Part 5 -- Where History Records Enlightenment, Kendi and DiAngelo See En-Whitenment
A Critique of Kendi, DiAngelo, Hannah Jones, and Critical Race Theory
In this essay, I’ll explore how Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, just as they reject colorblindness as a moral principle, also reject objectivity as a scientific goal.
Regarding the scientific method, in Is Everyone Really Equal?: An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice Education, DiAngelo and her co-authors state:
[The] scientific method … rested on the importance of reason, principles of rational thought, the infallibility of close observation, and the discovery of natural laws and principles governing life and society. Critical Theory developed in part as a response to this presumed superiority and infallibility of the scientific method, and raised questions about whose rationality and whose presumed objectivity underlies scientific methods.
Bias, of course, can always negatively influence what should be objective inquiries. But introducing new biases is no solution. As Thomas Sowell points out in his book Black Rednecks and White Liberals:
The unattainability of objectivity is too often a distraction from something more mundane that is quite attainable but is often absent -- honesty. When facts about racial or ethnic groups that are both known and relevant are deliberately suppressed because they would undermine a particular vision, doctrine, or agenda, then history is prostituted and cannot serve as a check against visions, because facts have been subordinated to visions.
To avoid honestly addressing alternative causes of disparities in outcomes among people grouped by race, advocates of “critical race theory” go so far as to reject the scientific method itself as an aspect of a distinctly “white culture.” This rejection of the scientific method even worked its way into a graphic on the Smithsonian National African-American History Museum’s website (since removed) which stated the scientific method is a distinctive marker of “whiteness,” an analysis that is itself racist in the sense it implies rational thinking is somehow “white.”
This is no surprise, as Kendi and DiAngelo’s false assumption that disparities in outcomes among people grouped by race are caused solely by racism cannot be plausibly maintained unless the scientific method is rejected. Indeed, the most influential Enlightenment and scientific method thinkers explicitly rejected assuming an abstract proposed explanation (a hypothesis, such as “all racial group disparities are caused by racism”), and then basing all subsequent knowledge on that assumption.
Francis Bacon, for example, proposed an approach to the understanding of the world based on experimentation and inductive reasoning from observed real-world phenomena, an approach that led to the scientific and industrial revolutions. And as Isaac Newton wrote in his Principia, “I do not feign hypotheses. For whatever is not deduced from the phenomena must be called a hypothesis; and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, or based on occult qualities, or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy [that is, science based on the study of real-world phenomena].”
The “anti-racist” dismissal of the scientific method as “an assumption of Whiteness” is apparently based on the understanding that, historically, scientific principles were developed by white people in disproportion to their percentage of the world population, and therefore the scientific method is somehow a result of disproportionate power relations rather than a proven means of establishing truth. As historian Niall Ferguson writes in his book Civilization:
Those who decry ‘Eurocentrism’ as if it were some distasteful prejudice have a problem: the Scientific Revolution was, by any scientific measure, wholly Eurocentric. An astonishingly high proportion of the key figures – around 80 per cent – originated in a hexagon bounded by Glasgow, Copenhagen, Kraków, Naples, Marseille and Plymouth, and nearly all the rest were born within a hundred miles of that area. In marked contrast, Ottoman scientific progress was non-existent in this same period. The best explanation for this divergence was the unlimited sovereignty of religion in the Muslim world … Indeed, it was blasphemous to suggest that man might be able to discern the divine mode of operation, which God might in any case vary at will … Under [Islamic] clerical influence, the study of ancient philosophy was curtailed, books burned and so-called freethinkers persecuted; increasingly, the madrasas became focused exclusively on theology at a time when European universities were broadening the scope of their scholarship. Printing, too, was resisted in the Muslim world … In 1515 a decree of Sultan Selim I had threatened with death anyone found using the printing press. This failure to reconcile Islam with scientific progress was to prove disastrous. Having once provided European scholars with ideas and inspiration, Muslim scientists were now cut off from the latest research. If the Scientific Revolution was generated by a network, then the Ottoman Empire was effectively offline.
Culture, whatever its source, can drive disparities throughout history. Science should not be condemned as systemically racist, or an “assumption of Whiteness,” because it happened to develop in different ways or to different extents in culturally distinct geographic regions. Enlightenment principles and the scientific method should be embraced by everyone, because those principles help everyone, regardless of the tabulations of the skin colors of the people who developed those principles and methods.
As Eric Herschthal has explored in his book “The Science of Abolition: How Slaveholders Became the Enemies of Progress,” scientists rightly used arguments based on the scientific method to increase opposition to slavery in America after the nation’s founding:
[F]ew have realized that antislavery advocates, as much as their proslavery adversaries, relied on scientific discourse to defend their views. Taken together, this antislavery scientific discourse amounts to what I call the science of abolition—a wide range of scientific arguments that helped legitimate the antislavery movement and that ultimately cast slaveholders as unscientific and premodern: the enemies of progress … Frederick Douglass routinely ran scientific articles against slavery in the North Star and his eponymous paper … [Joseph] Priestley discovered the element we now call oxygen. Franklin discovered the nature of electrical currents. Darwin devised new theories of human evolution that would influence his grandson Charles … Though perhaps only a minority of men of science joined abolitionist societies, the ones who did were often prominent—and highly visible—members … To take just one example: between 1787 and 1818, three of the four presidents of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, the early republic’s leading antislavery society, were men of science, including [Benjamin] Franklin and [Benjamin] Rush … … Franklin, Rush, and [Benjamin] Banneker helped expand abolitionism’s appeal beyond the movement’s initial Quaker base. By offering a wide range of scientific arguments against slavery, and relying on scientific networks to circulate their work and strengthen their ties to the movement, they began to make antislavery appear not just moral, but rational—a movement backed by science.
But today Kendi, DiAngelo, and others who promote the false assumption that racism is the sole cause of any group disparities, are leading a movement based on faith in that assumption, not evidence of its truth.
The ancient Greeks first began the search for truth based on proof instead of the pronouncements of the priesthood. As Peter Bernstein writes, in his book “Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk,”:
The unique quality of the Greek spirit was the insistence on proof. “Why?” mattered more to them than “What?” The Greeks were able to reframe the ultimate questions because theirs was the first civilization in history to be free of the intellectual straitjacket imposed by an all-powerful priesthood.
Yet today, as Pluckrose and Lindsay write in their book Cynical Theories, it is “no exaggeration to observe that Social Justice Theorists have created a new religion, a tradition of faith that is actively hostile to reason, falsification, disconfirmation, and disagreement of any kind.”
In the next essay, I’ll discuss the 1619 Project, which aims to incorporate the tenets of this new religion into history taught at schools, embodying the ultimate merger of woke church and state.
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