9 March 2012
Reaching
Critical Mass
In one of
the funnier, or scarier, videos I have seen recently, Breitbart.com’s
Editor-In-Chief Joel Pollak acquits
himself well in a heated discussion with Soledad O'Brien of CNN about critical
race theory. A major point of contention
revolved around the description of CRT:
“What part of that
was the bombshell? Because I missed it. I don’t get it,” O’Brien exclaimed.
“What was a bombshell?”
“Well, the bombshell
is the revelation of the relationship between Obama and Derrick Bell,” Pollak
pointed out.
“Okay, so he’s a
Harvard Law student and a Harvard Law Professor, yeah.” O’Brien added.
“Derrick Bell is the
Jeremiah Wright of academia,” Pollak stated. “He passed away last year, but
during his lifetime, he developed a theory called critical race theory, which
holds that the civil rights movement was a sham and that white supremacy is the
order and it must be overthrown.”
“So that is a
complete misreading,” O’Brien interrupted. “I’ll stop you there for a second — then
I’ll let you continue. That is a complete misreading of critical race theory.
That’s an actual theory. You could Google it and some would give you a good
definition. So that’s not correct. But keep going.”
“In what way is it a
critical misreading?” Pollak countered. “Can you explain to me? Explain to your
readers (sic) what it is,”
Eventually,
Ms. O'Brien delivered her perspective (probably with help from the earbud):
“Critical race
theory looks into the intersection of race and politics and the law and as a
legal academic who would study this and write about it, he would advance the
theory about what exactly happened when the law was examined in terms of racial
politics,” O’Brien explained. “There is no white supremacy in that. It is a
theory. It’s an academic theory and as one of the leading academics at Harvard
Law School, he was one of the people as part of that conversation. So that is a
short definition.”
Uh huh. And Rush Limbaugh sometimes comments on the
intersection of public policy and sexual mores.
Nothing to see here.
Pollak fired
back:
“I’m glad we’ve got
you saying that on tape because that’s a complete misrepresentation,” Pollak
hit back. “Critical race theory is all about white supremacy. Critical race
theory holds that civil rights laws are ineffective, that racial equality is
impossible, because the legal and Constitutional in America is white
supremacist.”
Perhaps we
can adjudicate this. Is CRT oriented
around some notion of white dominance or white supremacy? I think we can count on the NY Times to
present critical race theory in as gauzy and flattering a focus as possible, so
let's see how they described it over the years.
That specific phrase is returned fourteen times since 1981 by the Times
search engine. The first mention is from
1993:
Two New Law Journals Plan To Focus on Asian
Americans
SAN FRANCISCO, Jan.
28— University of California students in Los Angeles and Berkeley are working
separately to produce the nation's first two journals that will focus on legal
issues of concern to Asian Americans.
..."At
U.C.L.A., there's the Black Law Journal, which discusses African-American
issues, there's the Chicano Law Review, which deals with Latino issues, and
other journals that deal with trade and the environment," said Theresa
Han, a third-year law student at U.C.L.A. and co-editor in chief of the
university's Asian American and Pacific Islands Law Journal. "What we're
talking about are issues that specifically affect the Asian-American community,
like voting rights, how admission policies at universities affect Asian
Americans or how civil-rights legislation affects Asian Americans."
Both journals have adopted as their approach to legal analysis a young
and controversial area of legal scholarship known as "critical race
theory." The theory holds that to properly understand law in American
society, one must recognize that it has systematically subordinated non-whites.
"Law is not
just neutral, to be used by good and bad people," said Angela Harris, a
Berkeley law professor and adviser to the Asian Law Journal. She noted, for
example, how economic competition between Chinese and white laborers near the turn
of the century led to the Exclusionary Acts, which suspended Chinese
immigration. "Subordination of people of color is woven into the law,"
she said.
Pollak 1,
O'Brien 0. The obitiuary of W. Haywood
Burns mentions he taught CRT courses but offers no definition.
Here is a
1996 book review:
THE COMING RACE WAR?
And Other Apocalyptic Tales of America After Affirmative Action and
Welfare.
By Richard Delgado.
New York University,
$24.95.
Richard Delgado, who
teaches law at the University of Colorado, is an exponent of critical race
theory, which argues that American law, both unconsciously and
deliberately, oppresses minorities and insures control by white elites.
Pollak 2,
O'Brien 0
Here is a
May 5, 1997 think-piece:
For Black Scholars Wedded to Prism of Race, New and Separate Goals
By NEIL A. LEWIS
...
Critical race
theorists, who are on the faculty at almost every major law school and are
producing an ever-growing body of scholarly work, have drawn from an idea made
popular by postmodernist scholars of all races, that there is no objective
reality. Instead, the critical race
theorists say, there are competing racial versions of reality that may never be
reconciled.
Many theorists say
that because few whites will ever be able to see things as blacks do, real
racial understanding may be beyond the nation's reach.
''Critical race
theory wants to bring race to the very center of the analysis of most
situations,'' said Prof. Anthony E. Cook, an adherent of the theory on the
faculty at Georgetown University Law School. ''Its assumption is that race has
affected our perception of reality and our understanding of the world -- in
almost every way.''
...
''Critical race theory counters
colorblindness by saying that race is not simply skin color, and it tries to
reveal the ways that race is a category that has been structured out of law and
culture and history,'' said Prof. Kimberle Crenshaw of the University
of California at Los Angeles Law School, an editor of the leading anthology on
the subject.
''Most people think law is being neutral if it doesn't say anything
explicit about race,'' she said. ''But it is not usually neutral. It is
simply facilitating whatever power relationships were in existence when the law
was put in place.''
One important
battleground in critical race theory is the criminal justice system: Why, the
theorists ask, are a disproportionate number of the men in America's jails
black? Many critical race theorists say it is because the system is infected with
racism at every level, from prosecutors' offices to judges' chambers.
Pollak 3,
O'Brien 0.
Entry 5 is a
letter to the editor:
Hitler said it first. Think with the blood!
Hmm,
Godwin's Law? Pressing on, entry 6 is a
review by Neil Lewis of a book by Derrick Bell:
Storied Arguments
By Neil A. Lewis
AFROLANTICA LEGACIES
By Derrick Bell.
Bell's
long-expressed pessimistic view of racial relations, and the principal pillar
of most black critical-race theorists, is that the civil rights movement, with
its emphasis on integration, has been largely a failure and that racism has not
abated. But to press these arguable positions, Bell sees no need to prove or
demonstrate anything; he merely asserts conclusions. In these and previous tales, his
truths are simple: black people always behave nobly while white people behave
atrociously. In those few instances in which they don't, it is solely
because of a cynical if submerged self-interest.
Well, the
reviewer doesn't specifically say that atrocious whites use the color of law to
entrench their power, but it doesn't sound quite as race-neutral as Ms. O'Brien
seems to pretend. Call it even.
Here is a
May 10, 1998 book review:
Race Matters
By Laura Kalman
SEEING A COLOR-BLIND FUTURE
The Paradox of Race.
By Patricia J.
Williams.
...Williams helped
shape critical race theory, a movement of left law professors who say that equality
under the law, while vital, eliminates only blatant racism and who seek through
their scholarship to transform the way America constructs race and embeds and
perpetuates racism.
My emphasis;
Pollak 4, O'Brien 0.
Entry 8, a
1998 review of a Thurgood Marshall biography by Juan Williams, includes this
aside:
His core belief was not the radical one that the law itself is an
instrument of white power, as, say, critical race theory would have it, but
that it was a neutral instrument that could be put to the task of forcing
whites to accept blacks as equals.
Pollak 5,
O'Brien 0.
Entries 9
from April 20, 2002 and 10 from Jan 26,
2005 mention CRT without defining it. But we get some flavor from the 2005
article about Stanford Law School:
Their
courses here resound with the armchair radicalism of Orientalism,
neocolonialism, deconstructionism, white studies, critical race theory, queer
theory, blah blah blah.
Entry 11
also mention CRT as an aside. Entry 12
is from the Tom Horne, Attorney General of Arizona, in a letter defending
himself from a NY Times editorial:
Students are taught
“critical race theory,” which explains privilege as referring to “the amount of
melanin in a person’s skin.“ So-called “ ‘white ways’ ... must be recognized,
internalized and silently acted on by people of color.” Such statements promote
racial resentment.
The Times
editors may have given a platform to a conservative but we can't assume they
endorse this description of CRT, so it won't be scored. Still, Tom Horne would agree with Pollak.
Entry 13 by
Stanley Fish mentions CRT as an aside. And the Big Finish at 14 is the Oct 7,
2011 obituary of Derrick Bell:
Derrick Bell, Pioneering Law Professor And Civil Rights Advocate, Dies
at 80
By FRED A. BERNSTEIN
CORRECTION APPENDED
Derrick Bell, a
legal scholar who saw persistent racism in America and sought to expose it
through books, articles and provocative career moves -- he gave up a Harvard
Law School professorship to protest the school's hiring practices -- died on
Wednesday in Manhattan. He was 80 and lived on the Upper West Side.
...He was a pioneer
of critical race theory -- a body of legal scholarship that explored how racism
is embedded in laws and legal institutions, even many of those intended to
redress past injustices. His 1973 book, ''Race, Racism and American Law,''
became a staple in law schools and is now in its sixth edition.
...Professor Bell's
core beliefs included what he called ''the interest convergence dilemma'' -- the
idea that whites would not support efforts to improve the position of blacks
unless it was in their interest. Asked how the status of blacks could be
improved, he said he generally supported civil rights litigation, but cautioned
that even favorable rulings would probably yield disappointing results and that
it was best to be prepared for that.
Much of Professor
Bell's scholarship rejected dry legal analysis in favor of stories. In books
and law review articles, he presented parables and allegories about race
relations, then debated their meaning with a fictional alter ego, a professor
named Geneva Crenshaw, who forced him to confront the truth about racism in
America.
One of his
best-known parables is ''The Space Traders,'' which appeared in his 1992 book,
''Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism.'' In the story, as
Professor Bell later described it, creatures from another planet offer the
United States ''enough gold to retire the national debt, a magic chemical that
will cleanse America's polluted skies and waters, and a limitless source of
safe energy to replace our dwindling reserves.'' In exchange, the creatures ask
for only one thing: America's black population, which would be sent to outer
space. The white population accepts the offer by an overwhelming margin. (In
1994 the story was adapted as one of three segments in a television movie titled
''Cosmic Slop.'')
I'm going to
take a chance and score this for Pollak.
The final score, based on thirty years of NY Times coverage: Pollak 6,
O'Brien 0.
So her
statement about critical race theory - “There is no white supremacy in
that" - is either woefully misinformed or a lie. And since she has claimed to be re-reading a
book books by Derrick Bell, I think she knows darn well she is lying.
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