Critical race theory

Posted By Mahabodhi on Jul 5, 2024 | 0 comments

Below is an excerpt from my forthcoming book…

© Mahabodhi Burton

5 minute read

This excerpt is from Chapter 4: ‘Postmodernism and the academic mindset’ and follows on from Woke as Maoism with American Characteristics.

Whiteness as Property

In 1993, James Lindsay explains, Cheryl Harris wrote a long article for the Harvard Law Review called ‘Whiteness as Property,’[1] in which she proposed that whiteness or white privilege constitutes a kind of cultural private property. In The Communist Manifesto, Marx said that communism could be summarized in a single sentence: ‘the abolition of private property.’ This is why critical race theory thinks whiteness must be abolished in order to have racial justice. Lindsay:

‘People who have access to this property are whites, or white adjacent, or they act white. … People without that are people of colour and they are oppressed by systemic racism. Systemic racism is enforced by an ideology of white supremacy. Instead of capitalism, if you think of whiteness as a form of cultural capital, white supremacy, as they define it, is identical to capitalism.

 

‘It’s not believing that white people are superior, it’s believing that white people have access to the control of society and should maintain that. Even if you don’t actually believe that, if you merely support that, you have adopted the ideology of white supremacy into your mind. And so, you have the exact same system. And the goal is to awaken a racial consciousness in people so that they will band together as a class and seize the means of cultural production, so that white cultural production is no longer the dominant mode.

 

‘I know in the UK, throughout Europe, I hear this question again and again, why on Earth is this very American phenomenon about slavery and so on, that doesn’t apply to our country, why is it popular here. It’s because it’s not about history at all, it’s not about slavery at all, those are excuses that they use. It’s about creating a class consciousness that’s against this form of property called whiteness, that’s against the dominant culture. That may just be a matter of fact, say if you’re in Europe, that’s why because it becomes a site by which people can come together, and they can channel resentment and try to claim power.’[2]

Recapping James’ points, Jake says: that ‘Marxism transcends economics, and even transcends social theory, the theory of Marxism bears a religious-like structure that can be extrapolated across all domains of life. And he used the example of private property, which if taken literally means a physical asset but that idea can be extrapolated to the idea of whiteness as private property, or whiteness as capital, as was explicitly stated, as he mentioned in Cheryl Harris’s 1993 article for the Harvard Law Review, and furthermore he mentions seizing the means of production, which in the traditional sense means the oppressed proletariat rising up and taking their share in profits, however in the cultural sense, means seizing the means of white cultural production.’[3]

Next in the video, Lindsay gets into specific examples of how cultural Marxism manifests in in the modern day, namely ideas like critical race theory, queer theory and post-colonial theory. Jake:

‘ … and the reason why this is so important is because in the modern day sometimes it’s almost impossible to argue against these things, if you’re not armed and dangerous with this knowledge, because these ideas are held up as self-evident truths of progressivism and goodness: the people that promulgate these ideas are protecting the lives and the existences of minorities and if you dare question it then you will be hit with all of the -isms and all of the -phobes. They will pick it out of their buffet breakfast of -isms and -phobes. Furthermore, if you try and lift the veil of what this really is, which is cultural Marxism, then you will be laughed at and ridiculed and told that you have no idea what Marxism really is.’

Racism and queer theory

In his book, Race Marxism, James Lindsay defines critical race theory:

‘I said the critical race theory is calling everything you want to control racist until you control it, but couldn’t we say the same about Marxism, it’s calling everything you want to control bourgeois until you control it.

 

’But those mean the same thing, they mean exactly the same thing, but what about say queer theory? How is that Marxist? It’s very strange, all this gender, and sex, and sexuality. Well Tom said, what does woke attack? The idea of being normal. Well the queer theory thinks that there are certain people who get to set the norms of society, they are privileged, they call themselves normal. They say this is normal, it’s normal to consider yourself a man, and look like a man, and act like a man, and dress like a man, and eat meat like a man, and then there are women, this should be feminine and pretty and all these things and so they get to define what’s normal. They’re heterosexuals, so they get to define the heterosexuality as normal, and other sexualities are abnormal, and so you have a conflict across this cultural property of who gets to be considered normal, and who is a pervert or a freak, or some other term that gets used in their literature, but technically who is a queer, which sounds like a slur, but they adopted it, and it’s a technical academic term now. It means an identity without an essence, by the way, an identity that is strictly oppositional to the concept of the normal, as defined by queer theorist David Halperin in his 1995[4] book Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography.[5] I didn’t make that up. I’m not extrapolating. So, you see queer theory is just another species of the genus of Marxism.’[6]

Post-colonial theory

Likewise, with post-colonial theory: Here, you have, as Lindsay says: ‘The West as the oppressor, they have access to the material and cultural wealth of the world, because they’ve decided their culture is the default and have gone and colonized the world to bring culture to the world, … and so the oppressed, the natives around the world, the people, have to band together, and their activity is going to be called decolonization.’[7]

‘They have to remove every aspect of Western culture, so when they come to Belgium, or they come to France, or they come to the United States, and they say we’re going to decolonize the curriculum, or they go to the UK and say we’re going to decolonize Shakespeare, this is what they mean. We’re going to remove the cultural significance of your cultural artifacts because those cultural artifacts themselves are oppressive to us.’[8]

Recapping, Jake says:

‘Did that just make too much sense to you? It did for me. We are seeing this exact thing happen in the West, and it is working. Think about it. They do it to people in positions of power, sports leagues, corporations, small businesses, public figures, politicians, and the list goes on. And then when they call them racist, what do they do, well they issue groveling public apologies, they take the knee, they bend over, they raise their fists, they put their employees through woke struggle sessions, all to avoid being called racist.

 

‘Obviously queer theory is something that’s designed to attack Western norms, to attack biological norms, cultural norms, etc. And it makes sense when you think about it in the Marxist framework, because these norms are the oppressors, and those who deviate from the norms, or those who are queer, are the oppressed, and in order to remedy this and change the paradigm, then this power structure needs to be overthrown.

 

’It’s important to realize that they don’t care about helping people who are historically oppressed, or whatever. This is merely a masquerade that they use to destroy the fundamental institutions of Western culture, because they’re from a colonial heritage, … which means that they are inextricably linked to this evil past and must be decolonialized.’[9]

Jake sums up why it is called Critical Theory:

‘Criticize and ultimately destroy everything without ever actually building anything, that right there is the difference between intellectuals and people who operate in the real world.’[10]

Of course, nobody ever will want to admit to the lack of integrity in acquiescing to socialist criticism in this debasing way: and so, the cycle perpetuates itself.

The chapter goes on to explore the history of Cultural Marxism.

[1] Cheryl I. Harris. ‘Whiteness as Property.’ Harvard Law Review. Vol. 106, No. 8 (Jun., 1993), pp. 1707-91. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1341787

[2] ‘James Lindsay SHATTERS Woke Ideology: EU Parliament Speech. Rattlesnake TV. YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aviyl1eiC1s

Permission has been sought from James Lindsay on multiple occasions to use the transcript of his European Parliament talk.

Below is the transcript of Rattlesnake TV’s video which I have consent to share:

https://archive.org/details/james-lindsay-shatters-woke-ideology_202312

[3] Ibid.

[4] Should be 1997.

[5] David M. Halperin. (1995) Saint Foucault: Toward a Gay Hagiography. OUP.

[6] ‘James Lindsay SHATTERS Woke Ideology: EU Parliament Speech.’

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid.