Remembering DEI’s Progenitor, CRT
One doesn’t hear too much, if anything, about Critical Race Theory anymore. Now the media’s attention is upon DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion), the nefarious trident wielded by CRT.
DEI is CRT’s applied methodology to bring about societal and/or cultural changes anywhere advocates deem necessary. In actuality, it’s a shameless, in-your-face bigotry designed to alienate and disparage non-believers of its practices. DEI is the applied system to obfuscate and make palatable the deeply malicious aspects of CRT.
The results are now coming in from some private businesses and public institutions that had adopted DEI policies just a few years ago. Apparently, all does not bode well for DEI’s broad public acceptability as the cure-all for the nation’s ills. Those same entities are currently downsizing, rewriting and/or eliminating DEI requirements in HR departments and management positions.
Recently I did a deep dive into the personality of the nation’s public schools. I analyzed the psychothermal dynamics of why there had been created a severe fracture of the Public Trust in the system of public education.1 That analysis centered upon the public recognition of the undeniable dysfunctional behavior observed within the countenance and character of America’s public schools.
Most parents in America rely upon public education for their children. They also have certain expectations regarding students’ grade-level academic proficiency and the appropriateness of the curriculum taught. It is part of the bond, both actual and implicit, between local public school governance and the community it serves.
The causes for breaking the trust in the system of public education are many, but none more salient for its deliberate, deleterious psychological effects than DEI and its precursor, CRT. The strategic origins of CRT stretch back decades.
At its core, I found that the overall theme underlying CRT to be a heinous twist of social engineering. It’s no small wonder why concerned parents demonstrably took exception with their local schools’ substituting CRT ideology in place of teaching critical thinking skills. K-12 student proficiency in all subjects at all grade levels had measurably declined in the nation’s school districts that adopted CRT curriculum guidelines.
Its title doesn’t pull any punches; Critical Race Theory is racism. Only in the mind of a racist could such a theory find fertile soil. It was academically created by racists to be promoted and applied by racists.
And, over time, social engineering specialists acquired the verbal dexterity to successfully propagandize their racist dogma. It began with a marketing campaign in higher education under the guise of academic course work; then graduating students from elite liberal colleges and universities where CRT had found accommodating sociological humanitarian inroads for its doctrine.
The general technique of inculcating social racism is always the same, simple repetition -- over-n-over and louder-n-louder. It’s intended to be the mind-numbing annoyance it is so that tolerance rather than activism becomes the acceptable mode of adaptability for those within its sphere of influence.
Beyond CRT’s procedural techniques, devotees religiously believe that their principles must be publicly projected with the ego’s most emotive bravado. This is to attract the greatest possible public attention and to intentionally provoke some antithetical reaction (possibly extreme), but only if an event suits their racist agenda.
During quiescent times, when headlines no longer echo their bigotry, advocates seek as much social media face-time as possible to espouse their hostile and insincere human interest. Listen carefully to their insatiable appetite for greater power while lurking behind the countenance of a carefully crafted and myopically defined altruistic concept of victimhood and social equity.
The use of the words “social equity” intends an emotionless, impersonal impression upon the mind. It’s a psychological alchemy that neutralizes a personal drive toward success with a civil, more democratic acceptance of mediocrity. Thus, they favor participation trophies for the group rather than acknowledge and reward individual merit. All-n-all, it is a vicious rationale designed to disincentivize an individual’s creative spirit while inculcating pre-engineered homogenized communal beliefs that substitute for personal responsibility.
It doesn’t matter how you want to sugarcoat it, extremism under any banner is still extremism, and the foundations of CRT are indeed extreme and imperious. Everyone has read about and seen high-profile racial advocates and political operatives who opportunistically misuse, abuse and pattern tragic newsworthy events to guide and shape public opinion to favor their shameful narrative.
Ironically, those highlighted acts then illuminate CRT’s inherent blind spot. Its extreme creed breeds a contemptible narcissism that creates an inability for its disciples to introspect. This endorses behavior grounded in acute paranoia displayed by a defensive arrogance that stimulates the motivation to immediately and adamantly dismiss any challenge to their tenets.
Like any theory, CRT is a hypothesis, a conjecture, a conceptual framework, and essentially a projected guess containing data sewn together in support of some potential yet-to-be tested or validated outcome or result. Theories are ubiquitous in academia; and they all beg to be tested, argued for and against, and either adopted or discarded resulting from intellectual acumen applied to earnest research discourse and procedures.
CRT, however, is the exception to this academic regimen. Its backers tolerate no debate beyond its mandates. In their shortsighted view, if you don’t accept CRT as it stands then you must be a racist person. Again, it’s their obtuse character that prohibits seeing the blatant hypocrisy of their own projections.
The theory maintains a self-ordained, academic smugness based upon stories formulated from cherry-picked legal issues. All of those anecdotes required a victim in order to magnify the argument of racial inequity.
Every highly publicized individual case chosen by CRT amplifiers must in some way be symbolic of the hidden racism they claim is everywhere in (white) American society. Each victim’s story is then expertly tailored to fit a legal design wrapped in as much metaphor as possible. It is then broadly trumpeted as a gross aberration of some poor soul’s oppressed life’s journey mystically transforming the victim into Jung’s hero.
The theory goes on to assert that virtually all of America’s established institutions are inherently racist in some ill-defined, arcane way. By inappropriately assigning the personality trait of racism to a societal system provides a window to observe how CRT negatively plugs into the system’s psychothermal life process.
With regards to the K-12 system of public education in America the research indicated that reducing critical thinking skills with time spent instead on social engineering wastes energy available to the system. This produced a thermal increase in psychic entropy within the personality development of public education. In a relatively short amount of time, that demonstrably reduced the value of the system’s end product, students. What followed socially was a break in the public trust.
CRT claims to be the magic social elixir to cure America’s systemic racial inequity throughout all levels of government, the military, local and state funded institutions, and all hierarchical entrepreneurial enterprises…essentially anywhere partisans deem necessary. “It is an environment in which dissenting from the new critical race orthodoxy — or even failing to swear fealty to it like some kind of McCarthy-era loyalty oath — is grounds for public humiliation and professional retaliation...”2 Any notion that it is actually derisive to people of color, or that it is fundamentally alienating in practice and detrimental to all groups in American society is also not permitted.
CRT also makes very clear that it does not value who you are, but what you are. This is blatant regressive logic where individuality is expunged and replaced with a social, collective dynamic. In this way, CRT subjugates what is personally creative and qualitative to that which is communally provided and quantitative.
The theory’s rationale is that any individual achievement, advancement, or societal success by a person of color is always determined by some other person, group, or entity. The victim-turned-hero now dons the shroud of the oppressed; and with it comes the vehement insistence that this condition must no longer be tolerated. This is the way CRT culturally massages the heartstrings of Judeo-Christian humanitarianism!
CRT advocates refuse to see that promoting “the other” is immediately divisive. For them, a person’s race is indisputable and it is therefore the one irrefutable fact used to substantiate the entire theory. It’s a circular logic which ignores the truth that it promotes a deliberate societal and cultural disunity that is decidedly and brazenly discriminatory.
The theory goes on to presume the notion that white guilt is something real – almost tangible – and, get this, predicated upon an unconscious3 predisposition toward bigotry and superiority. I have found no data to substantiate that absurd claim. There is only advocate journalism to promote CRT’s notion of a deeply imbedded, unresolved cultural guilt in order to influence public opinion in its favor.
There are many critics of CRT, each with a valid perspective describing the theory’s weaknesses and toxic attributes. And devotees of CRT always offer the same intolerant and incoherent ravings of indignation and denial. Their behavioral display tells you all you need to know of CRT’s rectitude and impartiality in civic discourse.
I’ve taken issue with CRT because it has greatly contributed to the ruination of the people’s trust in public education and because of its deleterious effects upon millions of young people. Indeed, there are other important issues that adversely contribute to the system of public education in America, but none as psychologically pernicious as CRT.
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1. See Other Material: “The Personality Dynamics of Public Education”
2. https://www.thefp.com/p/whistleblower-at-smith-college-resigns
3. See Glossary
First published October, 2023
