CTR, Racism, and Obama...

by: Les Carpenter
Rational Nation USA
Liberty -vs- Tyranny


Every since the controversy over Critical Race Theory has emerged, the result of the late Andrew Breitbart's allegation that President Obama was influenced by Harvard Law Professor Derrick Bell's "radical" teachings I became mildly interested. For me it is more important to determine the truth than it is to defeat the President based on unfounded or unsubstantiated claims of "radicalism" based his association with Bell while he was attending Harvard law school.

Critical Race Theory (CRT), as described by Dr. Theodora Regina Berry is;... "a framework that addresses the politics of race in the context of the law. What we're looking at are the ways in which racial politics have either changed or maintained the status quo in American society."

Thinking about the history of the United States, both pre emancipation of blacks as well as post emancipation the above description is certainly an apt one. In reflecting on how prejudicial American society remained following emancipation of blacks, and how the political, economic, and legal system moved at a snails pace toward meaningful change one can better understand the dynamics of racial politics. For the better part of 146 years since blacks gained their freedom they have remained, until 2009, outside of the power structure in American politics.

It is not my intent to delve deeply into CRT as it is both beyond my scope of expertise and outside my time limits. I will say that based on my reading thus far, and the President's discernible actions, we ought not be terribly concerned. As I stated earlier getting to the truth should be of primary importance. Using even remotely fallacious allegations to discredit the President begs the question, is one who does a racist after all?

Following is a informative article with several links.

International Business Times - The theory's late founder, Harvard law professor Derrick Bell, has been called "an inspiring teacher and mentor" as well as a "raging, fulminating racist." The late Andrew Breitbart charged that Obama's predilection for "racial division and class warfare" stemmed from Bell's teachings. On Thursday, CNN news anchor Soledad O'Brien got into an on-air spat about the very meaning of the concept. Even the term's Wikipedia entry has undergone frequent changes over the last few days.

Dr. Theodora Regina Berry, president of the Critical Race Studies in Education Association (CRSEASSOC), offered a succinct definition of the concept. "Critical race theory is really a framework that addresses the politics of race in the context of the law," she said. "What we're looking at are the ways in which racial politics have either changed or maintained the status quo in American society."

In other words, this school of thought examines how laws meant to promote a fair society may actually reinforce inequality and preserve hierarchies. In the seminal 1973 publication "Race, Racism and American Law," Bell explained that racism is a subtle yet powerful institutionalized force. His goal was to examine the "law's role in concretizing racial differences, maintaining racial inequality, and reifying the status quo."

He challenged the assumed fairness of the American political system, arguing that true neutrality is impossible. "Abstraction, put forth as 'rational' or 'objective' truth, [allows] the privileged to de-personify their claims and then pass them off as the universal authority and the universal good," wrote Bell in 1995. To address this, critical race theorists "seek to empower and include traditionally excluded views."

As Berry explains it, "There's a major tenet of critical race theory called anti-essentialism. What that really means is there's no one-size-fits-all answer to every kind of situation." In terms of policy, this means that "we need to look at the multiple ways that people live to determine the kinds of things the government can do for them, based on where they live, who they are and how they're educated."

Bell was an independent and sometimes provocative thinker; he differed from many of his contemporaries in that he doubted the momentousness of many civil rights victories and even argued in 1992 that "black people will never gain full equality in this country." Bell was not resigned; he simply advocated a more challenging and holistic approach to achieving equality. {Read More}

Racism is one of the most revolting characteristic of humankind. It is present in all races, cultures, and ethnicity. No one is completely free of it.

As my wife and I watched our two year and seven month old grandson last summer playing with, and walking hand in hand with a three year old African American child we could not help but think how badly adult society has screwed things up. Neither our grandson or his new found friend noticed the difference in their color. If they did it simply wasn't important.

Being a Objectivist I went to the writing of the women whose fierce belief in individualism, and the right of the individual to be judged solely on the merit of their character as an individual to find what I believe characterizes racism.

excerpts from "Racism" by Ayn Rand - Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man's genetic lineage -- the notion that a man's intellectual and characterological traits are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry. Which means, in practice, that a man is to be judged, not by his own character and actions, but by the characters and actions of a collective of ancestors.

Racism claims that the content of a man's mind (not his cognitive apparatus, but its content) is inherited; that a man's convictions, values and character are determined before he is born, by physical forces beyond his control. This is the caveman's version of the doctrine of innate ideas -- or of inherited knowledge -- which has been thoroughly refuted by philosophy and science. Racism is a doctrine of, by and for brutes. It is a barnyard or stock-farm version of collectivism, appropriate to a mentality that differentiates between various breeds of anmials, but not between animals and men.

Like every form of determinism, racism invalidates the specific attribute which distinguishes man from all other living species: his rational faculty. Racism negates two aspects of man's life: reason and choice, or mind and morality, replacing them with chemical predestination.

The respectable family that supports worthless relatives or covers up their crimes in order to "protect the family name" (as if the moral stature of one man could be damaged by the actions of another) -- the bum who boasts that his great-grandfather was an empire-builder, or the small-town spinster who boasts that her maternal great-uncle was a state senator and her third-cousin gave a concert at Carnegie Hall (as if the achievements of one man could rub off on the mediocrity of another) -- the parents who search genealogical trees in order to evaluate their prospective sons-in-law -- the celebrity who starts his autobiography with a detailed account of his family history -- all these are samples of racism, the atavvistic manifestations of a doctrine whose full expression is the tribal warfare of prehistorical savages, the wholesale slaughter of Nazi Germany, the atrocities of today's so-called "newly-emerging nations."

The theory that holds "good blood" and "bad blood" as a moral-intellectual criterion, can lead to nothing but torrents of blood in practice. Brute force is the only avenue of action open to men who regard themselves as mindless aggregates of chemicals.

Modern racists attempt to prove the superiority or inferiority of a given race by the historical achievements of some of its members. The frequent historical spectacle of a great innovator who, in his lifetime, is jeered, denounced, obstructed, persecuted by his countrymen, and then, a few years after his death, is enshrined in a national monument and hailed as a proof of greatness of the German (or French or Italian or Cambodian) race -- is as revolting a spectacle of collectivist expropriation, perpetrated by racists, as any expropriation of material wealth perpetrated by communists.

Just as there is no such thing as a collective or racial mind, so there is no such thing as a collective or racial achievement. There are only individual minds and individual achievements -- and a culture is not the anonymous product of undifferentiated masses, but the sum of the intellectual achievements of individual men.

Even if it were proved -- which it is not -- that the incidence of men of potentially superior brain power is greater among the members of certain races than among the members of others, it would still tell us nothing about any given individual and it would be irrelevant to one's judgment of him. A genius is a genius, regardless of the number of morons who belong to the same race -- and a moron is a moron, regardless of the number of geniuses who share his racial origin. It is hard to say which is the more outrageous injustice: the claim of Southern racists that a Negro genius should be treated as inferior because his race has "produced" some brutes -- or the claim of a German brute to the status of a superior because his race has "produced" Goethe, Schiller and Brahms.

These are not two different claims, of course, but two applications of the same basic premise. The question of whether one alleges the superiority or the inferiority of any given race is irrelevant; racism has only one psychological root: the racist's sense of his own inferiority.

Like every other form of collectivism, racism is a quest for the unearned. It is a quest for automatic knowledge -- for an automatic evaluation of men's characters that bypasses the responsibility of exercising rational or moral judgment -- and, above all, a quest for an automatic self-esteem (or pseudo-self-esteem).

To ascribe one's virtues to one's racial origin, is to confess that one has no knowledge of the process by which virtues are acquired and, most often, that one has failed to acquire them. The overwhelming majority of racists are men who have earned no sense of personal identity, who can claim no individual achievement or distinction, and who seek the illusion of a "tribal self-esteem" by alleging the inferiority of some other tribe. Observe the hysterical intensity of the Southern racists; observe also that racism is much more prevalent among the poor white trash than among their intellectual betters. {Read More}

Sometimes it is good to look in the mirror. Perhaps more Americans should do so more often.

If only we could see the world through the eyes of a two or three year old.

Via: Memeorandum

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