Video Analysis of Popular "Critical Race Theory" Texts
Video Analysis of Popular "Critical Race Theory" Texts
A close look at Kendi's How to Be An Antiracist, DiAngelo's White Fragility, The 1619 Project, and other popular promotions of "critical race theory" concepts.
Hello there everyone! There are some remarkably popular texts promoting “critical race theory” concepts that contains some remarkably false narratives. I have a video up on Youtube analyzing these texts in some detail. If you think it’s a worthwhile discussion, please send it to others through your various blogs and social media, especially if you’re connected to anyone concerned with the popularization of these false narratives. Following the link to the video, I’m posting below the transcript of the video as well (the numbers simply refer to the slides I use in the video in the order in which they appear). At at the bottom are buttons to subscribe to my Substack, to share this particular post, and to share my Big Picture Substack. Thanks for watching!
Here’s a link to the video on Youtube:
And here’s a transcript of the video (again, the numbers simply refer to the slides I used in the video in the order in which they appear):
Paul Taylor
Big Picture Critical Race Theory
Script with Numbered Slides
Also note (for those who focus on identity politics) that the following academics and scholars cited in this presentation are black academics and scholars: Thomas Sowell, John Hope Franklin, William Julius Wilson, Robert Woodson, Ian Rowe, Martin Luther King, Jr., Frederick Douglass, Roland Fryer, Coleman Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Larry Koger. Deidre McCloskey is transgender.
1
One of my friends and neighbors works for the American Federation of Teachers, a union whose sole legal duty is to get higher pay and benefits for teachers. Now, the curricula taught in schools isn’t part of a unions’ legal mission, but the AFT promotes various teachings in schools anyway.
2
This video isn’t about my friend. It’s about the books she’s promoted -- through the American Federation of Teachers -- as educational resources. Whoever’s running for school board in your area, these are the books lots of education bureaucrats and administrators are promoting -- and whoever wins or loses in any school board election, people should know what these books say.
3
The first book this school board candidate lists is Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be An Antiracist.
4
Mr. Kendi told the New York Times “When I see racial disparities, I see racism.”
5
In another of his books, Stamped from the Beginning, he also writes “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.”
6
So, he literally attributes any difference in outcomes among people grouped by race -- differences in test scores, school discipline rates, or anything else -- to racism.
This assumption is contrary to logic and evidence.
7; then 8-15
As Thomas Sowell points out in his book Discrimination and Disparities, it’s statistically inevitable that when you group people together in different ways, including by race, those groups aren’t going to have equal outcomes as a group.
For example, if you need to meet three criteria to achieve a certain outcome, and your chances of meeting all three of those criteria are 2/3 (or 66%), then your chance of achieving that outcome is 2/3 times 2/3 times 2/3, which equals to 8/27.
16-19
But say one group – for reasons having nothing to do with racism -- has only a one-third chance of meeting one of those criteria instead of two-thirds. Then that group’s chance of achieving a given outcome would be 1/3 times 2/3 times 2/3, which equals 4/27.
That’s half the odds of achieving the outcome simply because the odds of meeting one of the criteria dropped from 2/3 to 1/3.
20, 21
As Thomas Sowell explains, “What does this little exercise in arithmetic mean in the real world? One conclusion is that we should not expect success to be evenly or randomly distributed among individuals, groups, institutions or nations in endeavors with multiple prerequisites.”
22
Now, to take a simple example, a child is better off when there are two loving parents in the house instead of one. When there are two loving parents in the home, kids get twice the supervision, twice the education, and often twice the resources.
If there are just small differences regarding the presence of two loving parents in a home when you compare any groups based on race (or anything else), you’re going to get some differences – some disparities – among those groups.
23, 23a
Douglas Downey, in his book How Schools Really Matter, describes how education gaps between lower- and higher-income students start well before kindergarten, and generally continue throughout their school time, with learning gaps increasing over the summers, when school is out for summer and parental influence is greatest.
24
Downey also points out that students in public school generally spend only 13% of their waking hours in school, and so influences outside of school dominate learning patterns generally – and the degree of that influence depends on whether or not there are one or two loving parents in the home to help with education.
25
To illustrate, Downey compares the effects of teacher-student ratios to the effects of parent-child ratios. As Downey writes, “Consider the following scenario: a disadvantaged child endures a student/teacher ratio of 25:1 [that is, 25 teachers to every one student] while an advantaged child enjoys a 15:1 ratio [that is, 15 teachers for every one student] —a 40 percent smaller child/adult ratio at school. But with three siblings and a single parent, the disadvantaged child’s adult/child ratio at home (1:4) [that is, one parent for every 4 children] is even worse (relatively) than the advantaged child who has one sibling and two parents (1:1) [that is, one parent for every child]. The disadvantaged child’s relative disadvantage at school, therefore, is smaller, where the child/adult ratio is only 40 percent worse, than at home, where the child/adult ratio is four times as large.”
That means that a parent deficit at home can often affect a child much more than any teacher deficit at school.
26, https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/charts-of-the-day-all-viral-edition/
And when we look at the percent of births to unmarried women by race, we see differences among people grouped by race, and those differences lead to other differences, including differences in income, education rates, and crime rates among these same groups. And by no means do whites as a group come out on top when it comes to those differences.
26a
As Kenny Xu points out in his book An Inconvenient Minority …
26b
“Asian Americans [were] one of the poorer ethnic groups in American life between 1880 and 1940, with low comparative social mobility from father to son …”
26c
“[But by] 1980, Asian Americans had greater incomes than white Americans and exceeded Black incomes in California by a factor of an entire educational degree.”
26d
Within the black community, kids from two-parent homes tend to do better on a variety of metrics. Researcher Van C. Tran of Columbia University examined cultural differences between West Indian second-generation young people and native black young people in New York City. Both group’s skin tones are the same. The researcher did this to determine what might explain the greater success of those West Indian second-generation young people.
26e
As Tran writes:
[T]here has been a dearth of research examining the neighborhood experiences of second-generation West Indians who grew up in similar neighborhoods and often live in close proximity to native blacks … [I] document the different ways in which second-generation West Indians and native blacks navigate their neighborhood environments, with the former [that is, West Indians] reporting stricter parenting … In their daily life, [West Indian second-generation youth] are also as likely as blacks to experience discrimination and prejudice from native whites and others … Overall, data … confirm the second-generation advantage among West Indians across eight measures: high school dropout, unemployment rate, … college graduate, professional attainment, arrest rate, incarceration rate, and teenage pregnancy … Native blacks reported the most disadvantaged outcomes, while West Indians reported outcomes similar to those of native whites … [A] key difference was family structure. West Indians also grew up with more adult figures in the household because they were more likely to grow up in two-parent households and their household tended to include both kin and non-kin adults. In contrast, native blacks were more likely to grow up in single-parent households where the father was absent and the mother bore the burden of parenting, disciplining, and supervision … This closer supervision has several implications for delinquency among the second generation, from drug use to skipping school … These cultural strategies are neither specific to a particular ethnic group nor to a particular social class, though the qualitative data presented here suggest they were more prevalent among West Indians than native blacks … More broadly, these findings suggest that race is “more than just black” and the complex link between ethnicity and culture deserves further research.”
27
The most comprehensive study of American black families from the end of slavery to 1925, Herbert Gutman’s The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925, concluded that:
28
“At all moments in time between 1880 and 1925 – that is, from an adult generation born in slavery to an adult generation about to be devastated by the Great Depression of the 1930s and the modernization of southern agriculture afterward – the typical Afro-American family was lower-class in status and headed by two parents … The two-parent household was not limited to better-advantaged Afro-Americans … It was just as common among farm laborers, sharecroppers, tenants, and northern and southern urban unskilled laborers and service workers.”
29
In a review of the book on its cover, John Hope Franklin states “Gutman has successfully challenged the traditional view that slavery virtually destroyed the Afro-American family.”
30
As Harvard Professor William Julius Wilson writes in his book “The Truly Disadvantaged”:
31
“Until the publication of Herbert Gutman’s impressive historical study on the black family, scholars had assumed that the current problems of the black family could be traced back to slavery … Gutman presented data that convincingly demonstrated that the black family was not particularly disorganized during slavery or during the early years of blacks’ first migration to the urban North beginning after the turn of the century. The problems of the modern black family, he suggests, are a product of more recent social forces.”
32, 33
And as Robert Woodson points out in Red, White, and Black, “In ten years of the Depression, when the United States overall had a negative GNP and a nearly 25 percent unemployment rate, the unemployment rate in the black community was over 40 percent. Even then, the marriage rate in the black community was higher than it was in the white community, despite times of economic deprivation and racism. In 1925 in New York City, 85 percent of black families were a husband and wife raising their children—while today the rate of out-of-wedlock births among blacks has skyrocketed to nearly 71 percent.”
The point here is not to blame anybody, in the 1920’s or today, but to recognize that when you see disparities, and when you look at the evidence, you see … lots of different things. Certainly not just racism, if racism is a factor at all.
34, 35, 36, 37, 38
As Ian Rowe has testified before Congress:
a range of studies have identified “toxic levels of wealth inequality,” especially between black and white Americans. According to the Federal Reserve’s 2019 Survey of Consumer Finances, the wealth gap between Black and white Americans at the median — the middle household in each community — was $164,100. The median Black household was worth only $24,100; the median white household, $188,200 … For some, this gap is vibrant proof of a permanent and insurmountable legacy of racial discrimination … [But [t]he same 2019 Survey of Consumer Finances that shows the average black family has one seventh the wealth of the average white family also shows the reverse when family structure is considered. Indeed, black households headed by two married parents have slightly higher wealth than the median net worth of the typical white, single-parent household (Figure 1).
And when education is considered, on an absolute basis, the median net worth of two-parent black households is nearly $220,000 and more than three times that of the typical white, single-parent household. See the chart below.
Moreover, the 2017 report The Millennial Success Sequence finds that a stunning 91 percent of black people avoided poverty when they reached their prime young adult years (age 28–34), if they followed the “success sequence”—that is, they earned at least a high school degree, worked full-time so they learned the dignity and discipline of work, and married before having any children, in that order.
Kendi assumes away all the relevant evidence needed to discuss whether racism, or something else, is the cause of any particular difference in outcomes among people grouped by race. Even worse, he defines as racist any policy that fails to guarantee more equal outcomes – he calls equal outcomes “equity” -- even when disparities have nothing to do with race.
39
Kendi writes: “A racist policy is any measure that produces or sustains racial inequity [that is, some differences in outcomes] between racial groups. An antiracist policy is any measure that produces or sustains racial equity [that is, equal outcomes] between racial groups.”
That means Kendi considers any situation in which there aren’t equal outcomes to be the result of racism, even when the evidence indicates the disparities are the result of something other than racism.
And worse than that, Kendi’s assumption that racism is behind all disparities leads him to openly advocate discrimination against other people based on the color of their skin.
40
Kendi writes, “If discrimination is creating equity, then it is antiracist.”
Did you get that? According to Kendi, when you actively discriminate against people based on the color of their skin and in so doing guarantee certain outcomes for others based on their skin color, that’s somehow antiracist, instead of, well, racist.
41
Just a few sentences later, he writes: “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.”
Kendi’s explicit support for discrimination based on race is directly contrary to the clear moral principle so beautifully described by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in his landmark speech, in which he said
MLK Content Character Clip (video)
“I have a dream my four little children will one day live in a nation where they not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
Dr. King was advocating the compelling moral principle of colorblindness. He was advocating for equal rights, regardless of race.
42
But Kendi explicitly rejects the concept of colorblindness. He writes, “The language of color blindness -- like the language of ‘not racist’ -- is a mask to hide racism.”
43
Martin Luther King Jr.’s argument for a colorblind approach is and has been a far more compelling argument than any race-based approach. That’s why Kendi explicitly rejects the very process of argument and education in his book. Kendi writes in How to Be an Antiracist: “Educational and moral suasion is” a “failed strategy.”
If educational and moral suasion is not your strategy, then what is it? Indoctrination?
44
“Colorblindness” is a metaphor for a universal moral and legal principle that states even though people have different skin colors, they should be treated as if they didn’t, as skin color is irrelevant to an individual’s moral worth.
45
As former slave and civil rights leader Frederick Douglass said, “color should not be a criterion of rights, neither should it be a standard of duty. The whole duty of a man, belongs alike to white and black.”
46
Frederick Douglass also said “It is evident that the white and black “must fall or flourish together.” In the light of this great truth, laws ought to be enacted, and institutions established — all distinctions, founded on complexion, ought to be repealed, repudiated, and forever abolished …”
So how does Kendi respond to Dr. King’s and Frederick Douglass’ clear moral principle? He makes the absurd claim that people who adhere to the moral principle of colorblindness are actually somehow denying the physical reality of different skin colors, which of course they are not doing.
47
Kendi writes, in of all places his children’s book Antiracist Baby, that “If you claim to be color-blind, you deny what’s right in front of you” next to an illustration of people with different skin colors.
But to adhere to the principle of colorblindness is not to deny reality, but to embrace the moral principle that skin color, which of course exists, should be irrelevant to moral judgements about individuals.
48
(A little side-note here. The same children’s book, ends with the seemingly contradictory line “Antiracist baby … doesn’t judge a book by its cover.” Well, if one can be “cover-blind” as a matter of principle, why can’t one be colorblind as a matter of principle as well?)
49
Anyway, Kendi so despises the concept of colorblindness that he even maintains “The most threatening racist movement is not the alt right’s unlikely drive for a White ethnostate but the regular American’s drive for a ‘race-neutral’ one.”
49a
Who was the founder of the modern movement for race-neutrality? It was Martin Luther King, Jr. Kendi thinks Martin Luther King Jr. is the founder of a movement that’s more dangerous than movements advocating white supremacy. Does that make any sense to you?
50
Now, when Kendi rejects the moral principle of colorblindness, he also explicitly rejects the legal principle of equal rights, regardless of race.
Again, in Kendi’s view, all disparities among people grouped by race are assumed to be due to “systemic” discrimination at the policy level as long as any disparities among people grouped by race are allowed to remain.
50a
Remember, as Kendi writes in How to Be an Antiracist, “Every policy in every institution in every community in every nation is producing or sustaining either racial inequity or equity between racial groups.”
50b
And so in Kendi’s view, “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.”
As a result, antiracists, as Kendi views them, should support systemic racism themselves -- only a racism aimed in another direction. All in the name of “equity.”
51
And if equity requires racial discrimination, then the concept of equal rights and the Constitution’s “equal protection of the law” has to go.
52
That’s why Kendi supports an amendment to the Constitution to do just that. As 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 [that is, disparate outcomes] over a certain threshold ...”
Notice that he needs to put racial “groups” into the Constitution, so as to require equal outcomes for groups based solely on race. And to do that, the goal of equal protection of the law for individuals, regardless of race, must be abandoned, according to Kendi.
53
Frederick Douglass, on the other hand, noted, “I know of no rights of race superior to the rights of humanity.” A believer in equality under the law, Douglass insisted “The constitution knows no man by the color of his skin.”
54
Now let’s look at the next book this school board candidate recommends, Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility.
55
Like Kendi, DiAngelo assumes that disparities in outcomes among people grouped by race must be caused by racism, writing that “Whites enact racism [by] [a]ttributing inequality between whites and people of color to causes other than racism.”
DiAngelo also explicitly rejects the moral concept of colorblindness, along with the concepts of individualism and even objectivity, which she sees as problematic aspects of having lighter skin.
56
DiAngelo believes individualism – that is, treating people as individuals -- is an aspect of what she calls “white identity,” writing that “a significant aspect of white identity is to see oneself as an individual, outside or innocent of race – ‘just human.’”
57
The idea that people should be treated as “just human,” of course, underpins the moral concept of “colorblindness.” But DiAngelo rejects the concept of colorblindness as something that perpetuates racism, stating “To challenge the ideologies of racism such as individualism and color blindness, we as white people must suspend our perception of ourselves as unique and/or outside race.”
58
In White Fragility, DiAngelo singles out the concepts of individualism and objectivity as barriers to understanding “cultural frameworks.” She writes, “exploring these cultural frameworks can be particularly challenging in Western culture precisely because of two key Western ideologies: individualism and objectivity.”
59
So DiAngelo says the concepts of individualism and objectivity interfere with learning. Now, we all have biases we should become aware of, and compensate for, but that’s all part of the pursuit of objectivity, not it’s abandonment.
60
And treating people as individuals — treating them according to the content of their character — is what combats discrimination based on race. Group averages don’t tell us anything about any particular individual. For example, even though group averages fall where they do, still millions of black and other minority students score higher than millions of white and Asian students on standardized tests. Those are all individual students, not stand-ins for their groups.
Treating people as individuals and objectively analyzing issues facilitates understanding. Treating people as individuals and the concept of objectivity were key advances in science, morality, and pluralist democracy.
61
Indeed, researchers have found that greater racial and ethnic diversity within one’s social network tends to increase a person’s adherence to the values of individualism, including individual autonomy and a greater preference for uniqueness. This indicates that as America becomes more racially and ethnically diverse, its people will come to value individualism more, and loyalty to their racially and ethnically-defined in-group less.
62
As the researchers reported: “In three studies, across different levels of measurement and analysis, we find converging evidence that ethnic diversity accompanies individualistic relational structures and increases the endorsement of individualistic values. Historical rates of ethnic diversity across different U.S. regions reveal this association (Study 1), as do individual-level reports of interethnic contact (Studies 2 and 3). The results of the forecasting model in Study 1 suggest that the trend toward increasing individualism will likely continue over the next several decades, assuming continuing growth in ethnic diversity …”
63
“That is, future increases in ethnic diversity will likely be accompanied by an increasing societal emphasis on individualistic dimensions …”
64
Researchers have also found that individualism is associated with both greater well-being and altruism. As one of the researchers described the results in the New York Times: “The United States is notable for its individualism … When comparing countries, my colleagues and I found that greater levels of individualism were linked to more generosity — not less — as we detail in a forthcoming article in the journal Psychological Science. For our research, we gathered data from 152 countries concerning seven distinct forms of altruism and generosity …”
65
“We found that countries that scored highly on one form of altruism tended to score highly on the others, too, suggesting that broad cultural factors were at play. When we looked for factors that were associated with altruism across nations, two in particular stood out: various measures of “flourishing” (including subjectively reported well-being and objective metrics of prosperity, literacy and longevity) and individualism.”
66
“[E]ven after statistically controlling for wealth, health, education and other variables, we found that in more individualist countries like the Netherlands, Bhutan and the United States, people were more altruistic across our seven indicators than were people in more collectivist cultures — even wealthy ones — like Ukraine, Croatia and China.
67, 68
“On average, people in more individualist countries donate more money, more blood, more bone marrow and more organs. They more often help others in need …”
The more people treat other people as individuals, the happier they are, the more giving they are, and the more they respect the uniqueness of other people.
69, 70, 71
Other researchers from five different universities found that “Our empirical results, which hold with three different measures of individualism, show that individualism is indeed associated with higher levels of charitable giving,” as indicated by the WGI (the World Giving Index).
72
As Arthur C. Brooks has written, “As a general rule, researchers find that individualism in a country strongly predicts the average level of well-being, even when correcting for life expectancy, access to food and water, and other variables.”
If that’s true, does individualism sound like a bad thing to you?
Not only does Robin DiAngelo reject treating people as individuals, she tells people they’re inherently defined by their skin color, and to act accordingly.
73
She writes that “White identity is inherently racist; white people do not exist outside the system of white supremacy."
It’s hard to imagine a cruder form of racism. Unless perhaps someone taught that thinking logically was somehow a “white thing.” Which brings us to our next text …
74, 75
A March, 2021, webinar sponsored by the American Federation of Teacher’s Share My Lesson organization was called “Anti-Racism Resources for Schools and Classrooms.”
76
It directed teachers to an education module that features a document titled “The Characteristics of White Supremacy Culture,” by Tema Okun (TEMA OHCUN), and it invites teachers to “Reflect on white supremacy culture and steps that can be taken to become free of it, particularly in schooling.”
77, 78
Now that sounds reasonable until you actually read the document, in which the author states the “characteristics of white supremacy culture” include the practice of “requiring people to think in a linear (logical) fashion.”
Listing thinking in a logical fashion as something uniquely “white” is of course itself a racist concept.
79
As Matt Yglesias, who used to write for Vox and the Washington Post, writes, “From any normal standpoint, the idea that “requiring people to think in a linear (logical) fashion” is racist is itself racist. People of all ethnic backgrounds can think logically!”
Fryer video
Roland Fryer, who became the youngest tenured black professor in Harvard University’s history, said this about the linear-thinking professor who first inspired him …
“I never thought like that, no one ever talked like that. And so it was a way to use linear logic to questions I thought were really relevant … [I]f you look at the data carefully and you actually use science to help understand and fix the issues of being black in America, that is the best way forward … Some people play this with politics and power, and I get that. I’m not naïve enough to understand that’s not important, but I really thought that having the facts right was really key. And so I set out on an absolute personal mission of 80 hours a week for two decades to do that. To have proof that was above reproach. To tackle issues like police, like education, like health, like the crack epidemic, and to do what inspired me when I walked into that first economics class, which is to use the best possible tools to approach the hardest social problems.” (at the 9:02 minute mark and the 19:00 minute mark).
80
Not surprisingly, Harvard’s youngest black tenured professor attributes “linear logic” to his success. But Tema Okun attributes linear logic to a “White Supremacy Culture”?
81, 82, 83, 84
Such perverse thinking even made its way to the Smithsonian Institution, which briefly posted this chart claiming the scientific method and linear thinking is somehow a white thing, along with “hard work is the key to success.”
Do you think criticizing logical thinking, the scientific method, and hard work as the key to success? I doubt it. Logical thinking, the scientific method, and hard work are the very keys to success.
Let’s take a quick look at where logical thinking, the scientific method, and hard work has gotten us as a society.
85, 86
The following charts shows the many ways the world has improved for the better following the Enlightenment, and the Industrial and Scientific Revolutions, around 1800.
87, 88
Just look at the dramatic spiked increase in life expectancy, gross domestic product per person (that’s all the goods and services we get to enjoy), and the percent of people not living in extreme poverty. All those good things happened because of logical thinking, the scientific method, and hard work.
89
As Dierdre McCloskey has written in Leave Me Alone and I'll Make You Rich: How the Bourgeois Deal Enriched the World:
“Our ancestors [living in the year 1800] lived on about $3 a day, expressed in US dollars at 2008 prices. The poorest places were down at $1 a day, the richest as an average in 1800, up at a still pathetic $6. Now the two billion or so people [out of about 7.5 billion people worldwide] in the very high-income nations [like the U.S.] earn more like $80 to $150 a day. They are on the sharply rising blade of a hockey stick of the Great Enrichment, after three hundred thousand years bumping along the $3 a day of the handle … The great magnitude of the increase is not at all in scientific doubt, ranging from 1,000 to 10,000 percent … The Nobel laureate in economics William Nordhaus notes that the conventional magnitudes are greatly understated precisely because the quality of goods and services has improved: “If we are to obtain accurate estimates of the growth of real incomes over the last century, we must somehow construct price indexes that account for the vast changes in the quality and range of goods and services that we consume, that somehow compare the services of horse with automobile, of Pony Express with facsimile machine [today we’d say email], of carbon paper with photocopier, of dark and lonely nights with nights spent watching television, and of brain surgery with magnetic resonance imaging.” The world’s daily bread, along with clothing and shelter and entertainment and lighting and dentistry and air conditioning, has increased by a factor of easily ten globally, and much more, thirty to one hundred times, in the high-income nations [like the U.S.].”
Stigmatizing logical thinking and the scientific method can only tend to discourage kids from becoming the inventors, entrepreneurs, and scientists we all need.
90
This inspiring book about black entrepreneurship by free and enslaved blacks says the following about black inventors from 1860, even before the Civil War, to 1900 ...
91
“Unlike business activity -- which has a certain collective sense to it -- invention is an art. It is an intellectual activity which requires systematic reason and logic, as well as trial and error. As ideas became inventions and inventions became income, Afro-Americans made significant contributions.”
92, 93, 94, 95
Here’s a list of just some of things African Americans invented from 1860 to 1900.
These are true stories that should inspire knowledge, logical thinking, hard work, and success. But these true stories can’t effectively be taught when the claim is made that logical thinking is somehow a “white” thing, and worse, somehow connected to white supremacy. The inspirational part of these stories is that logic can lead to breaking through barriers.
96, 97
Tema Okun, on the other hand, claims that logic is somehow a white supremacist thing that should be avoided. What a false and terrible lesson that is.
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The power to change minds through logical thinking is part of the wonderful story of Benjamin Banneker, a free black mathematician and scientist who lived during America’s founding.
99, 100
He published an almanac including the calculated location of the stars each day, and sent a copy along with a letter to Thomas Jefferson, who had previously thought black people were biologically inferior.
101, 102
Although Jefferson continued to have ambivalent thoughts, he was was deeply moved by Banneker’s letter and accomplishments. Jefferson wrote a letter to the Marquis de Condorcet, another scientist who was active in the anti-slavery movement, and passed along to him Banneker’s almanac. Jefferson’s letter to the Marquis de Condorcet states in part:
“I have seen very elegant solutions of Geometrical problems by him … I shall be delighted to see these instances of moral eminence so multiplied as to prove that the want of talents observed in them [blacks] is merely the effect of their degraded condition [that is, slavery] and not proceeding from any difference in the stature of the parts on which intellect depends.”
103
Jefferson, the author of Declaration of Independence’s phrase “all Men are created equal,” was moved in the direction of changing his racist views based on the power of logical thinking.
How can you effectively teach inspirational stories like that, when you disparage logic, objectivity, and treating people as individuals?
And how can you effectively teach inspirational stories when you teach people the false notion that American history is primarily a history of oppression, the effects of which are somehow still all around us even today?
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Which brings us to this school board candidate’s next recommendation, the recommendation that teachers use materials provided by The 1619 Project.
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The essays that compose the 1619 Project would have you believe that even today, the vestiges of slavery are everywhere. As Coleman Hughes has written, “Instead of teaching black children lessons they can use to improve their lives … the 1619 Project seems hell-bent on teaching them to see slavery everywhere: in traffic jams, in sugary foods, and, most surprisingly, in Excel spreadsheets.”
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Mr. Hughes is referring to Matthew Desmond’s 1619 Project essay, in which Desmond actually writes “When a mid-level manager spends an afternoon filling in rows and columns on an Excel spreadsheet, they are repeating business procedures whose roots twist back to slave-labor camps.”
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Here’s how the New York Times introduced the 1619 Project in August, 2019. It states “The 1619 Project … aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding …” because black slaves were first brought to North American shores in that year.
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Here’s Nikole Hannah Jones, who heads the 1619 Project, reiterating that claim. She wrote “I argue that 1619 is our true founding.”
109
And “we are talking the founding of America. And that is 1619.”
If it were to make any sense to claim slavery is essential to the founding of America, then there would have to be something about slavery unique to America. But slavery was a worldwide phenomenon for thousands of years, and it still exists in many parts of the world.
110
Human slavery is a supreme evil. It was also a worldwide phenomenon. Look at this map showing the volume of slaves sold by African slave traders worldwide, with the width of the line indicating the relative volume of the sales.
Much larger numbers of black slaves were sold by African warlords to slaveowners in the Middle East, and South America.
Now, that everyone was doing it doesn’t excuse in the least the absolute horrors of slavery. but it does put the lie to the false narrative that slavery uniquely defines America’s identity.
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And slavery wasn’t a strictly white versus black phenomenon. The source of the slave trade -- without which it wouldn’t have existed as it did -- was overwhelmingly black African warlords, who enslaved other Africans for sale and profit.
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As Peter Lovejoy writes in “Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa”:
113
“Slavery has been an important phenomenon throughout history. It has been found in many places, from classical antiquity to very recent times. Africa has been intimately connected with this history, both as a major source of slaves for ancient civilizations, the Islamic world, India, and the Americas, and as one of the principal areas where slavery was common. Indeed, in Africa slavery lasted well into the twentieth century – notably longer than in the Americas.”
114
As David S. Landes describes in his book “The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor”, slavery dominated African commerce because conditions in Africa made using animals for work practically impossible: In Africa, “the vector is the tsetse fly, a nasty little insect that would dry up and die without frequent sucks of mammal blood. Even today, with powerful drugs available, the density of these insects makes large areas of tropical Africa uninhabitable by cattle and hostile to humans. In the past, before the advent of scientific tropical medicine and pharmacology, the entire economy was distorted by this scourge: animal husbandry and transport were impossible; only goods of high value and low volume could be moved, and then only by human porters.”
115
“Needless to say, volunteers for this work were not forthcoming. The solution was found in slavery, its own kind of habit-forming plague, exposing much of the continent to unending raids and insecurity.”
What slaves African warlords didn’t use themselves, they sold to others for profit.
115a
Researcher Zora Neale Hurston interviewed Cudjo Lewis, one of the last African slaves brought to America (illegally) in 1860. Cudjo Lewis’s own description of his enslavement in Africa by a competing black African tribe is recounted in Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo,” written in 1927. At the time, there was a popular myth that black slaves from Africa were lured into capture by white slave traders, when in fact they were enslaved by other black tribes, and only then sold to white buyers.
115b
As Ms. Hurston writes, “One thing impressed me strongly from this three months of association with Cudjo Lewis. The white people had held my people in slavery in America. They had bought us, it is true and exploited us. But the inescapable fact that stuck in my craw, was: my people had sold me and the white people had bought me. That did away with the folklore I had been brought up on—that the white people had gone to Africa, waved a red handkerchief at the Africans and lured them aboard ship and sailed away.”
115c
As Basil Davidson writes in his book The African Slave Trade:
115d
“For their part, the [African] coastal chiefs were not slow in understanding where their own commercial interest lay. They in turn endeavoured to win a monopoly on the landward side of the trade … whence most of the captives must come. [The African coastal chiefs] also fought each other as the Europeans did, sought alliance with this or that European nation, stormed their rivals, enslaved them, sold them off; or were themselves seized and sold.”
And in America, free blacks owned slaves as well.
116
As Larry Koger writes in “Black Slaveowners: Free Black Slave Masters in South Carolina, 1790-1860”:
117
“at one time or another, free black slaveowners resided in every Southern state which countenanced slavery and even in Northern states. In Louisiana, Maryland, South Carolina, and Virginia, free blacks owned more than 10,000 slaves, according to the federal census of 1830.”
118
Native Americans owned slaves, too. As explained by Barbara Krauthamer in her book Black Slaves, Indian Masters: Slavery, Emancipation, and Citizenship in the Native American South.
119
Native Americans tribes bought thousands of slaves, and joined as allies to the Confederacy during the Civil War -- and didn’t free their own slaves until a treaty with the United States required their freedom in 1866, a year after the Civil War ended slavery in the United States.
120
The 1619 Project initially made another central claim that was false.
121
In the Hannah-Jones introductory essay to the 1619 Project, she wrote:
122
“one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.”
123
That’s false. Gordon S. Wood, one of the nation’s most preeminent historians of the American Revolution, wrote that “I don't know of any colonist who said that they wanted independence in order to preserve their slaves ... No colonist expressed alarm that the mother country [England] was out to abolish slavery in 1776.”
124
And in a December, 2019, letter published in The New York Times, historians Gordon Wood, James M. McPherson, Sean Wilentz, Victoria Bynum and James Oakes expressed “strong reservations” about the 1619 Project generally and requested factual corrections, accusing the authors of a “displacement of historical understanding by ideology.”
125
Indeed, Sean Wilenz, in his book No Property in Man, describes how the Constitution's provisions led to abolishing slavery because the Founders rejected any federal right to own property in people. When the South couldn’t fall back on constitutional protections for property in men, its leaders had to resort to Civil War, which caused the death of some 600,000 people, with roughly one Union soldier dying for every nine or ten slaves freed.
126, 127
If the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution hadn’t enshrined noble ideals, opponents of slavery couldn’t have so effectively shamed slavery supporters with their hypocrisy. Pointing out that shameful hypocrisy between the ideals of our founding documents and the existence of slavery is what led to the end of slavery in America.
Martin Luther King Jr. specifically drew attention to the hypocrisy exhibited by allowing slavery and discriminatory practices to continue in the face of the universal principles embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
In his “I Have a Dream” speech, Martin Luther King said
MLK Promissory Note Clip (video)
“When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the ‘unalienable Rights’ of ‘Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.’”
128
As Thomas Sowell has pointed out:
Slavery was just not an issue, not even among intellectuals, much less among political leaders, until the 18th century – and then it was an issue only in Western civilization. Among those who turned against slavery in the 18th century were George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry and other American leaders. You could research all of 18th century Africa or Asia or the Middle East without finding any comparable rejection of slavery there. But who is singled out for scathing criticism today? American leaders of the 18th century.
129
Hannah Jones herself has since admitted that the 1619 Project is not true history. She tweeted, “I’ve always said that the 1619 Project is not a history. It is a work of journalism that explicitly seeks to challenge the national narrative and, therefore, the national memory.”
129a
She also tweeted “The 1619 Project explicitly denies objectivity.”
If Hanna Jones’ current position is that the 1619 Project isn’t history, and that it isn’t objective, then in which class would it be taught? A class called “Made-Up-History for Fraudulent Journalists Who Want to Create False Memories?”
The 1619 Project isn’t history by the admission of its own head . It’s identity politics.
130
And claiming the vestiges of slavery are ever-present barriers in America today is a false and disempowering message, because it instills in people a false perception of outward barriers instead of inward resilience.
As Abraham Lincoln said “Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed, is more important than any other one thing.”
131
And Frederick Douglass said in his 1859 “Self-Made Men” speech: “Personal independence is a virtue … But there can be no independence without a large share of self-dependence, and this virtue cannot be bestowed. It must be developed from within.”
132
I was reading a book recently called One Giant Leap, and it mentions a story told by John F. Kennedy in a speech encouraging the American people to keep up the quest for a successful moonwalk. He said:
JKF Speech (video)
“Frank O’Connor, the Irish writer, tells in one of his books how, as a boy, he and his friends would make their way across the countryside, and when they came to an orchard wall that seemed too high and too doubtful to try, and too difficult to permit their voyage to continue, they took off their hats and tossed them over the wall—and then they had no choice but to follow them. This nation has tossed its cap over the wall of space, and we have no choice but to follow it.”
That’s the sort of self-empowering message that leads to moonwalks, to graduations, and to happy and successful lives.
Teaching kids they’re the inevitable victims of vague outside forces like “systemic racism” can only diminish their sense of their own ability to improve their lives. And it’s when people understand their own ability to succeed that they’re most likely to succeed.
133
An investigation that covered over 260,000 individuals from 84 countries during a period of 25 years concluded that a person’s feelings of control in their own life (what psychologists call a “locus of control”) is most closely associated with greater life-satisfaction.
The paper concluded:
134
“A very strong association between life-satisfaction and a variable that measures both freedom of choice and the locus of control is found controlling for country and individual characteristics, personal values and social attitudes. This association is stronger and more consistent than the association between life satisfaction and all other known predictors of life satisfaction in a cross-country and within country context … Freedom and control is the only variable that is consistently significant with a positive sign across all … countries ... Income rank is significant in only two countries and together with the importance of politics is the least relevant of the variables.”
So, worldwide, the attitude most associated with greater life satisfaction is an understanding that individuals have control over their own lives. But that attitude is directly contradicted by the false notion that people are victims trapped in a maze of “systemic” barriers.
134a
America is one of the most tolerant countries in the world. After Swedish researchers looked at surveys on tolerance conducted around the world for decades, they published the results of their study in the International Review for Social Sciences.
134b
They found that along with being one of the freest countries in the world, the United States was one of the very most tolerant countries in the world as well …
134c
… with almost 100 percent of the American people reporting tolerant attitudes toward people of other races.
135
With all this said, I'm not worried about my own kids. And I'm not worried about their teachers, who in my experience have been absolutely wonderful educators. But the education system has tended to become dominated by administrators -- not educators -- too many of whom push identity politics.
So if you see toxic falsehoods like what I’ve described creeping into your child’s world view, help them broaden their understanding based on facts and data. Help make sure that whenever possible they read sustained treatments of issues in book form that can often provide context, and counter the misleading impressions left by the much shorter opinion pieces that dominate social media.
And of course schools should teach the history of racism, in America and throughout the world. But teachers won’t be able to effectively condemn that racism if the curriculum – or the administrator powers that be -- call for teaching that some racism is good.
136
I want to close with some quotes from Professor William Julius Wilson of Harvard, who writes the following in a book called “The Truly Disadvantaged.” Professor Wilson writes:
137
“even if racism continues to be a factor in the social and economic progress of some blacks, can it be used to explain the sharp increase in inner-city social dislocations since 1970? Unfortunately, no one who supports the contemporary racism thesis has provided adequate or convincing answers to this question.”
138
When describing the term “structural racism,” Professor Wilson writes:
“Indeed, because this term [“structural racism”] has been used so indiscriminately, has so many different definitions, and is often relied on to cover up lack of information or knowledge of complex issues, it frequently weakens rather than enhances arguments concerning race.”
139
And when describing the goal of equalizing chances in life, Professor Wilson writes:
“[P]rograms based on this principle [of equalizing life chances] would not be restrictively applied to members of certain racial or ethnic groups but would be targeted to truly disadvantaged individuals regardless of their race or ethnicity.”
This is Paul Taylor, and I approved this message, although I’m not running for anything.
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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