The controversy regarding critical race theory has exposed the fundamental weakness of the American left in the post-civil rights, post-Vietnam War activism era: it gave up on organizing people. Instead the left went for the soft sell of producing theories about oppression but no serious mobilization against it. Beginning from the seventies and onward, the American left had given up organizing people through labor unions, mass-based direct action groups. The Democratic Party, the “party of the people,” shifted away from working people to college educated professionals, the very people who either teach the theory or promote it via the DEI industry.
However, critical race theory is merely the latest iteration of phantom politics which has characterized the post-civil rights political activities of African Americans. Jesse Jackson’s two presidential campaigns, Al Sharpton’s campaign, Louis Farrakhan’s Million Man March franchise, numerous “black agenda” confabs, even Black Lives Matters are examples of phantom politics: none of them truly sought to assert black participation in striving for a share in the distribution of power. Such “politics” play to the emotional appeal of “movement” but never entailed the hard work of actually mobilizing people to contest for power in a democratic society.
As the post-civil, post-Vietnam era of activism declined, activists retreated to the university and engaged in theory proliferation, creating a “critical theory industrial complex” based on a melange of ideas borrowed and/or swiped from the Frankfurt School, postmodern theorists such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Francois Lyotard.
Later came American theorists and practitioners such as Derrick Bell, Kimberle Crenshaw, Robin DiAngleo, Ibram Kendi, and Nikole Hannah-Jones. So called critical race theory is just one of many academic theories such as postcolonial theory, queer theory, feminst theory, disability and fat studies, and social justice scholarship, which forms the basis of being “woke,” i.e., super sensitive to actual and perceived injustices. Yet as the theories proliferated, unions and mass-based organizing and mobilization declined in American society.
If one reads “The Man Behind Critical Race Theory,” a New Yorker article about Derrick Bell, one can easily discern the limits of critical legal theory, from which critical race theory rose. Why was the civil rights movement effective? It was due to the fact that it had mobilized people. Critical race theory, however, began as a legal movement–in posh universities– without a cause, meaning masses of people behind it. Critical race theory is basically doing the same thing that the post-civil right black political leadership class had done, meaning extricating itself from the masses of black people. The fact that CRT could be easily isolated and denigrated by the right, as shown by Christopher Rufo, means that it has no network or apparatus to defend itself, popular support.
Critical race theory is popular with some on the left because it explains oppression but doesn’t do anything about it.
To be clear, the civil rights movement had its limitations; it was unable to address the economic conditions of segregation. However, that aspect of the movement was slowly coming into focus but was thwarted by King’s assassination and the rise of the godfather of identity politics: black power. The civil rights coalition — blacks, labor, liberals, churches and others — fractured with each component going its own way. Some into academia.
Academia is not interested in unions or working people, black, white or Hispanic. It is interested in theories of oppression or systems of power but not in creating real tools to help people obtain power to improve their lives individually and collectively. Theory, over the last forty years, has become the intellectual plaything of academics who think they are doing “critical” work “unmasking power.” “Political work” that is, essentially, phantom politics.
This academic left, which is middle and upper-middle class, and predominantly white, has theories about oppression and power but doesn’t offer any guide in helping “subordinate people” achieve it. It has no true sense of solidarity with the real problems that afflict a near-decimated multi-racial working class. Its motto: Let ‘Em Theory.
Would Robin DiAngelo be welcomed at businesses if she were teaching DEI workshops on “corporate fragility” instead of “white fragility”?
