Part 1 -- A Critique of Kendi, DiAngelo, Hannah Jones, and Critical Race Theory
Two Sides of the Same Trick Coin
In a previous video I summarized how and why various popular books and texts promoting “critical race theory” are based on false narratives. In the following series of essays, I’ll continue that assessment in more detail, drawing on lots of history and science that’s interesting in it’s own right -- from the witchcraft craze of medieval times to modern information theory. The first essay points out the remarkable similarities between the false reasoning employed by those seeking to destroy imagined witches in the late Middle Ages and the false reasoning used by proponents of “critical race theory” to combat imagined racism today. I hope you enjoy these essays, and if you do please spread the word to others.
Part 1
Introduction
Suppose you flipped a coin and it always came up heads. When you take a moment to inspect the coin, you find out it has heads on both sides. It’s a trick coin.
And so it is with the racial world views of Ibram X. Kendi, Robin DiAngelo, and other proponents of a false theory that posits all disprities in society between groups of people sorted by race are the result of racism. In their bestselling books, Kendi (Stamped from the Beginning and How to Be an Antiracist) and DiAngelo (White Fragility) explicitly assume racism is the sole cause of what are in reality statistically inevitable disparities in outcomes between people grouped by race.
DiAngelo writes “Whites enact racism [by] [a]ttributing inequality between whites and people of color to causes other than racism.” And Kendi has said “When I see racial disparities, I see racism.” And in Stamped from the Beginning, Kendi writes (emphasis added) “We have a hard time recognizing that racial discrimination is the sole cause of racial disparities in this country and in the world at large.” To settle any issue regarding disparities, they offer a coin flip -- and it always comes up racism.
Such a simple trick has either fooled many people in high institutional positions , or they’ve decided they might as well promote this false idea because so many others already believe it. In any case, this is the first in series of ten essays exploring the many problems created, and the other problems ignored, when a trick coin becomes the basis of a prominent yet false theory of social justice.
The Hammer of Witches
The coin trick method of discerning truth is so crude it’s no surprise it was widespread in medieval times. In their books, Kendi and DiAngelo appeal not to methods of proof, but to the methods explicated in another, similarly popular book written centuries ago – a book that also falsely assumed a specific ill intent was the cause of bad outcomes. That book was the Malleus Maleficarum (usually translated as the Hammer of Witches), a treatise on witchcraft.
As Christopher Mackey describes the Malleus in the introduction to his English translation, “Published in 1486 (only a generation after the introduction of printing by moveable type in Western Europe), the work served to popularize the new conception of magic [and] played a major role in the savage efforts undertaken to stamp out witchcraft in Western Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.” According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, the Malleus went through 28 editions between 1486 and 1600.
Then, as now, the university system served to train those who would identify heretics. As Mackey explains, the authors of the Malleus were Dominican friars, and because “the Order was intended to subvert heretical opposition to Church teachings, the Dominicans soon became involved in theological studies in order to sharpen their skills in spotting and rebutting heretical views. Hence, there was often a close connection between the local Dominican convent and the theological faculty at a neighboring university.”
The policies advocated in the Malleus were implemented across Europe. The policies advocated in DiAngelo’s and Kendi’s books are just now starting to find their way into American law. Before they potentially become entrenched, it’s worth considering the similarities in the approach of these books, and how they diverge from the humanistic and Enlightenment values that helped end the witch hunts and usher in the conditions for human flourishing.
Kendi and DiAngelo’s Hammer of Whiteness
Kendi has tweeted: “The heartbeat of racism is denial. And too often, the more powerful the racism, the more powerful the denial.” And DiAngelo also considers denials of racism proof of racism. As she writes in White Fragility, “None of the white people whose actions I describe in this book would identify as racist. In fact, they would most likely identify as racially progressive and vehemently deny any complicity with racism. Yet all their responses illustrate white fragility and how it holds racism in place.”
The Malleus describes how a suspected sorceress should be questioned by her inquisitors, instructing them to “[n]ote that for the most part sorceresses initially make a denial [that sorceresses exists], and hence a greater suspicion arises than if they responded, ‘Whether they exist or not I leave to my betters.’” According to the Malleus, not only does a denial indicate guilt, but the only exculpatory response is the accused’s expression of deference to one’s “betters” among the clerisy’s academic elite -- whose doctrines posit the existence of witches. And similarly, as DiAngelo wrote in her dissertation, her “primary measure” of white racism is “the larger body of research in the Whiteness literature” – a Whiteness literature that posits omnipresent racism.
The authors of the Malleus didn’t even try to corroborate their claim of widespread Satanism. As Mackay writes:
There is absolutely no independent corroboration of any such [Satanic] activity on the part of anyone. The sole evidence for this activity comes from the theoretical discussions and judicial investigations conducted by men who believed in the existence of a form of maleficent sorcery … [T]he self- image of the official forms of Christianity necessitated the corollary notion that any deviation from orthodoxy could only be based on adherence to Satan …
DiAngelo’s method also avoids corroboration, and presumes guilt from deviations from orthodoxy. In her view, “people of color” in particular should not be consulted for corroboration as to whether or not certain complaints of racism by other people of color are reasonable. As she writes, “by complaining to one person of color about the unfairness of feedback from another person of color … I am pressuring a person of color to collude with my racism.” Without the means of consulting a person of color as to the reasonableness of a given claim by another person of color, a deviation from accepted orthodoxy (as described in “the Whiteness literature”) is more easily assumed to be racist.
But that assumption is often shown to be false when researchers, against DiAngelo’s wishes, actually talk to people of color. Researchers have shown, for example, that statements that some call “racist dog whistles” (that is, statements that allegedly couch racist sentiments in seemingly innocuous language) are in fact not perceived as racist by majorities in the black community. As Ian Haney López and Tory Gavito note in the New York Times:
With the help of two liberal pollsters, Joshua Ulibarri and Celinda Lake, we … polled large cohorts of whites and African-Americans. The results are sobering. We began by asking eligible voters how “convincing” they found a dog-whistle message lifted from Republican talking points. Among other elements, the message … called for “fully funding the police, so our communities are not threatened by people who refuse to follow our laws.” Almost three out of five white respondents judged the message convincing. More surprising, exactly the same percentage of African-Americans agreed, as did an even higher percentage of Latinos.
In The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can't Cure Our Social Ills, Jesse Singal writes the following about so-called “microaggressions,” which some people allege are hidden racial slights:
One as-yet-unanswered challenge to microaggression theory is that the overwhelming majority of blacks and Latinos report, in polling, that they do not find many of the utterances listed as microaggressions to be offensive. If an Ivy League professor who isn’t black determines that “America is a melting pot” is offensive to black people but black people disagree by an overwhelming margin—77 percent of them found it inoffensive, to be exact—whose account should win out?
Singal cites a survey report by Emily Ekins, in which, for example, when asked whether the statement “I don’t notice people’s race” is offensive or not, 71% of blacks and 80% of Latinos said it was not offensive. When asked whether the statement “Everyone can succeed in this society if they work hard enough” was offensive or not, 77% of blacks and 89% of Latinos said it was not offensive. And when asked whether the statement “America is a land of opportunity” was offensive or not, 93% of blacks and 89% of Latinos said it was not offensive.
And so allegedly “racist dog whistles” aren’t corraborated as such by people of color when researchers (again, to DiAngelo’s presumed horror) simply ask them. And indeed those results reflect historical experience over the last forty years. In Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America, for example, Professor James Foreman writes extensively about the historic support for aggressive law enforcement in the black community to combat largely black-on-black crime. As Foreman writes:
I have tried to recover a portion of African American social, political, and intellectual history—a story that gets ignored or elided when we fail to appreciate the role that blacks have played in shaping criminal justice policy over the past forty years. African Americans performed this role as citizens, voters, mayors, legislators, prosecutors, police officers, police chiefs, corrections officials, and community activists. Their influence grew as a result of black progress in attaining political power, especially after the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. And to a significant extent, the new black leaders and their constituents supported tough-on-crime measures. To understand why, we must start with a profound social fact: in the years preceding and during our punishment binge, black communities were devastated by historically unprecedented levels of crime and violence.
Foreman goes on to describe how black leaders in the recent past understood that tough-on-crime policies truly recognized that black lives matter. As he writes:
African Americans have always viewed the protection of black lives as a civil rights issue, whether the threat comes from police officers or street criminals. Far from ignoring the issue of crime by blacks against other blacks, African American officials and their constituents have been consumed by it … When [Eric] Holder [as chief prosecutor in Washington. D.C. in the 1990’s] told the audience at the Arlington Sheraton that 94 percent of black homicide victims were slain by black assailants, he was simply putting a number on a problem his audience knew well. A range of black voices—and not just from law enforcement—agreed with Holder that safety was a civil rights issue. “If we’re not safe within our homes, if we’re not safe within our person, then every other civil right just doesn’t matter,” said Wade Henderson, the head of the NAACP’s Washington office. In such times, when Holder asked other blacks to help him respond to black America’s “group suicide,” few would say no … Holder’s standing lent him similar credibility when he spoke to black audiences about Operation Ceasefire [an aggressive policing program he administered as top prosecutor in Washington, D.C. in the 1990’s]. “I’m not going to be naïve about it,” he told an audience at a community meeting on upper Georgia Avenue. “The people who will be stopped will be young black males, overwhelmingly.” But, as he had done in his King Day speech, Holder argued that such concerns were outweighed by the need to protect blacks from crime. He took a similar tack when celebrating the first anniversary of Operation Ceasefire with officers [making] 2,300 arrests. Holder acknowledged that most of the arrestees were black. But he had no regrets, he told the assembled officers, and neither should they. “Young black males are 1 percent of the nation’s population but account for 18 percent of the nation’s homicides,” he said. “You all are saving lives …” Holder’s approach was embraced by the black police chiefs who were running departments in several major cities by the late 1990s. In response to allegations that police were engaged in racial profiling, Bernard Parks, the African American police chief in Los Angeles, said that racial disparities resulted from the choices of criminals, not police bias. “It’s not the fault of the police when they stop minority males or put them in jail,” said Parks. “It’s the fault of the minority males for committing the crime. In my mind it is not a great revelation that if officers are looking for criminal activity, they’re going to look at the kind of people who are listed on crime reports.” Charles Ramsey, who became D.C.’s police chief in 1998, agreed. “Not to say that [racial profiling] doesn’t happen, but it’s clearly not as serious or widespread as the publicity suggests,” Ramsey said. “I get so tired of hearing that ‘Driving While Black’ stuff. It’s just used to the point where it has no meaning. I drive while black—I’m black. I sleep while black too. It’s victimology.’”
Victimology – the study of imagined victims – is the same trick-coin misdirection employed by Kendi and DiAngelo to avoid discussing far more pressing social problems. And it’s the same trick-coin misdirection employed by the elties who directed the witch hunts of the Middle Ages. Professor Teofilo F. Ruiz, in his Great Courses lecture series on “The Terror of History: Mystics, Heretics, and Witches in the Western Tradition,” describes how elites created the witch craze to help control the masses by directing their attention away from real problems and toward a group of scapegoats. In Lecture 19, he explains how the witch craze was based on a “pathology” that:
works in the following manner: you select a group, you essentially direct your anger or you categorize or you stereotype not an individual – it’s not the individual Jew or the individual witch that you are after – it’s a group of people. And then the second step is you create a mythology out of the need for a scapegoat … This mythology, some historians have argued, was something constructed from above. That is to say, there is a dual process. There is fear at the bottom created by all the anxieties that I have been describing before. And there is a construction of a mythology from above … you link together the anxieties and fears of the people at the bottom and you bring it together, you link it, with a construction of a mythology from above … This fear is part of a process by which … all those institutions that are attempting essentially to create order and to monitor their activities of western society channel all the frustrations and the fears of the general population, what we might call a kind of mass psychoses, a mass pathology, and in a sense direct it against one particular target, in this case, of course, all women, people accused of witchcraft. How does this work? Now, please understand that this is something that works to this very day. It is a process and it is a mechanism that is employed by governments and those in power to this very day and … benefits the state in taking the mind of people from other more serious problems … [I]t works in a kind of unconscious manner in which the state throws out all of its weight, together with that of the church, in an attack against certain segments of the population and therefore create this kind of theater of power which serves as a form of entertainment but which also has very important pedagogical purposes because it teaches people that here is the person responsible for all your difficulties, for all the problems we face, and if we exercise this person from our society, if we in a sense punish this person, then everything will be all right. That we as a collective are engaged in a great battle against the forces of evil. That they are the agents of the enemy.
Substitute “whiteness” for “witches” and Professor Ruiz’s explanation resonates with modern ears familiar with critical race theory literature. Cullen Murphy describes the heresy inquisitors of the Middle Ages in God’s Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World as follows:
Inquisitors would come to a town and, following the practice of the Medieval Inquisition, preach a sermon, calling upon people to make a clean breast of their lapses -- and, just as important, inviting them to point out lapses by others. Anyone who came forward and was “reconciled” within the period of grace would be treated gently. Anyone who failed to come forward and was later accused would be treated harshly. As had happened before, the very structure of the process encouraged confession and denunciation -- not to mention false confession and false denunciation.
And so today, according to her website, DiAngelo is paid to give similar speeches to entities including Amazon, colleges and universities, The Hollywood Writer’s Guild, and the Seattle Public Schools. DiAngelo continued to insist on large speaking fees, even for virtual, pre-recorded statements. Kendi, too, receives large sums for short speeches aa well, including $20,000 paid by a Virginia public school system for a one-hour video conference presentation.
As Murphy reminds us, the Spanish inquisitor general Torquemada, too, “amassed a considerable fortune.”
In the next essay in this series, I’ll explore in more detail how Kendi and DiAngelo resort to witch hunt techniques and their “same-sided trick coin” to avoid addressing what are in fact multi-faceted social problems.
Links to all essays in this series: Part1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4; Part 5; Part 6; Part 7; Part 8; Part 9; Part 10; Part 11; Part 12
Collected essays in this series
Short video documentary on problems with popular critical race theory texts
Harvard Law School flashback