Part 8 – 2-bit History

A Critique of Kendi, DiAngelo, Hannah Jones, and Critical Race Theory

In the Twentieth Century, Claude Shannon revolutionized the way engineers understood communications by figuring out that information is really an exercise involving predictability.  Take a coin toss, for example.  If a two-sided coin is repeatedly flipped, we soon see that whether it falls heads or tails is random, but repeating the coin toss over and over again will yield a pattern in which it becomes clear the odds of the coin coming up heads is 1/2.  That’s information.  However, if the coin is a trick coin, and has heads on both sides, then the coin itself contains no information because the result of flipping it is always entirely predictable.  It will be heads every time, so you don’t have to flip it at all to conclude it will always be heads.  A trick coin bears no information in that sense. As Thomas Sowell points out, methods of analysis that simply assume “institutional” racism without evaluating other evidence are akin to the trick coin.

As Sowell writes in his book Wealth, Poverty, and Politics:

However dramatic the increase of black political representation at local and national levels, there were no correspondingly dramatic reductions in economic disparities … This leaves those who cling to the prevailing vision little alternative but to claim that even an absence of concrete evidence that continuing black lags, gaps or disparities can be traced to what others are doing to them only shows that these continuing gaps must be due to the diabolical cleverness with which “covert” or “institutional” racism has been concealed. When an absence of tangible evidence is assumed to prove the same proposition that tangible evidence would also prove, that is essentially an arbitrary heads-I-win-and-tails-you-lose argument.

When crucial facts are left out of the narratives spun by Kendi, DiAngelo, and Hannah Jones, history itself loses its value.  Cesar Hidalgo, in his book “Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies,” describes how value is embodied in the arrangement of information, using the example of an expensive Bugatti model car that gets wrecked in a crash:

The car’s dollar value evaporated in the crash not because the crash destroyed the atoms that made up the Bugatti but because the crash changed the way in which these were arranged. As the parts that made the Bugatti were pulled apart and twisted, the information that was embodied in the Bugatti was largely destroyed. This is another way of saying that the $2.5 million worth of value was stored not in the car’s atoms but in the way those atoms were arranged. That arrangement is information.

The one-note narrative of Kendi, DiAngelo, and Hannah Jones is just this sort of wreck.  They’ve driven the car of history into a tree and pulled from the wreckage a single, tiny gear they call “systemic racism,” and they use that single gear to explain the sum of the parts.  As Hidalgo further describes, while the universe at large has a tendency to move from order to disorder, we humans on Earth have developed the capacity to retain information and build on it. That’s history understood with all its relevant contours and details.  But the aim of the project of Kendi, DiAngelo, and Hannah Jones is just the opposite: their project doesn’t retain and build on history, but rather selectively removes large swaths of information from history for its own political ends.

In a recent talk, Kendi compared racial justice to a light switch: “Last I checked, lights are either on or they’re off. Last I checked, there’s really no in-between injustice and justice.”  If that way of thinking were a computer, it’d be the most basic computer possible: a one-bit device.  Powerful computers contain billions of electronic switches, each of which can be turned “on” or “off” in myriad ways that communicate information to the screen.  Each of these billions of switches is called a “bit.”  One switch is one bit.  Critical race theory isn’t even a two-bit theory: it’s a one-bit theory because it ignores millions of other switches that help explain causation and allows for only a single bit switch of information, namely racism -- a switch that is always turned on.

The Zero-Information Meme of Antiracism

As discussed in previous essays, Kendi and DiAngelo falsely assume all disparities in outcomes among people grouped by race are caused by racism, a position belied by the facts and devoid of any exploration of the multivariate, contextual causes of those disparities.  It’s akin to a trick coin that always comes up racism.

Francis Bacon, in his essay “Of Unity in Religion,” wrote that one of the “false peaces or unities” occur “when the peace is grounded but upon an implicit ignorance; for all colours will agree in the dark.”  Kendi and DiAngelo promote just such a false unity.  And their exclusive focus on racism while ignoring other causes is very tempting, even easy, to some.  But that only allows for agreement in the dark.

Kendi and DiAngelo’s trick coin is a disaster as a teaching tool, especially if used in the context of a classroom practicing “self-referential learning.”  Take the following example provided by former chancellor of New York City schools Joel Klein:

My years as chancellor convinced me that too much classroom time was being spent on what I came to call self-referential learning rather than real knowledge and skills acquisition. By this, I mean discussions focused on what kids think or feel about something, rather than discussions that enrich knowledge so that a child can develop views or feelings based on the knowledge required for serious critical thinking and analysis. The most disheartening example came in a history class I observed on the Civil War, in which the teacher asked, “What caused the war?”

“Slavery,” answered one student.

“And what caused slavery?” continued the teacher.

“Racism,” said a second child.

When the teacher then asked, “Has anyone here experienced racism recently?” half the students raised their hands and started talking about their own personal experiences. The class never got back to discussing the Civil War.

This example reveals a poor understanding among the students of the origins of slavery (see the discussion in Part 6), and also the problem of grounding education in assumptions.  When an educator allows assumptions to go unchallenged, that educator abandons the project of imparting knowledge to students.  And if an educator were to teach Kendi’s and DiAngelo’s assumption as truth, they would foreclose the introduction of actual knowledge into the classroom, because doing so would contradict the very assumption that’s the basis for the lesson.  Teaching Kendi’s and DiAngelo’s assumption forecloses large swaths of knowledge, unless one is willing to essentially teach that their assumption is false through the introduction of alternative explanations.

That would follow from adhering to Jonathan Rauch’s excellent advice in his book Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought, in which he writes: “The skeptical rule is: No one gets the final say.  You may claim that a statement is established as knowledge only if it can be debunked in principle, and only insofar as it withstands attempts to debunk it.” 

Kendi’s and DiAngelo’s trick coin violates this rule.

Rauch continues:

The empirical rule: if people follow it in deciding who is right and who is wrong, then no one gets special say simply on the basis of who he happens to be.  The empirical rule is: no one has personal authority.  You may claim that a statement has been established as knowledge only insofar as the method used to check it gives the same result regardless of the identity of the checker and regardless of the source of the statement.”

As Rauch writes, “If you make different rules for black and white checkers, you are not doing science.”  DiAngelo explicitly violates this rule when she writes in White Fragility that “people of color” should not be consulted for corroboration as to whether certain complaints of racism by other people of color are reasonable or not. As she writes, “In essence, by complaining to one person of color about the unfairness of feedback from another person of color (no matter how diplomatically or indirectly I try to mask my complaint), I am pressuring a person of color to collude with my racism.”

As Rauch writes, “Anyone – Pope, propogandist, anti-communist, anti-racist – who wants to silence criticism or regulate an argument in order to keep wrong-thinking people out of power has no moral claim to be anything but ignored.”

Further, Kendi explicitly rejects persuasion as a means of convincing people.  In Stamped from the Beginning, he writes that “educational persuasion will never bring into being an antiracist America.”  Instead, writes Kendi, “history is clear on what has worked … Racist ideas have always been the public relations arm of the company of racial discriminators and their products: racial disparities.  Eradicate the company, and the public relations arm goes down, too.”  Kendi is stating plainly that the only way to eradicate racism is to eradicate racial disparities.  Since he claims that can’t be done through education, it must be done by force.  Hence his proposal for a constitutional amendment.  (As discussed in Part 4, Kendi wrote in Politico: “To fix the original sin of racism, Americans should pass an anti-racist amendment to the U.S. Constitution that enshrines two guiding anti-racist principals [sic]: Racial inequity is evidence of racist policy and the different racial groups are equals.  The amendment would make unconstitutional racial inequity over a certain threshold ...”).

Critical Race Theory’s Intellectual Isolationism

Taking an even broader perspective, the one-note theory of Kendi, DiAngelo, and Hannah Jones is a form of intellectual isolation, which when applied as national policy has led to the downfall of societies.

Thomas Sowell gives the examples of Japan and the Islamic world in his book Wealth, Poverty, and Politics:

One of Japan’s few geographic advantages has been its accessibility to the sea, so that its coastal areas have been in communication with the outside world … For more than two centuries, however, the government of Japan cut the country off from much of the outside world. From 1638 to 1868, emigration from Japan was forbidden, on pain of death, and Japanese who happened to be abroad at the time of this decree were forbidden to return. According to leading scholars of East Asian history, “The Japanese, who had been technologically and institutionally abreast of the Europeans in many respects and ahead in some at the start of the seventeenth century, fell drastically behind.” Isolation took its toll in Japan, as it has elsewhere … As the distinguished British magazine The Economist put it in 2014: A thousand years ago, the great cities of Baghdad, Damascus and Cairo took turns to race ahead of the Western world.  Islam and innovation were twins.  The various Arab caliphates were dynamic superpowers— beacons of learning, tolerance and trade. Yet today the Arabs are in a wretched state … Eventually, the Western world would overtake the Middle Eastern and North African countries, both militarily and in terms of science and technology. But now the Islamic countries were by no means as receptive to the cultural advances made in the Western countries as the West had once been when the countries of the Middle East and North Africa were ascendant— or as the Islamic world itself had once been receptive to absorbing cultural advances from other societies … One revealing sign of today’s lack of cultural receptivity to Western culture in the Middle East is that in today’s Arab world— about 300 million people in more than 20 countries— the number of books translated from other languages has been just one-fifth of the number translated by Greece alone, for a population of 11 million people.

Freeman Dyson adds the example of China, writing:

The worst political blunder in the history of civilization was probably the decision of the emperor of China in the year 1433 to stop exploring the oceans and to destroy the ships capable of exploration and the written records of their voyages. . . The decision was the result of powerful people pursuing partisan squabbles and neglecting the long-range interests of the empire. This is a disease to which governments of all kinds, including democracies, are fatally susceptible.

Kendi, DiAngelo, and Hannah Jones have fenced off their narrowest of ideologies on a small speck of land within vast interlocking continental plates spanning the world.

The assumption that all disparities among people grouped by race are caused by racism has the appeal of simplicity, not accuracy.  But that simplicity has achieved the appeal of a meme, as will be explored in the next essay.

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