What is called critical race theory (CRT) now pervades American life, including the corporate world and public school systems, and has been tacitly endorsed by the Biden administration under the innocuous-sounding but purposely misleading euphemism of "racial equity." It thus promises to become the standard American political narrative for years to come, shaping and defining how we see our experiment in self-government and individual liberty.
Proponents argue that this constitutes a long-overdue racial reckoning that will allow Americans to fully grasp the extent to which our history, institutions, and society have been based on "white supremacy" from the beginning.
In reality, what CRT threatens to do is not better educate us regarding the evils of slavery and Jim Crow but take us back to the kind of thinking that made such injustices possible.
This is because CRT begins with the same toxic assumption as other forms of racism throughout history and across societies: that we can infer just about everything we need to know about people we don't know from their pigmentation.
Traditional racism was built on pernicious stereotypes about Black Americans suggestive of racial inferiority. CRT is based in every sense upon similar stereotypes and resulting assumptions, only in this case in its depiction of white rather than Black people.
"Whiteness" is said to be the cause of all that ails us and the primary source of white supremacy. To be white is therefore to be guilty, regardless of how a white person behaves or thinks. They are racist purely because of the color of their skin and, in a toxic application of the concept of collective guilt, because some of their ancestors were.
In short, like the segregationists who supported Jim Crow in the pre-1960s South, CRT supporters see race as the sole basis for judging people and assigning guilt or innocence.
If "Blackness" was a justification for the old discrimination, "whiteness" is a basis for the new; the colors might have changed, but the way of thinking about race and people has not.
Sadly, many of the same liberals who once bravely led the campaign for civil rights now lead the campaign to champion a new form of racism based on thinking similar to that of the segregationists they once opposed. It turns out that it wasn't the idea of discriminating based on race that they cared most about, but who was doing the discriminating and who was being discriminated against.
Racist assumptions and stereotypes are apparently fine so long as they apply to white people instead of Black.
We are consequently instructed by CRT prophets like Ibram X. Kendi that discrimination in the past requires more discrimination in the present and future, and that we need to incorporate race into every aspect of life because race dictates all. And that anyone who disagrees is a racist.
It is remarkable how big a reversal this represents from what Americans of good will embraced in the 1950s and 1960s to great effect: equal treatment under the law, and a society in which race neither counted for nor against. "Color-blindness" was what most of us, Black and white, thought we were aiming for, but that concept is now dismissed by CRT as hopelessly racist.
Martin Luther King's "content of their character, not the color of their skin" now becomes color of skin regardless of character (and all else).
Since it is difficult to grasp as a logical proposition how more race consciousness and race-conscious policies will lead to less racism, it might be useful to conduct a thought experiment in which we assume that CRT has nothing at all to do with combating racism and is instead primarily a means of acquiring political power, that it employs charges of racism as a weapon because it is the worst thing a person can be accused of, and because any denial is only taken as further evidence of guilt.
Those who point out that this is illogical and unjust and attempt to defend the falsely accused can be accused too, as well as any bystanders who are silent ("silence is racism") or who denounce the accused with insufficient fervor.
The thought might occur that racism now surrounds us because so many people have become so invested in and benefit from finding it, making the definition of the thing so open-ended and amorphous as to encompass any behavior or opinions that the self-appointed arbiters of such matters don't approve of.
Chief Justice John Roberts once argued that the "way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discrimination on the basis of race," but when you begin with the proposition that everything is about race, there is no way to stop or prove that it isn't.
CRT might be a false, even slanderous portrayal of America and white Americans, and toxic in its effect on our discourse about race, but there is no denying its genius as a political stratagem.
It efficiently manufactures the very thing, racism, it claims to be resisting under the guise of anti-racism, and then uses accusations of racism to effectively discourage any resistance.
Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.