The Patriot Post® · In Brief: Critical Race Theory's Marxist Roots
Patriot Post readers are no strangers to the idea that Black Lives Matter is a Marxist organization. Political analyst Bruce Thornton digs into that case in a recent article:
The expanding influence of Critical Race Theory and its Black Live Matter “praxis,” as Marxists call applied theory, has raised concerns about its incoherent pronouncements and illiberal aims. The origins of this ideology is an important question, for CRT has nothing to do with civil rights, or improving black lives or making them “matter.” It’s about increasing its practitioners’ power in our institutions in order to “fundamentally transform” the United States from a country of ordered liberty and limited government, to a “soft” despotic, intrusively regulated technocracy at best, or an illiberal socialist tyranny at worst.
CRT has its roots in Marxism, as one of the founders of BLM has bragged. And, like the Soviet version of Marxism, BLM’s growing influence over our social, educational, political, and corporate institutions — already compromised by a century of progressive ideology, itself a kissing-cousin of Marxism — is an existential danger to the Constitutional safeguards of our political freedom and unalienable rights.
Because of Marxism’s “hermeneutics of suspicion,” says Thornton, adherents look for the hidden “deeper meaning” in everything.
Hence for CRT, all the progress in race relations — the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Brown vs. Board of Education, the growth of the black middle class, the elimination of legal segregation, and the increase in black office-holders including the presidency — are mere “epiphenomena” that have not eliminated the underlying “systemic racism.” According to CRT, this occult “racism” keeps racism alive and accounts for all the “disparate impacts” that deny “equity” (i.e. the equality of result) to blacks and other minorities, but benefit and reward “white privilege” and “white supremacy” at the expense of black well-being.
Fighting this underlying sin, CRT proponents argue, is the reason for their indoctrination efforts, particularly in schools and universities, but also in corporate and government training programs. The “white fragility” and so forth must be rooted out, hence the redefinition of terms.
“Racism” today, then, is not about what it originally meant to the progressive “scientific” racists in the early 20th century — that every member of a lower race is by nature inferior to every member of the superior one. Now “racism” is a function of “white power” and “white privilege,” and its purpose is to shape our culture and political discourse — words like “equality” and “freedom” and “tolerance” — so that they both camouflage and perpetuate that power. So no oppressed person, meaning any “person of color” defined by superficial physical characteristics, can be “racist.” Only “whites,” who because of those historically oppressive institutions enjoy “white privilege” no matter their social class, are “racists.”
There’s plenty more, Thornton explains, but suffice it to say that CRT is the enemy of capitalism, Judeo-Christian culture, and Liberty itself. “And,” Thornton concludes, “the old enemy of freedom will win, unless, as Winston Churchill said to Parliament after the Munich debacle, ‘By a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigour, we rise again and take our stand for freedom as in the olden time.’”