Critical Race Theory Transcends Reality
by Ilana Mercer
Inciting racial hatred against whites is all in a day’s work on CNN. It devolves into a more festive affair when a celebrity like DL Hughley joins the network’s conga-line of cretins. In a July segment, the comedian, author of Surrender, White People, regaled those CNN viewers with a masochistic mindset, by comparing “racism” to COVID19. Whitey, belched Hughley—who used to be witty and is now a drag—can be an asymptomatic carrier of racism. Just because you haven’t done anything racist, doesn’t mean you aren’t racist.
Pay no attention to the COVID-race comparison. It’s the Left’s lowbrow idea of an intellectual quip. Be mindful, however, of the “guilty if you do, guilty if you don’t” pop-jurisprudence. Collectively convicting an entire racial group for metaphysical crimes is the cornerstone of the Critical Race Theory (CRT). Flouting Western judicial philosophy, Critical Race Theory says that you are a racist without having committed racism, which is like being a murderer, robber or rapist without having murdered, robbed or raped. How does that jurisprudence strike you? It strikes the reasonable, fair-minded member of society as “less than human, less than coherent, less than sane.”
Deconstructed, racism, as deployed by Critical Race theorists, is purely a metaphysical affair. It doesn’t survive contact with reality, relying for its validation on a loose relationship with the real world. You might say Critical Race Theory is anchored in symbolism and not realism. Ditto Critical Race Feminism (CRF), a subspecies of CRT, the symbolic nature of which this writer had traced in a 2001, Ottawa Citizen column.
Women’s studies courses and English departments have long been littered with Postmodernism’s lumpen jargon. There, text is routinely deconstructed and shred. Subjected to this academic acid, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, and T. S. Eliot are whittled down to no more than ruling-class oppressors, their artistry reduced to the bare bones of alleged power relationships in society. All this glumness is due to a theory, no more, and one based on a partial and insular view of history [and reality].
To properly place Critical Race Theory in perspective, a young man followed-up the column with a personalized tale of desperation. He had the misfortune of drawing a skyscraper in art class. His creation was alighted on by his professor-cum-oppressor and right away called out for being a phallic symbol, offensive to women folk, meant as a symbolic assertion of his dominance qua male. Where is reality in all this white noise? Nowhere, but in the heads of demented distaff and their house-broken, white, liberal, male accomplices. Symbolism, after all, is not reality. What you see in an ink-blot test is not real. It’s rarely even an approximation of reality. A Rorschach assay amounts to artistic license the tester takes with his subject’s reality. [Editorial note; or as Freud once sagely remarked, “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar”.]
As they are deployed today, the dreaded racism and sexism epithets are anchored in the notion that reality is determined by the allegedly pre-determined, power relationships in society. Whites, in particular white men and the remnant of a civilization their forebears built, are to blame for everything. A “fella” is laying waste to a little old lady’s bric-a-brac store in Kenosha, Wisconsin: blame the melanin-deprived.
As that would suggest, any black man looting constitutes not a crime with real victims, but, rather, an acting out by the victimized, a reaction to historic “oppression”; a response to The Machine, in accordance with a theory that has been dreamed-up in the rarified atmosphere of the academy, and applied outside of it. A theory, of course, any theory, is always an abstraction, removed from reality. A good theory cleaves to reality as much as possible, describing and presaging it. A bad theory superimposes a new reality on real events. Critical Race Theory does one worse: it rapes reality and loots it.
Another concrete case of the Critical-Race created tension between theory and reality unfolded on “Seattle Refined,” a Komo News television show. The words “riots and protests,” asserted a local, privileged professor, are social constructs imposed by the power structure” on poor people of color. Observe how for his “riots” our pedagogue claims the status of a “social construct,” a mere theory. For poverty, by contrast, this African-American educator chose the status of reality.
Our “teacher” earns a fail on reality testing and reason. Both poverty and the George Floyd, Democrat, race riots of 2020, ongoing, are immutable realities. Poverty, black and white, and the race riots are manifestly real. Ontologically, these are irrefutable events and occurrences. What a lie, then, and an affront to reality and reason is a theory of racism that opts to deny one incontestable reality—the riots—but admits of another—black (but not white) poverty. To opportunistically privilege only a spectrum of reality, as Critical Race Theory does, is (I repeat) “less than human, less than coherent, less than sane.”
In all its impenetrable, piss-poor prose, Critical Race theorizing is best confined to the turgid minds of our affirmative-action driven universities. Alas, it has percolated from America’s tertiary institutions throughout state and civil society. By now, the Critical Race rot is institutional; it is the handiwork of progressive—regressive, rather—parents, pedagogues and politicians.
Indeed, the youth rioting on our streets are not outsiders and interlopers; they are us. It is not insignificant that the whiter the city, the worse the riots have been. The protests that have engulfed more than 2,000 American cities have been the worst in “Minneapolis (64 percent white), Seattle (66 percent), Portland (77 percent), and Kenosha, Wisconsin (67 percent).”
To summarize: with Critical Race Theory, a triumphant Left arbitrarily imposes meaning on the phenomenological world as a function of its will to power. It then bullies those who don’t go along. The right-minded must reject this root-and-branch.
Ilana Mercer has been writing a weekly, paleolibertarian column since 1999. She’s the author of Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America From Post-Apartheid South Africa (2011) & The Trump Revolution: The Donald’s Creative Destruction Deconstructed” (June, 2016). She’s currently on Gab, YouTube, Twitter & LinkedIn, but has been banned by Facebook
“Symbolism, after all, is not reality.“ Now THAT is a loaded statement! Not only, but if accepted, begs the question: “What then is reality, and how can it be known?” As the author acknowledges in the next few sentences, the ink blot is just an ink blot, but then she also removes an ink blot from the realm of symbols.
“And God said…” Genesis 1:3,6,9,14,20,24, and 26
John 1:1-3: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being. In Him was life, and the life was the Light of men.”
An ink blot is not a symbol, it is an ink blot, with no inherent meaning beyond itself. To submit to a Rorschach test is to voluntarily and knowingly seek symbolism in something that has no intrinsic meaning or intelligence behind it. True symbols on the other hand always carry intent to convey information about realities that exist beyond themselves. The words I write in this response are symbolic of my thoughts which are real thoughts. They convey meaning, (hopefully). The code in a computer program is made of symbols, and which a compiler has been designed to understand and to convert into machine language for execution by a cpu. DNA codes are symbols instructing the cell as to how to engineer itself when going through mitosis. Symbols always represent communicable intelligence.
So as quoted above, at least one view of ‘reality’ accepts the proposition that a symbol is real. A word is a symbol. And all that has been created has been made by a Word, a symbol, whose essence as a symbol is beyond itself, but the more real because of it.
To get back to the article on hand: The validity of a symbol is relative to the truth or falsehood the thing beyond itself that the symbol represents. Critical Race Theory is not invalid because of its symbolic nature, it is invalid because the symbols point to lies, lies that are manifestly, lies.