https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/critical-race-theorys-marxist-roots-bruce-thornton/
The expanding influence of Critical Race Theory and its Black Live Matter “praxis,” as Marxists call applied theory, has raised concerns about its incoherent pronouncements and illiberal aims. The origins of this ideology is an important question, for CRT has nothing to do with civil rights, or improving black lives or making them “matter.” It’s about increasing its practitioners’ power in our institutions in order to “fundamentally transform” the United States from a country of ordered liberty and limited government, to a “soft” despotic, intrusively regulated technocracy at best, or an illiberal socialist tyranny at worst.
CRT has its roots in Marxism, as one of the founders of BLM has bragged. And, like the Soviet version of Marxism, BLM’s growing influence over our social, educational, political, and corporate institutions––already compromised by a century of progressive ideology, itself a kissing-cousin of Marxism––is an existential danger to the Constitutional safeguards of our political freedom and unalienable rights.
The first Marxist feature is the dubious habit of thought often called the “hermeneutics of suspicion.” This intellectual grift also defines postmodernism in general, and ideological movements like poststructuralism, radical feminism, and postcolonialism, all of which are fellow travelers of Marxism.
This method of analysis assumes that the reality of all social, political, artistic, and other cultural phenomena cannot be known from the public words and actions of social and political institutions, but rather must be found in the deeper, subterranean ideologies of the power elite that runs them. This “ruling class” shapes political and institutional “discourses” and “knowledge regimes”––the “epiphenomena,” as Marxists call them–– in order to benefit their tyrannical, selfish interests by oppressing others, whom they keep imprisoned in a “false consciousness” that hides from them the true agents and causes of their oppression.
Hence for CRT, all the progress in race relations––the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Brown vs. Board of Education, the growth of the black middle class, the elimination of legal segregation, and the increase in black office-holders including the presidency––are mere “epiphenomena” that have not eliminated the underlying “systemic racism.” According to CRT, this occult “racism” keeps racism alive and accounts for all the “disparate impacts” that deny “equity” (i.e. the equality of result) to blacks and other minorities, but benefit and reward “white privilege” and “white supremacy” at the expense of black well-being.
Correcting that “false consciousness,” especially “white fragility,” the denial of white “privilege” and “racism,” explains the efforts to include CRT in school curricula from pre-school to university, and in training programs for employees of corporations and the federal and state government agencies so that they interpret their functions from the CRT perspective. The goal is to expose and reform these institutions’ true oppressive nature that is obscured by their duplicitous, self-serving public claims and motives. Hence the “1619 Project,” which has revolutionized and deformed the discipline of American history from grade school to university.
