How to Argue with People Who Aren't There
There’s a meme that recently made the rounds among my well-meaning lefty friends, and it’s a variation on this:
Oh, snap.
Here’s the thing, though.
I get it. There are plenty of people who are slinging the term “critical race theory” around, clearly without knowing what it means. Ask ten of them what it means, and at least nine of them will give you a vague or incorrect answer.
My lefty friends take that ignorance and run with it – and fair enough, it’s easy (although not very gracious) to poke fun at people who use a term and can’t explain it clearly.
But listen: Not a single person of my acquaintance, not one, of any political persuasion, no matter how simple or nuanced their political views may be, regardless of whether they can explain what CRT is, has ever said they object to truthful American history being taught.
Not one.
I’ve never heard a single person of my acquaintance, no matter how conservative (or, even in my mind, “regressive”) their views are, advocate or even imply — and this includes the most conservative of the conservative — that we should not be teaching a truthful account of the history of racism, slavery, stealing the Native Americans’ land through “treaties,” lynchings, redlining, Jim Crow — you name it.
Not one person is saying that we shouldn’t teach these things truthfully. Not one person is saying we should leave these things out of the curriculum. Not one person is saying any of these historical things are overblown.
These are horrible things, these are a blight on our history as a nation, and they must be taught. Everyone agrees.
So when my lefty friends are posting this meme and thereby I suppose in their own way believing themselves to be pushing back against racial injustice, taking a swipe at “ignorance,” the irony is they share in the ignorance, they promote more ignorance, because they are arguing with people who simply don’t exist.
How can you strike a superior moral pose — how can you be so convinced of your own virtue — when you can’t clearly and in good faith articulate the claims and concerns of the people you claim moral superiority to? That’s just lazy and dishonest. I’m not saying that my well-meaning lefty friends are deliberately being lazy and dishonest — no, they’re good people who dislike racism and want a fair world for everyone, and that’s why I love them. They thought the meme was funny and reposted it — it wasn’t all that serious to them, it was just a quick laugh — but that’s surely the outcome.
Please, instead, lefty friends, craft an argument — if you have one — against the claims that concerned people are actually raising. Argue with people who really exist, people with nuanced concerns. Don’t just poke fun at the people who have been vaguely alarmed in their echo chambers by the term “critical race theory” and can’t explain what they’re alarmed about– you’re shooting fish in a barrel.
Instead, listen to the concerns of people who see things they don’t like – yes, listen to the concerns of thoughtful people who disagree with you – and then decide if you have a snappy meme to make.
For example, here’s a description of the overarching concern with the way racism is currently addressed in some schools by the organization Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (FAIR) on its “About” page:
“Increasingly, American institutions — colleges and universities, businesses, government, the media and even our children’s schools — are enforcing a cynical and intolerant orthodoxy. This orthodoxy requires us to identify ourselves and each other based on immutable characteristics like skin color, gender and sexual orientation. It pits us against one another and diminishes what it means to be human.
“Today, almost 70 years after Brown v. Board of Education ushered in the Civil Rights Movement, there is an urgent need to reaffirm and advance its core principles. To insist on our common humanity. To demand that we are each entitled to equality under the law. To bring about a world in which we are all judged by the content of our character and not by the color of our skin.”
Hm. Well, what do they mean by that? What are some examples of the “cynical and intolerant orthodoxy”? What do they mean when they say that people are required to identify themselves and each other based on immutable characteristics? If those are the things they don’t like, what are some examples?
Here’s passage from a letter from FAIR to the US Department of Education expressing some examples of their concerns, which they seem to believe represents a well-intentioned but misguided cultural push:
“In the name of ‘anti-racism,’ children (and their parents) are being racially segregated for school meetings and student groups.1 Kindergarteners are asked to compare their skin color to crayons and shown macabre videos of dead children purportedly speaking from beyond the grave about the danger of police.2 Elementary school students are forced to march and chant for ‘black power.’3 Students are divided into groups of ‘oppressors’ and ‘oppressed’ based solely on their immutable characteristics.4 They are being taught the following: the U.S. was founded for the purpose of ‘impoverish[ing] people of color and enrich[ing] white people’;5 each student must identify as a member of a skin color group because it ‘gives [them] power over [their] oppressors’;6 ‘race is an essential part of one’s identity’;7 only white Americans can be racist;8 racism is ‘what white people do to people of color’;9 Americans with white skin are inherently ‘dominant’ and ‘oppressive’;10 calling the police is an act of ‘white supremacy’;11 ‘disruption is the new world order’ and the only means by which ‘those who are denied power [can] access power’;12 and any student who disagrees is a ‘white supremacist’ (if white) or ‘in denial’ (if not white).13 And those are just the lessons that have been made public. Almost certainly, a great many more instances remain hidden in classroom-only materials that are not shared with parents and kept behind a veil of opacity -- sometimes deliberately.”
You can check out the details in the footnotes and read these yourselves to decide whether any of these complaints seem like good-faith concerns. My point here is not whether I agree with any of these concerns. My point here is not whether you agree with any of these concerns. We might. We might not.
My point is that some people — perhaps people with whom you will still disagree once you fully hear them out — are expressing what seem like good-faith concerns, and they are not being heard, or they are being tarred with the simple “racist” brush to get them to shut up. The unfortunate outcome is that we can’t have a real dialog about what is being taught in the schools.
Common ground is not possible when you’re not hearing the “other side” — and it seems like in many cases, our echo chambers and our snappy memes enable us to deliberately avoid hearing them. That harms all of us: people of every political persuasion.
Read the footnotes. Are these issues on which decent, thoughtful people might legitimately disagree, or do these represent merely the racist frothings of those who don’t want “truthful history” taught?
I’m just asking you: Before you decide and post memes about these people and dismiss them as racist idiots, be sure you understand what they are complaining about. If you are going to fight racists from your keyboard, make sure you’re fighting people who actually exist. Make sure you’re engaging with someone.
Otherwise, you’re preaching to your cozy little choir, to the people who believe (and who misunderstand) all the same things that you do.
Otherwise, all you accomplish is to set up a strawman as the Bad Guy and solidify your position as a Good Guy in your own little tribe, without accomplishing anything productive or positive in the world.
That’s all I’m saying.
https://will-law.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Final-Madison-Letter.pdf; Max Eden, “Ban Critical Race Theory Now,” Newsweek (May 2021).
Christopher Rufo, “Failure Factory,” City Journal (Feb. 2021).
Christopher Rufo, “Bad Education,” City Journal (Feb. 2021).
Paul Rossi, “Opinion.” New York Post (Apr. 13, 2021).
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
https://aarjb2jw4n53e35fhbquj418-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Screen-Shot-2020-06-02- at-2.29.36-PM.png
“Teachers Told to Give Fake Curriculum to Parents Who Complain of ‘Indoctrination,’” Citizens Journal (May 2021).
https://aarjb2jw4n53e35fhbquj418-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Screen-Shot-2020-06-02- at-2.29.36-PM.png; https://schoolhouserights.org/the-lawsuit/complaint/
I love this substack, thanks for the insightful writing!
These days I work for an economic development nonprofit, but I spent the naughts in a social science PhD program at a top public university; at the time, I had my sights on an academic career.
At the time, it was obvious that acquiring serious fluency in postmodern, and critical theory discourses was an absolute necessity for competing in the academic job market. My politics were left-of-center, so I was pre-adapted, and acquire that fluency I certainly did.
Here's my take on the whole Pomo/Critical Theory ball of wax: by the late 60s, the Marxian left had very much soured on the idea of the proletariat as the foot soldiers of the revolution; it's fair to say that the feeling was mutual.
By that time, it had become abundantly clear what an appalling shit-show Soviet communism was, and even the French Marxists were having a crisis of faith. University radicals seeking to keep the faith, but uncomfortable with mass death in the pursuit of human liberation, needed a way out. They were certainly aware that most western workers despised them and their bottomless contempt for the societies that gave these academic radicals cushy jobs and elite status, so the workers had to go.
Being themselves widely despised in mainstream society, the radicals of the academy naturally sympathized with despised minorities. Thus, identity-based prejudices were seen as the path forward, and marginalized identity groups (racial, ethnic, and gender/sexual, to name a few) were chosen as a substitute for the proles. With the jettisoning of class as the primary lense for understanding oppression, factories as the primary battlefields, and workers as the shock troops, a new framework was required. That new framework was language, culture, power, and identity. With this shift, the old Marxian notion of 'the workers must seize control of the means of production' became 'the oppressed groups must seize control of the means of discursive production.'
The white race became the new bourgeoisie, and the search for unearned privilege was substituted for the old Marxian habit of denouncing all things bourgeois. And, of course, just as the proletariat needed a vanguard, so, too, do the oppressed groups. Capitalism and hierarchy are still very bad, so at least some things never change!
If you want to understand the new left, and just how badly these ideas can potentially play out, read Orwell. Homage to Catalonia, Animal Farm, and 1984 are good places to either begin, or refresh one's memory.
Matt Yglesias (Slow Boring) wrote a post that I can't remember the name of. His point was that he wasn't a fan of the "cancel culture" discourse. He said it's pretty reasonable for a company to fire someone for saying racist things and holding racist beliefs. The problem isn't the "cancelling," the problem is that we've move the goalpost on what being racist means. Most of us wouldn't want to work with a klansman or a white nationalist. It's probably a good thing that we have social taboos against that sort of stuff. Yglesias' problem is that people have begun calling fairly mundane beliefs racist: like the idea (once common in liberal circles) that standardized test gaps represent actual gaps in learning between races.
I think that's part of the problem here. Progressives have broadened the definition of racist/racism beyond all reason, and now a lot of others feel like the chair has been pulled out from under them.
I think that's what's going on here pro-CRT (CRT used with like ten asterisks here) people have decided all opposition is racist and therefore doesn't need to be addressed.