation when call-out opportunities present themselves—nor that some remain unrelentingly righteous even when those call-outs leave a life or a family in ruins.

Selective science denial—Disinterest in inconvenient truths—or worse, denial of inconvenient truths, is generally a sign that ideology is at play. Most of us on the left can rattle off a list of truths that Evangelicals find inconvenient. The Bible is full of contradictions. Teens are going to keep having sex. Species evolve. The Earth is four and a half billion years old. Climate change is caused by humans (which suggests that God doesn’t have his hand on the wheel). Prayer works, at best, at the margins of statistical significance. But evidence and facts can be just as inconvenient for the Woke. Gender dimorphism affects how we think, not just how we look. Personal responsibility has real world benefits, even for people who have the odds stacked against them. Lived experience is simply anecdotal evidence. Skin color is often a poor proxy for privilege. Organic foods won’t feed 11 billion.

Evangelism—As infectious ideologies, Evangelicalism and Woke culture rely on both paid evangelists and enthusiastic converts to spread the word. Cru (formerly Campus Crusade for Christ) and related organizations spend tens of millions annually seeking converts on college campuses. But many outreach activities are led by earnest student believers. Critical Oppression Theory on campus has its epicenter in gender and race studies but has become a mainstay in schools of public health and law as well as the liberal arts. Once this becomes the dominant lens for human interactions, students police themselves—and each other. Nobody wants to be the ignoramus who deadnames a transgender peer or microaggresses against a foreign student by asking about their culture.

Hypocrisy—Christianity bills itself as a religion centered in humility, but countervailing dogmas promote the opposite. It is hard to imagine a set of beliefs more arrogant than the following: The universe was designed for humans. We uniquely are made in the image of God. All other creatures are ours to consume. Among thousands of religions, I happened to be born into the one that’s correct. The creator of the universe wants a personal relationship with me. Where Evangelicalism traffics in hubris cloaked as humility, Woke culture traffics in discrimination cloaked as inclusion. The far left demands that hiring practices, organizational hierarchies, social affinity groups, political strategizing, and funding flow give primacy to race and gender. Some of the Woke measure people by these checkboxes to a degree matched in the West only by groups like MRAs (Men’s Rights Activists) and white supremacists. The intent is to rectify old wrongs and current inequities–to literally solve discrimination with discrimination. One result is disinterest in suffering that doesn’t derive from traditional structural oppression of one tribe by another.

Gloating about the fate of the wicked—One of humanity’s uglier traits is that we like it when our enemies suffer. Some of the great Christian leaders and great justice warriors of history have inspired people to rise higher (think Desmond Tutu, Eli Wiesel, Vaclav Havel, Nelson Mandela).  But neither Evangelicalism nor Woke culture consistently inspires members to transcend tribal vindictiveness because neither, at heart, calls members into our shared humanity. Some Christian leaders have actually proclaimed that the suffering of the damned in hell heightens the joy of the saved in heaven. Some of the Woke curse those they see as fascists to burn in the very same Christian hell, metaphorically if not literally. They dream of restorative justice for criminal offenses but lifelong, ruinous retribution for political sinners: Those hateful Trump voters deserve whatever destitution or illness may come their way. Unemployed young men in rural middle America are turning to Heroin? Too bad. Nobody did anything about the crack epidemic. Oil town’s on fire? Burn baby burn.

I know how compelling those frustrated, vengeful thoughts can be, because I’ve had them. But I think that progressives can do better.

Ideology has an awe-inspiring power to forge identity and community, direct energy, channel rage and determination, love and hate. It has been one of the most transformative forces in human history. But too often ideology in the hands of a social movement simply rebrands and redirects old self-centering impulses while justifying the sense that this particular fight is uniquely holy.

Even so, social movements and religions—including those that are misguided—usually emerge from an impulse that is deeply good, the desire to foster wellbeing in world that is more kind and just, one that brings us closer to humanity’s multi-millennial dream of broad enduring peace and bounty. This, too, is something that the Righteous and the Woke have in common. Both genuinely aspire to societal justice—small s, small j—meaning not the brand but the real deal. Given that they often see themselves at opposite ends of the spectrum, perhaps that is grounds for a little hope.

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Published: October 1, 2020

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So, what is critical race theory? Is it divisive propaganda that claims America and white people to be racist and evil? Or is it simply the recognition of all people as human beings?

The theory traces its roots back to the writings and activism of freed slaves including Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth, who argued strongly for the recognition of African-Americans as full human beings. However, the theory as we know it today could best be understood to have its founding father in the sociologist, W.E.B Du Bois (1868-1963). Du Bois argued that the idea of race was created to provide a biological justification for the enslavement, mistreatment and exploitation of African-Americans. He was right.

Du Bois, however, was inclined to believe that African-Americans needed to raise themselves out of their subordinated position by showing white Americans how wrong they were to devalue black Americans in this way. During the Civil Rights Movement, a more activist stance developed which required white Americans to take more responsibility for their own racist assumptions and help to reorder society more fairly.

Following the legal success of the Civil Rights Movement the movement stalled. Legal victories had been won but racist attitudes remained. Thus, what was needed was a “critical” approach. The word “critical” refers to a practice of critiquing institutions and broader society with a view to revolutionary political change. This was in contradiction to the liberal approach of reforming existing structures so that everybody had equal access to them.

As Angela Davis puts it in her foreword to Critical Race Theory: An Introduction: “Unlike traditional civil rights discourse, which stresses incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.”

The founding father of critical race theory was Derrick Bell, professor at Harvard Law School. Bell argued that racism has not improved and is, in fact permanent, and that whites simply find less obvious and legal ways to maintain their dominance. Bell developed his theory of “Interest convergence” which argued that whites only extend rights to blacks when it is in their own material interest. This cynical and pessimistic materialist approach tends to present empirical evidence of disparities and then claim racism as the sole cause of them, while ignoring progress.

Materialism held sway in critical race theory in the 1970s and 80s but gave way to postmodern ideas from the 1990s. In 1991, Kimberlé Crenshaw defined intersectionality as a “provisional concept linking contemporary politics with postmodern theory.”  She critiqued liberalism for its universalism which held that all people should have access to everything regardless of their identity and argued instead for an identity-based approach.

This critique marked a shift from liberalism to identity politics with added postmodernism. The postmodern approach to critical race theory focused less on material aspects of society and more on concepts of power, knowledge and language.

This owes much to the thought of the French theorist Michel Foucault, who argued that oppressive systems of power are maintained by ways of talking about things — discourses. Powerful forces in society get to decide which ways of talking about things are legitimate and they do so to maintain their own privileged positions.

Having legitimised certain discourses, the general population then accepts them as common sense and speaks as though they are true, thus upholding power structures such as white supremacy without realising what they are doing. Critical theorists exist to explain these systems and how they work so people can see them and dismantle them.

This is how critical race theory developed within the academy. However, since around 2010, it has moved into the mainstream. The ideas we are most likely to hear are those of Ibram X Kendi and Robin DiAngelo. Kendi’s How to be an AntiRacist (2019) and DiAngelo’s White Fragility (2018) were New York Times bestsellers for months and sold out again following the death of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protests.

The work of Ibram X Kendi seems to draw most of its spirit from the materialist approach, presenting us with two intertwined false dichotomies. Firstly, one can only be racist or anti-racist. Secondly, one can either support the existence of disparities between races as right and natural or one can attribute them to racist power structures and policies in society and oppose them.

That is, either one accepts that all disparities are the result of racist structures in society and devotes oneself to opposing these as such, or one is a racist. Kendi does not claim that all white people are racist but maintains that all people can behave in ways that are racist or anti-racist according to his definitions.

He writes: “One endorses either the idea of a racial hierarchy as a racist, or racial equality as an antiracist. One either believes problems are rooted in groups of people, as a racist, or locates the roots of problems in power and policies, as an anti-racist. One either allows racial inequities to persevere, as a racist, or confronts racial inequities, as an antiracist… . The claim of ‘not racist’ neutrality is a mask for racism… . The only way to undo racism is to consistently identify and describe it — and then dismantle it.”

Robin DiAngelo takes a thoroughly postmodern approach. Her belief is that white people are unavoidably racist because of the ways in which they have been socialised in white supremacist countries. DiAngelo identifies America as just such a country but also much of Europe, including the UK.

For DiAngelo, “whiteness” is a system that whites perpetuate with everything they do. In White Fragility, she describes whiteness as a “constellation of processes and practices” consisting of “basic rights, values, beliefs, perspectives and experiences purported to be commonly shared by all but which are actually only consistently afforded to white people”. For DiAngelo these processes are “dynamic, relational, and operating at all times and on myriad levels”.

Elsewhere, she sets out a tenet of anti-racism, stating that “The question is not ‘Did racism occur?’ but ‘How did racism manifest in that situation?'” There is no possibility of not being racist and DiAngelo’s training aims to get white people to accept that they are racist — as the Trump memo claims.

So, is the Trump administration right? Does critical race theory claim that America is racist? Yes. Does it claim that white people are racist? If the training is based on DiAngelo, yes. If it draws more on Kendi, a racist is anyone not entirely convinced that all disparities are due to racism. Interestingly, 43% of black Americans are not convinced of this and believe an unwillingness to work hard is a major cause compared to only 30% of whites who believe so. This doesn’t mean they are correct and the perception being higher in black Americans could well be better explained by a tendency to conservatism related to their greater, often Protestant, religiosity as a group.

Is Hart correct that critical race theory and anti-racism training simply want all people to be recognised as equally human? No, this universal humanist approach is explicitly criticised in critical race theory as the failed liberal approach. Critical race theory works by foregrounding identity, not our shared humanity. Is the Trump administration thus correct to call it “divisive”? Absolutely.

Defenders of critical race theory training often miscategorise it as a standard form of essential workplace training, but training people in critical race theory is not like training them in protocols of data protection where compliance with the law can reasonably be required. It is more like training them in a belief system like Christianity and denying employees the right to be openly Muslim, Jewish, Hindu or atheist. Nobody should be required to pretend to believe themselves to be racist or to believe in invisible systems of whiteness if they don’t.

Critical race theory and particularly the anti-racism of Robin DiAngelo require people to reject individual agency and the individual’s knowledge of and control over their own mind, and to accept that they must believe precisely what one set of American theorists insist they do. While believers in critical race theory often insist that only white people reject its ideas, studies show that progressives who hold these kinds of views are much more likely to be white. Black Americans are even split in believing that race relations will improve by focusing on commonalities (liberal universalism) as on differences (identity politics).

By banning training rooted in critical race theory for federal employees, President Trump has defended freedom of belief and taken a stand against coerced speech. Yet there is cause to be concerned. The rhetoric about “patriotic education” and “anti-American propaganda” indicates that Trump could intend to replace one biased and ideological narrative with another and thus deny American children a rigorous education about the racial history of America.

Following the release of his memo, he tweeted, “This is a sickness that cannot be allowed to continue. Please report any sightings so we can quickly extinguish!”

And rather ominiously, at Tuesday’s debate the president also responded to requests to condemn white supremacy by telling the far-Right street fighters Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by. But I’ll tell you what: Somebody’s got to do something about antifa and the left.”

While American liberals might share the president’s wish for critical race theory to cease and desist, they must retain their principles of freedom of belief and be on their guard lest this language presages authoritarian censorship.