The arrogant self-righteous lies being used to protect Critical Race Theory at student’s expense.
The Rundown
The video starts off with an angry white guy insulting CRT and claiming that it is idiotic to teach in schools. It then is revealed that this was just the intro for the creator to launch into his platform.
The creator introduces himself as Dr. Cruz despite the cringe-worthy use of Dr. to mean he has a Ph.D. He smugly invites the original creator to a “schooling” by saying, “welcome to class” with a big smile on his face. This is the smug self-righteousness of a bully whose platform is based on being able to censor comments and avoid anyone who disagrees with his position.
He tells us he is going to address multiple aspects of his claim that he got considerably wrong:
- The “Critical” in Critical Race Theory refers to Critical Theory which was started by Jewish people afraid of the rise in popularity of a particular German party.
- The Critical Theory founders that started the Frankfurt School would have laughed at anyone suggesting that this is Critical Theory. At best, it is the bastardization of Critical Theory that uses the term “Critical” as a defacto claim to legitimacy. It is not.
- But furthermore, as Critical Theory was replaced by critical theory (lower case) it began to change forms and the new critical theory had different goals that made it more adaptable to modern times. These changes did not happen 100 years ago as Dr. Cruz suggests, they are relative recent and the critical theory from which Critical Race Theory pretends to adhere to is simply again to sound more legitimate than the truth.
- No one who studies this theory has any use for any white person, especially children, to feel guilty about CRT and that White Guilt just gets in the way of learning about CRT.
- Again this is not accurate. Critical Legal studies had specific goals of finding race-specific laws and neutralizing them. It was not necessarily successful as the practice behind the laws didn’t change, just the wording.
- With this in mind, as an attorney, Derrick Bell started formulating his courtroom defense of black defendants using a new technique. The technique explained a different perspective of his defendant’s situation. In it, he used language that exonerated his client because it thrust the blame for the precursors to the crime directly on the shoulders of the jurors. In the grand style of a southern preacher, he would point at the jurors and squarely accuse them of forcing this poor otherwise innocent man to commit the crimes he was accused of. Since the jurors were mostly white, he would convince them that the only reason this person committed the crime was because he had no other options because of racism. He put the jurors on trial for the crime and all it takes is one juror to feel guilty for how they treated this poor client to acquit. In short, the foundation of the legal defense which spawns CRT is in fact White Guilt.
- The only reason that people claim that CRT scholars don’t want to hear about white guilt is because it’s not actionable. Guilt does nothing and because CRT is about advocacy first and foremost, they want action. If the guilt sponsors some sort of reaction like special consideration for black people, then it is the special consideration they are after, not the guilt. This allows them to further chastise people for guilt because guilt does nothing for them when it is considered in isolation.
- If you teach young white kids about CRT and labor issues they will grow up to realize that they have more in common with the poor than they do with the rich white people ruining everything.
- Let’s just quickly note how he slyly included labor issues. This isn’t about labor issues, but it seems to give him another point of defense. It’s not an honest portrayal of the conflict happening in our schools and it is almost shameless that he chose to include this in his claims defending CRT.
- One of the things about this kind of advocacy is that they employ the same techniques they accuse others of. School, to these people is a means of conditioning young students. It’s not so much about education as it is about conditioning them. They make these claims alongside the claims about the dishonest and incomplete portrayal of slavery in our schools–claiming this is how white people condition our children to be racist. It’s really just a smokescreen to get CRT into schools to start the conditioning them as CRT advocates early for their goals.
- At the very beginning of CRT, it was clear to the founders and their followers that for CRT to expand its effects it needs a captive audience like the forced education and brainwashing of college students. It was a clear progression that new students in higher ed could easily be recruited to join the advocacy of CRT once they were fed “alternative facts” through mandatory classes in CRT disguised as race-studies combined with loaded and cherry-picked perspectives about black opression. What if they could get the students to be prepared to take action in high school. So that’s what they started to do.
- Now granted they hid behind the idea that CRT was a matter of legal scholarship for as long as they could. Now, it clearly is laughable that this advocacy group of educators was teaching the legal aspets of CRT that include shifting the blame for the crimes of black defendents onto the shoulders of white jurors. But to keep bringing this into our schools, we needed a new face for CRT.
- Diversity, Inclusion, And Equity (carefully reordered so as not to refer to the literal death of America as DEI) has the same goals as CRT, makes the same claims as CRT and is sweeping through our schools because the students of the original CRT scholars are now the teachers in K-12. They have left higher education and are now expanding their cult viewpoint to indoctrinate students earlier.
Conclusion
My general response is that Dr. Cruz is simply a willful victim of the CRT cult who uses his platform and his Ph.D. to influence people to support the publically palatable aspects of CRT while denying the more apocalyptic and nihilistic.
Dr. Cruz has appropriated the struggle of supposed inner-city black citizens, a trope that wil never die thanks to CRT, to use victim mentality to make his claims that he is oppressed like all black people are oppressed. To someone not so fortunate as to have the advantages he has had by virtue of his skin color, his claims seem specious and his arguments seem intentionally misleading.
He has provided us with three explicit untruths about Critical Race Theory (listed above). He suggests that we read the works of a number of CRT Scholars and triggers his band of mouth-frothing followers to spew their venomous support for his views all over the comments. He does this with impunity because not only does Tik Tok allow creators with dishonest motives to eliminate all but the most glowing support comments, it also limits comments to 150 characters. He is free to provide multiple alternative facts that simply cannot be corrected or sourced in such a short format. This is the dangerous side of Tik Tok and Dr. Cruz has it down.
If you find that you are unconvinced about the risk associated with bringing CRT into our schools under such optimistic names as D.E.I. (actually DIE, but you get the point), simply consider this. Critical Theory is designed to express an alternate point of view as part of a wider curriculum of thought. It is supposed to take it’s place at the discussion table as one potential way to view a subject. That is not the case with CRT.
CRT offers their point of view as the only point of view. This extreme perspective coming from a small fraction of the small fraction of our country (less than 14%) is being told not as an alternative consideration, but rather as the only fact available. This is not relying on students to explore options and decide for themselves, this is brainwashing students and children as young as they can possible be. Though not officially CRT, Kendi’s work on Anti-Racism provides us with the same dichotomy: Either you are a racist or you support his radical extremist view of what racism is and how it affects a small portion of our country. Kendi even suggests that we introduce our children before school to the struggle between the races. How is this effective at coming together as a country–it’s not. That’s not the goal of Kendi, of anti-racism, or of CRT. Their priority is to bring about the literal deconstruction of our racist country from the roadways to the skyscrapers–all models of oppressive white supremacy. Read Derrick Bell’s last book to see that this is the real goal of antiracism and CRT. Quit listening to the pretty parts of CRT and look at what it is really saying.