by Dave Fryett
Race theory has an ugly past. Scientific racism, as it was misnamed, furnished ideological cover for many of the 19th and 20th century’s imperial marauders as they scoured the planet for valuable resources and cheap labor. The conclusions of this “scientific” research has been used to justify the cruelest subjugation, and, sadly, underpin fascist thought to the present day. Modern race theory, Critical Race Theory, disavows this past without caveat. It insists that race is man-made and seeks to understand the mechanisms by which race can come to be reified and how to prevent recurrences. CRT is postcolonial in that it “decenters” traditional European metanarratives and pursues the broadest possible base of sources and perspectives. These are noble aims and practices, but, I will argue, despite the best liberal intentions of its contemporary advocates, race theory is inherently reactionary, and can only lead back to the fascist nursery from which it emerged.
One could not ask for a better example than Geraldine Heng, author of The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages. When one studies race, modern science insists, one studies a chimera. In this case, however, it is a chimera which perpetually threatens to become an episteme and CRT traffics in the same discourse, the same “racial logic” as its earlier incarnation. In this book, Heng uses the lens of Critical Race Theory to investigate, among other events, the expulsion of the entire Jewish population of England in 1290. As we shall see, CRT takes her to a conclusion which is not only unsustainable, but which situates her in the mainstream of historical fascist thought. However different her viewpoint and goals may be from the German or Italian fascists of World War II–and they are!–she is nonetheless casting the same seeds; spreading old ideas in a new normative guise.
There are, I hope to persuade you, only two political orientations, two competing theories of everything–socialism and fascism–however many gradients may lie between. These two adversarial doctrines purport to explain history; to identify its animating, determinative forces. So, what are they?
No synopsis of socialism will satisfy everyone, but there are core elements upon which there is near universal agreement. At the heart of socialism is class struggle; the belief that the interests of working people clash with those of their employers, and that inevitably the working class will rise up, defeat the bourgeoisie and create a classless society. As Karl Marx famously put it: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guildmaster and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, that each time ended, either in the revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.” As capitalism is a global system, international proletarian cooperation will be necessary for its elimination. This places the working class of one nation in alliance with its counterparts in all the others, and in opposition to the bourgeoisie of all nations including its own. Crucially, then, socialism presupposes equality and promotes the breaching of racial and national barriers.
Fascism does not. As formulated by Giovanne Gentile, chief theoretician and speech writer for Benito Mussolini, fascism is a near point-by-point refutation, and wholesale repudiation, of socialist principles. It rejects class struggle and the perceived economic determinism of socialism in favor of “corporatism,” which contends that economic classes are like the individual organs in a body; each with its job to do and dependent on the others for its survival. Fascism dismisses equality and democracy as unattainable and undesirable. Human inequality is obvious and natural, and the cause of economic stratification. Given that human beings are not equal, the more gifted will rise to higher station and receive more, and that each member of society benefits from this hierarchy of merit. Perhaps the highest expression of this idea can be found in Arthur de Gobineau’s biological determinism. Gobinism held that the most successful people of Europe had the highest concentration of Aryan blood, and that this was responsible for their proficiency. Fortunately, this inanity no longer has currency among academics as modern scientific analytics has swept it into history’s dustbin, but it remains a theme in contemporary fascism.
As individuals are unequal, so then are races and nations (for fascists these should be one and the same). The European conquest and domination of Africa and the Americas, argued Adolf Hitler, is proof of the superiority of the Aryan race. Given these facts, so the argument goes, the real conflict is not between classes, but races. Competition for the world’s waterways, arable land and metals is, has been, and will ever remain the driving force of history. Thus, race is not only identity but destiny. You are your genes. Your race/nation–those who share your genes–is one and indivisible, and your only home and sanctuary in a world of eternally competing races. As such, procreation outside the race/nation is anathema, and was identified by German fascism, however absurdly, as responsible for that nation’s geopolitical impotence. To paraphrase Hitler’s noxious analogy: a bull wants a cow, not a doe or a mare.
Nowadays this might appear an unimportant matter as most people don’t identify as either socialist or fascist and are largely unaware of the points in dispute, but it most assuredly is not. Whenever political activists mass and plan, the issues of race and class manifest quickly, and contentiously. The splintering that often ensues can be insurmountable.
Heng’s book has been deemed “ground-breaking,” “seminal,” game-changing,” and has garnered no less than four prizes–and it is insufferable. Not only for the reason stated above, but in every way. The first thing which strikes the reader is its repetition–merciless, soporific repetition. Her endlessly euphuistic prose rolls out as inconvergent mass in which nothing is said, and then said again and again. Paragraph after vacuous paragraph wends onto the page in a florid stream of inarticulation in which the reader is left to scavenge for meaning, focus, or even purpose. She strains to write millenially, almost messianically, which is tiresome enough, but her inability to do so yields a literary effect not unlike a train wreck, with each verbal repackaging crashing successively into the one before it with such ineluctable force that the reader can do nothing but recoil and watch helplessly as the process plays itself out. One pines for substance but when it does arrive it is camouflaged by so much literary pomp that its barely detectable. Heng struggles and struggles to punch above her literary weight, resulting in a book which is painful to read.
Self-conscious and prolix as it is, Heng’s prose can provide comic relief :
“The chapters of this volume thus point to particular moments and instances of how race is made, to indicate the exemplary, dynamic, and resourceful character of race-making under conditions of possibility, not to extract repetitions without difference. They point to racializing momentum that manifests unevenly, and nonidentically, in different places and different times–to sketch the dynamic field of forces within which miscellaneous instances of race-making can occur under varied local conditions.” [All italics within quotation marks in the essay are Heng’s}
Under conditions of possibility, isn’t that how everything happens?
Invention is marred throughout by careless phrases; lapses which range from the merely clumsy to the redundant to the muddle-headed. Everybody makes such mistakes, but what distinguishes Heng’s work is their persistence: “battening on bodies, physiognomy, and somatic attributes,” “interknotted,” “recur again,” “across the translocal,” ‘hatching open,” “absolutely incommensurable,” “meanings that only exist as lacunae,” “land-based feudalism,” “early beginnings,” “legal execution by the state,” “screed of such vitriol,” “systematic targeting,” “repeating tendency,” “recloning,” “bifurcated polarities,” “interchangeably alike,” “genuinely novel,” “essentialized as absolute and fundamental,” “powerful dominant discourses,” “eschew altogether,” “exotic-foreign,” “gather and pool,” “juridical violence through law.” This may be dismissed simply as poor writing, but as we shall see, Heng’s linguistic contortions play a foundational role in her race-making thesis.
This book is a failure in style, substance, objectivity and integrity, and from its first word. The introduction is imaginatively entitled “Beginnings.” One of its sections is called “How to Read this Book on Medieval Race,” not only “how to read,” but “on race,” just in case you mistook The Invention of Race in The European Middle Ages for an auto repair manual. The next two sections are “What this Book Contains” followed cheerlessly by “What this Book does not Contain.”
What it contains is literal repetition. On page five are two consecutive paragraphs whose first begins “For race theorists, the study of racial emergence in the longer duree is also one means to understand…” On page 24, these paragraphs repeat save that they are footnoted differently and the phrase “longer duree” becomes “longue duree.” Inexcusably for author and editor, this is not the only ocurrence of its kind. Frequently, Heng reissues phrases verbatim, or slightly modified, to press other points.
Heng’s thesis teeters on her inflation of the word “race” to encompass other categories of conflict. She states, with as much clarity as one will find in the book, her reasons:
“In the descriptions of modernity as racial time, a privileged status has been accorded to the Enlightenment and its spawn of racial technologies describing body and nature through pseudoscientific discourses pivoting on biology as the ground of essence, reference, and definition. So tenacious has been scientific racism’s account of race, with its entrenchment of high modernist racism as the template of all racisms, that it is still routinely understood, in everyday life and much of scholarship, that properly racial logic and behavior must invoke biology and the body as their referent…In principle, race theory–whose brilliant practitioners are among the academy’s most formative and influential thinkers–understands, of course, that race has no singular or stable referent…Ann Stoler…voices the common understanding of all ‘that the concept of race’ is an ’empty vacuum.’”
Professor Stoler may indeed be brilliant but she needs a little help with the word vacuum.
Race can only have multiple referents if you insist upon it. As Heng notes, the public and many scholars (and Miriam Webster) believe the word identifies genetic strains. What benefit comes from Heng’s semiotic reconstruction is unclear. The problems of interpretation its newly bestowed ambiguity would occasion, on the other hand, are obvious: imagine what it would do to traffic patterns if the meaning of the word red was expanded to include green.
Later:
“Why call something race when many old terms–“ethnocentrism,” “xenophobia,” “premodern discriminations,” “prejudice,” “chauvinism,” even “fear of otherness and difference”–have been used comfortably for so long…The short answer is that the use of the term race continues to bear witness to important strategic, epistemological, and political commitments not adequately served by the invocations of categories of greater generality…or greater benignity in our understanding of human culture and society. Not to use the term race would be to sustain the reproduction of a certain kind of past, while keeping the door shut to tools, analyses, and resources that can name the past differently. Studies of ‘otherness’ and ‘difference’ in the Middle Ages…must then continue to dance around words they dare not use; concepts, tools, and resources that are closed off; and meanings that only exist as lacunae.”
Heng has no “short answers” for anything, more often than not, no answers at all. Which epistemological commitments are underserved? This issue is critical to her analysis–the void she must fill– but she does not elaborate. How does “xenophobia” have greater generality than the word “race” distended to include the meaning of xenophobia? Specifically which tools, analyses, or resources of historical inquiry are scuttled by not using the word race in investigating a religious conflict between people of the same race? Heng is silent. Exactly who is dancing fearfully? Names? examples? Is there really anybody in the field of critical race theory who wishes to apply the term race but has been prevented? Cowed? And by whom? Of paramount importance, she needs to explain, or at least adduce something, anything, as to how and why the “certain kind of past” she disdains is unsatisfactory, and specifically how her revisionist approach is superior.
Invention is written in the first-person infallible. Time and again Heng makes pronouncements, some quite fantastical, and never so much as pauses to justify them. It is also noteworthy that she does not include jingoism/nationalism. Does she exclude them from her expansive definition of race? Or perhaps she felt that the ones she did list were sufficient to establish her point. The omission is curious though as the interplay of race–as conventionally understood–and nation/empire, as was examined so admirably by Franz Fanon, is the ground which Heng must command if her thesis is to prevail.
Her next paragraph:
“Or, to put it another way: The refusal of race destygmatizes the impacts and consequences of certain laws, acts, practices, and institutions of the medieval period, so that we cannot name them for what they are, and makes it impossible to bear adequate witness to the full meaning of the manifestations and phenomena they installed. The unavailability of race thus often colludes in relegating such manifestations to an epiphenomenal status, enabling omissions that have, among other things, facilitated the entrenchment and reproduction of a certain kind of foundational historiography…”
How does the refusal to describe a religious conflict as racial destygmatize a law? No explanation or examples. What has been omitted? If the definition of race has to be enlarged to incorporate religion, how then can the term religion fail to name the phenomena for what they are? How does the unavailabilty of race transform something that isn’t epiphenomenal into epiphenomena? There is a presumption here that race cannot similarly mislead, which requires some elucidation. Moreover, can the “unavailability” of the term nationalism likewise confound and/or transpose? Race is awarded authority here in a manner which demands justification. To advocate the adoption of the term race over the others on the basis that it is more visceral; that it has greater gravitas, is a demagogic conceit. It should be abandoned on these grounds, not endorsed.
Her next paragraph:
“To cite just one example…How often do standard…histories of England discuss as constitutive to the formation of English identity, or to the nation of England, the mass expulsion of the Jews in 1290, the marking of the Jewish population with badges for three-quarters of a century, decimations of Jewish communities by mob violence, statutory laws ruling over where Jews were allowed to live, monitory apparatuses such as the Jewish Exchequer and the networks of registries created by England to track the behavior and lives of Jews, or popular lies and rumors like stories of ritual murder, which facilitated the legal executions of Jews by the state?”
Heng here asserts that the inability to use the word “race” has led historians to overlook, and hence omit from their accounts, the evident fact that the presence of Jews in England was at least contributory to the forging not only of English identity, but of the nation itself. So then the absence of what one would expect to find if her conjecture were correct is being offered as validation for the underlying premise–despite their opposition. You are always correct when you can rewrite the dictionary to cleave with the line of your argument, and your hypothesis can be confirmed by either the presence or absence of supporting evidence.
It may be folly to say that there can be no field of inquiry in which a shift from the mono- to the polysemous, from higher objectivity to the greater subjectivity of context and interpretation, is beneficial, but it is indeed hard to imagine one. The word race, once thus lexically corrupted, can be applied to just about anything, and so Heng does. She now introduces the concepts of “religious race,” and even “cartographical race.” As a result, rational discourse becomes increasingly difficult for as the word expands so it dilutes, and its probitive value is lost. The words we use are pivotal in that they at once enable and regulate ideas, and ideas orient and habituate people. Ideas also set discursive boundaries and mediate expectations and aspirations. Whether the goal is unearthing historical truth or effecting political change, the medium of those efforts is language. Little if anything is more important.
Indicative of the absurdity to which race theory leads is Heng’s stillborn contention that the two medieval centuries in which Jews inhabited England were constitutive to the formation of its identity. Napoleon said something to the effect that if you want to know a nation’s history, just look at the world map. I believe, as do others, that the three most constitutive, determinative factors in English history would be the Channel, coal, and the New World. And only the last can be seen to have anything to do with race–and even that would be incorrect. To assign supremacy to the brief contact with Jews is to underestimate the fecundity of such events as the Peasant Revolt of 1381, Puritanism, the break with Rome, the English Civil War, the industrial revolution, the empire, Chartism–each of which precipitated massive social change. To suggest that the influence of Jewish moneylenders was more profound is mysticism, and perhaps a bit anti-Semitic. What supernatural powers did these medieval Jews possess that all one needed to do was borrow a few quid from them and one’s Englishness was miraculously refined. One has to be a race-fetishist to assert with a straight face that the Jewish presence was the defining moment of English identity. Even in the period under review, the linguistic, legal, bureaucratic, demographic, and liturgical changes wrought by the Normans/Angevins had exponentially greater cultural impact than the Jews who were never numerous and but one of a handful of groups lending money. When the 12th and 13th centuries are viewed from our time, the most significant events for England, those which can be said to be incipient, catalyzing, transformative, or prefigurative, and whose effects persist in the modern world, have no Jewish involvement. When viewed across the totality of English history, the medieval Jewish presence is a footnote. It’s impossible to attribute such influence to them–unless, of course, you are a critical race theorist with a new book. Heng’s first book is entitled Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy, and Invention can properly be adjudged a sequel. One of the awards her book has won is from the American Association of Religion–that one she deserves.
Later Heng describes her definition as “The working minimum hypothesis of race that I devised,” issued with her customary circuity:
“Race is one of the primary names we have–a name we retain for the strategic, epistemological, and political commitments it recognizes–that is attached to a repeating tendency, of the greatest import, to demarcate human beings, through differences among humans that are selectively essentialized as absolute and fundamental, in order to distribute positions and powers differentially to human groups. Race-making that operates as specific historical occasions in which strategic essentialisms are posited and assigned through a variety of practices and pressures, so as to construct a hierarchy of peoples for differential treatment. My understanding, thus, is that race is a structural relationship for the articulation and management of human differences, rather than a substantive content.”
Minimum? Certainly the wording is hers and hers alone, but the hypothesis (if I decrypted it correctly)–that race is a social construct, with no basis in science, whereby differences among human groups are exploited to justify subordination– was not introduced by Invention. In fact it is older than its author. With respect to medieval Anglo-Jewry, they “entered into race” as a result of the restrictions placed on their activities and the attendant state oversight, their marking by badges which they were forced to wear in public, and the accusation of lethal Jewish violence against Christians, which according to Heng, were “designed to authorize and arrange” for community violence against the Jews. By dint of these repressive measures, Jews became “raced,” or victims of “race-making.” The Jewish case is confounded by their dual identities of race and religion, however, for Heng it doesn’t matter. Whenever any group has reached a certain level of subjection by the connivance of another, whatever the difference may be–race, religion, geography, cartography etc.–the former has been “raced” and should be so designated. So then race is a generic category of oppression under whose rubric a group can be placed when they cross an unspecified (at least in Invention) threshold of subjugation. Again, what interrogative purpose is served by transforming a word which is almost universally understood to identify a type of difference and rebranding it to mean difference itself?
On a related topic, Eric Arnesen wrote in “Whiteness and the Historians’ Imagination”:
“Italian or Polish immigrants and their children may not have been the social or economic equals of the old Protestant Anglo-Saxon elite, but who, precisely, portrayed or ‘constructed’ them as not-quite white? It was not politicians courting their votes, government and military officials attempting to mobilize them, academic anthropologists and social scientists studying them, journalists writing about them, or industrial unionists seeking to organize them. Only if whiteness is merely a metaphor for class and social power are these men and women not white. But if it is merely a metaphor, then its descriptive and explanatory power is weak and its repetition in so many different contexts contributes only to confusion…on what grounds do these historians single out those views, declare them hegemonic, and ignore all countervailing opinion, no matter how great? This raises the question of whose discourse counts…To return to the initial query of ‘how the Irish became white,’ the short answer is a simple one: by manipulating definitions and putting words into historical subjects’ mouths, the Irish became white because historians, not their contemporaries, first made them ‘nonwhite’ before making them ‘white.’”
As we shall see in the next essay, Heng’s approach “contributes only to confusion” even in, and particularly in, the case of the Anglo-Jewry.
Another curious aspect of Invention is that Heng credits herself–absent any feigned humility–with the discovery that race/racism existed in medieval times, which is what her book is intended to demonstrate. During this period, we have the Abbasid Revolution which was explicitly anti-racist–this has been acknowledged in the historiography for centuries. Askia Muhammad, Songhai emperor, justified the massacre of those Mossi who inhabited the mountains on his southern border on the basis that they were irredeemably savage. In China, the Song were eliminating tribes to their south on the same grounds. In Cuzco proper, the Inca established an apartheid regime. Askia Muhammad also established a government department to oversee White people (by which he meant Arabs and Berbers). In the 1980s, Cedric Robinson, originator of the theory of racial capitalism, published Black Marxism, which documented in meticulous detail instances of racism in Europe in the medieval period. This is all the more remarkable as Heng cites Robinson in Invention. As far as I know, there has been no criticism of Heng on this account, which is puzzling as her reckless claim to ownership of this idea is quite clearly fraudulent.
“When state executions of group victims–unfortunates who were condemned by community fictions allowed to exercise juridical violence through law–occurred in the modern period, such official practices have been understood by race studies to constitute de facto acts of race: institutional crimes of a sanctioned, legal kind committed by the state against members of an internal population identified by their recognized membership within a targeted group. In the 20th century, the phenomenon of legalized state violence occurred most notoriously, of course, under the regime of apartheid in South Africa. Today, Turkey’s systematic targeting of its Kurdish population for persecution and abuse offers an example of 21st century-style apartheid and state racism.”
No one can float a signifier like Geraldine Heng.
The crux: “such…practices have been understood by race studies to constitute de facto acts of race.” I should hope everyone would agree that at least one of the cases she identifies involves racism, but “have been understood by race studies” is not a scholarly argument, or a compelling one. De facto? Is that a joke? Was then Russia’s execution of the Decembrists’ leaders an act of race? The harvesting of Louis XVI’s head? Or China’s counterrevolutionary junta’s execution of the Gang of Four? If we accept that such incidents wherein the executioners and victims are of the same race, language, etc. are de facto racial, then “race” has lost all meaning–even that which Heng would ascribe to it. The deeper one dives into her thesis the more disfunctional it becomes. The events I’ve cited have nothing to do with race, and to suggest otherwise is not only preposterous, but it means “that we cannot name them for what they are.” We have reached a fateful point of divergence as there are only two political orientations no matter how many gradients lie between: by insisting on the primacy of race, “tools, analyses, and resources” are not gained but squandered, truth not revealed but disguised. What is lost is class analysis, which anyone but a critical race theorist could see is the appropriate “tool” for investigation of the cases I mentioned. And, more importantly, the only one which provides a solution.
Moreover, If the word race can be conflated with anything that might hit the headlines, what possible analytical value can it have? If it can mean anything, then it can’t mean anything.
“The economic superiority of Jews, as…bankers and agents of capital, jostled…against their subordinate status as social and ideological subjects. The logic of capital in a commercializing economy such as England’s…might suggest the advantages of capital accumulation, whose…benefits…should be manifold. But when economic rationality collides with ideological constrictions that define the minority population managing capital as inferior, morally suspect, and theologically condemned, identification with capital renders the association with wealth…monstrous and troubling.”
Elsewhere Heng states that the race-making of Jews lead to a “mistrust of all wealth,” which is another fascist principle. It has to be stressed that not all fascist thought is erroneous or malign, however, this one is pernicious. Heng’s argument, at least in the case of the Anglo-Jewry, is that race antagonism was the cause of class antagonism. In Gentile’s “Doctrine of Fascism” and Hitler’s Mein Kampf it is proposed that class conflict does not arise organically from the irreconcilability of interests between workers and owners endemic to capitalist modes of production–there are no conflicts between members of the same race only between races–but rather are caused by exogenously induced imbalances of power between classes. Both Hitler and Gentile attributed this to “parliamentarianism,” or representative democracy as we would call it. Given that electoralism requires money, the wealthier class got the upper hand in government and inordinate power devolved to the bourgeoisie, with Hitler conveniently attributing the problem, at least in part, to Jewish malevolence. Both agreed on the “leader principle” whereby one ruler with carte blanche acts as impartial broker between classes regulating each as benefits the race/nation as a whole and, as Hitler put it, “directly responsible to the German people.” The Nazi slogan was “One nation, one race, one leader.”
All of this is just camouflage for capitalism, nevertheless, the race-begets-class conflict trope is a key point for fascist theory as it needs to furnish an explanation for intraracial class conflict. Without one fascism collapses into rubble. It must be emphasized that I do not mean to equate Heng with Hitler–that would be stupid and obscene–but there are only two political orientations no matter how many gradients may lie between, and in Invention Heng endorses a few critically important fascist ideas. In the end though, she is not to blame, as I argued above and will below, inevitably this is where race theory leads.
To wit:
“Is race in a world of differences still fundamentally religious race…? Under what conditions can racial divides be bridged…? Are there new configurations of the racial that we have yet to see in Europe’s encounters with alien otherness across the globe? Finally, in a global economy of mercantile capitalism, might race itself become irrelevant: When profit is the driving force, and trade capitalism webs the world in a network of intertwined relations, is race shunted aside as no longer of import?”
Insipid.
Will capitalism eliminate racism? Stunning. This question bespeaks a thoroughgoing ignorance of the topic as even the most cursory look at the history of wage labor upends this absurdity. First, capitalism colonized the world long ago, so there is no more ‘alien otherness.’ Second, pre-capitalist trade’s driving force was likewise profit. In fact, it was under these conditions that racism, be its origin modern or medieval, arose. So to speak of the profit motive as inimical to racism is historically illiterate. One has to sever oneself from reality in order to entertain–even for a moment–such rudderless twaddle. Heng manifestly does not know what she is talking about. This book should have a warning label on it like a pack of cigarettes. If capitalism, now centuries old, is to purge the world of the abomination, it seems to be in no particular hurry…
Webs/network/intertwined, can the English language survive Geraldine Heng?
Okay, you say, so what? This is a forgettable book produced by a bumbling academic, what’s the big deal? This book is winning prizes! The author is being feted. Invention is being heralded as a revolution in CRT. Heng is no outlier–she is their queen. Under what conditions can racial divides be bridged? Not these. Not with Heng’s obscurantist, worthless, anodyne clatter. Is CRT really fighting racism? Can it? The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense fought racism; the Wobblies fought racism; the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, the Green Corn rebels, Students for a Democratic Society, the Alabama Communist Party, Love and Rage, the Working People’s Alliance, AIM, the Quaker Action Group, and many others, and, thus far, all have failed and many have had their epitaphs written in blood. There is a trail of lynchees, life-long prison inmates, and exiled behind this effort, and while I have not suffered such extremes I have been kicked in the head by cops in Seattle, trampled by cops on horseback in New York, and gassed in Portland. The struggle is real, which is only too apparent when viewed from under a rearing horse. So to suggest that the lynchers, wardens, taser brandishers, and baton wielders, the sentries of the existing order, and their capitalist bosses, will be the agents who will bring racism to an end is not only quite ridiculous, it is demeaning to those who have given and lost so much. If we could ask Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman, or the hundreds of Wobblies who were murdered, I wonder if they would see it her way.
Regardless of intention, CRT cannot but reinforce racism. This, inevitably, is where critical race theory leads–to such stupefying, racism-sustaining delusions as above. It can do no other. When you study the reification of race, inescapably, you reify race, and thus confer undeserved legitimacy upon it. Race theory presumes that there is something to be examined, even if only a reification, and hence is worthy of investigation. You cannot defeat racism by corroboration; by vetting those core principles which constitute, sadly, the basis of its appeal, and without which it could not long endure. Moreover, racism will prevail so long as we declare the beneficiaries of the racist socio-economic order, its ruling-class architects, to be nothing more than the victims of petty jealousy. However broad and sincere its anti-racist convictions, CRT provides grounds for the defense of racism, and discursive weaponry for its enforcers. To insist that race can be understood independent of, and without reference to, the class oppression in which it is always found; a proposition which is the sine qua non of both critical race theory and fascism, and without which CRT can claim no disquisitive utility or role in liberation struggles, is to concede that the fascists have a valid case to make.
There are only two political orientations however many gradients lie between. Modern race theory serves the same master, however unwillingly, as did its precursor. Critical race theorists believe they can swim these infected waters because they have been properly inoculated by lofty goals, polypraxes, and inclusivity, Invention stands as rebuttal.
Dave Fryett is an anarchist in the Pacific North-West. He can be reached at metrobusman@yahoo.com
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