It is nothing short of fantastic that an academic course of study, usually taught at the graduate school level, has become the fodder to escalate the culture war onto an unthinkable plane. But that is what we’re looking at. Critical race theory is plutonium right now. Here’s a definition of what the term meant before it was coopted to mean anything the person using it wants it to mean, for the purpose of fear mongering amongst insecure whites, and ginning up the ratings for right-wing media.

Technically, critical race theory is an academic framework for examining the ways in which systemic racism shapes and influences national and social institutions. But to right-wing activists who refuse to understand this, it has instead become a catchall phrase used to attack anything they dislike. This has created a vicious cycle whereby right-wing commentators misrepresent what critical race theory is and instead attribute to it a cavalcade of hypothetical horrors that, in turn, generates panic and outrage among other right-wing activists over something they don’t understand.

It was somewhat comical back in the day when Michelle Bachmann and others were claiming that FEMA housing was being constructed to imprison white people as reparations for slavery. We have pretty much recycled to that and Pat Robertson articulates the core of the issue, that low education, low information whites fear POCs and what they might do to them. If that isn’t guilt fueled paranoia then I don’t know what is.

You can’t get any clearer than that. The tables are going to turn and whatever you did to the black man for 400 years the black man is going to do to you, now. It’s a power trip. Racism is a systemic system, as is sexism. Both are inbred in this culture.

That’s a pretty good definition of Trumpism, “the manifestation of the fear, insecurity, and neurosis experienced by the decline of white identity politics and dominance.” That’s what drives the Trump train, fear, insecurity, neurosis.

It’s a losing battle because 1. any political posture, or any policy generally speaking, based upon a negative, is a losing proposition. And, 2. by the year 2045, the melting pot of the American experiment will have whites as a minority, along with all other races and ethnicities. We are going to have to develop a new lexicon, because majority/minority is too simplistic a concept to adequately describe what the racial makeup of the country is turning into, right now as we speak. We’re going to be a majority of minorities.

What is a total hoot, or a tragedy, depending upon how you want to view it, is that Robertson has just tacitly acknowledged the systemic racism which he and his ilk say doesn’t exist — and then he goes on to perfectly articulate white fear.

There you have it from Pat Robertson, authority figure to millions.

Oh well, it gives Dr. Fauci a break for a few hours from wingnut attacks. We must always look for the silver lining, don’t you agree?

 

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10 COMMENTS

  1. Robertson is not wrong. He is acknowledging that racism is systemic. Remember, many right-wingers claim (contrary to all historical evidence and current data) there is not systemic racism in America. The very fact that white people are afraid of black people is also a tantamount admission that white people, regardless of the strident denials of some, actually do recognize that America is rife with systemic racism. It is not a stretch to conclude that the very [people who deny the existence of systemic racism, by that very denial, demonstrate they are racist. Non-racists feel no guilty need to deny the historical facts.

  2. To the fear mongering white raisin…the Bible contains the phrase “fear not” 365 times, one per day. Read it have you?

  3. I noticed yet another definition of Trumpism, but for me the best one is the one that seemed to hit me with physical force as I watched Amanda Gorman deliver her poem at President Biden’s Inauguration:

    “We’ve seen a force that would shatter our nation, rather than share it.

    Would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy.”

    I have literally seen the ugliness of human nature on slabs in morgues and funeral home prep rooms – shattered bodies of murder/suicides because some asshole decided that they (almost but not always a man) made the decision if they couldn’t have somebody then nobody else would be able to do so. It is a sickening thing to behold, and Trumpism is this same ghastly human trait manifesting in society and politics.

  4. Among the things that get me? The phrase “the soft bigotry of low expectations” came from Michael Gerson, who at the time he coined it worked for George Bush and this was used to chastise all of those of us who were among the “elite” liberals. And now, here we are, 20 years later, ignoring the fact that white rage, which is fueling much of the current iteration of systemic racism, has set itself up to harvest, and more often, to demand the benefits of low expectations. Because, poor (read that not poor as in living in poverty) white people have been so cheated of America’s opportunities that they deserve breaks, never mind of course that white folks have benefited since the founding of this nation from entitlement simply because we were and are white.
    The problem, however, is that history has a way of coming back and biting us in the ass–which brings me to the rest of my thoughts: this inconvenient history is what has so many white people quaking in their boots and thus attempting at every turn to silence it. One example: the brouhaha over the 1619 Project; and the big one right now—Critical Race Theory. Which BTW it appears so few conservatives even understand.

    • If we consider the lived experience of some of these white people, their past has given them no way to understand their white privilege. For example, there were only seven black kids in my all white high school. So my high school was 99.65% white. There was no cognizance of white privilege because there was no basis for comparison. From their point of view, color had nothing to do with their achievement or lack of achievement. I do not blame these people for not having the sort of life experience they can extrapolate to the rest of America. I do blame them for adamantly refusing to be educated.

      Conservatives understand the systemic racism component of CRT, and it is that very component they vociferously deny, while not realizing that their very stridency is evidence of its veracity.

      • Exactly. To alter a bit Shakespeare’s famous line, conservatives doth protest too much, methinks. The louder and more strident the protests are, the easier it is to connect the dots to their fear; but as well, to their desperation to hang on to power.
        Further, the fear it seems is driven not by guilty conscience, but from a visceral place–what we have done to legions of people of color they will, or could, if they gain power, do to us. And as Ursula says in this article, it’s a 400-year-long stranglehold, plenty of time to build both a superiority conceptualization of whiteness and a fear that it could be taken away.

  5. In Robertson’s comments, he makes a mistake endemic in the right’s logic…he lumps all whites into one giant group that are all being (supposedly) mistreated and should be afraid.

    Our society is more complex than that. A majority of white Americans aren’t threatened by the shifting demographics. But there is a minority of whites who had previously benefited from others being assigned to the lowest rungs of society because of their race and gender. That group…largely non-college rural whites…are watching as that system slowly gives way to something new, and they aren’t wrong in their conclusion that they are being passed over and relegated to those lower rungs.

    Unfortunately, this is exacerbated by our political system, because these same individuals have concentrated themselves into geographical areas where they’ve installed governments run by people who have zero interest in advancing those on the lowest rungs of society. If they want to vote for Democrats, we’d try to expand education and welfare and wages and opportunity. But they’ll keep voting for men like Snyder or Abbott, who will poison their water and leave them in the freezing cold without power. It feels like eventually the GOP or it’s platform or its base has to break apart.

    To live in interesting times…

    • Rory, your assessment of the situation in our nation is accurate. In my thirty+ years of work as a public servant, I have said repeatedly that those with little education and political awareness consistently vote for (or approve of, since many of them don’t even vote) “conservatives” (read: Republicans) who consistently sabotage any efforts to help their constituents out of the dire situations they find themselves. A perfect example: passing laws making it illegal to “reward” someone for standing in line to vote by offering them a cold drink. How Biblical is that? Christ must be burying His lovely face in His wounded hands. ?

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