Philosophical Foundations of Critical Race Theory (1)
The decade of the 1960s was a very turbulent period. We have not fully recovered from all of the things that resulted from that decade: There were four major political figures who were assassinated (Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, John F. Kennedy, and Robert F. Kennedy)—the Vietnam War—Cuban Missile Crisis—and at the end of the decade, we landed the first man on the moon and the Woodstock Festival occurred! During this time, there were the anti-war protests and the civil rights protests. By this time, the Postmodernist movement, having begun in the 1950s, began to take root in academic circles, and a first wave of those who would be influenced by this position were taught to reject “modernity.” Modernism roughly corresponds with the Enlightenment which occurred around 1650 and lasted at least through 1950. The primary focus during this time was epistemology—that is, how do we know, what are the conditions of knowledge, and what are the limits of knowledge? In the 1950s, first in Europe before the United States, all those things gained in the Enlightenment were rejected. It started in the arts, but quickly spread to all other disciplines, including science. Naturally, those committed to the scientific process were not simply going to ignore the challenge. To the postmodernist all knowledge and, therefore, truth itself, was seen as subjective, and rooted in each person’s experience. There is some objectivity in science, but postmodernists have given up any hope of rising above the subjective knowing of their own truths. Nancy Pearcey refers to this expansion of the postmodernists beyond the arts in the following:
As the arts lost status and prestige, artists and writers found themselves adrift, without their historical functions in society. Many responded by going on the offensive, attacking the mechanistic science and industrial society that they regarded as dehumanizing—and that had made their own status so precarious. Today they continue to seek redress by demonstrating the superiority of their own new analytical tools of literary analysis and deconstruction. And why not apply those tools even to the sacrosanct area of science? If all texts can be deconstructed, what makes scientific texts immune to that process? (114)
We are all hearing the language of the postmodernists today. When they speak of “her truth” or “reimagining police forces” or “deconstruction,” we are hearing the postmodernists speak about their subjective convictions which are really only their personal opinions.
The next decade after the 1960s was often referred to as the “Me” generation, due to the massive influence of Humanistic thought as it surfaced in Humanistic Psychology (called “Third-Force” psychology). The influence in educational circles was very powerful, seen in such well-known men as John Dewey (the father of modern education), Carl Rogers, Erich Fromm, Rollo May, and Abraham Maslow. We began to hear such things as “self-esteem,” “self-actualization,” “peak experiences,” and the like. This movement, born out of “modernity” was just a polite way of saying “atheism,” or “agnosticism.” These folks were the immediate forerunners of the “New Atheists” that we are familiar with today. They were sometimes called “methodological naturalists,” because they rejected any supernatural realm or life beyond physical death, including, of course, God. Postmodernist thinking was just gaining a foothold on students in our major universities, and has since become one of the primary challenges in our culture today. There is a third challenge, peculiar to American culture and that is pragmatism.
If there is a dominant philosophy in America today, it would probably be either naturalism or pragmatism. James Sire argues that on university campuses across North America naturalism remains dominant: “Today naturalism is dominant. There is simply no academic discipline—whether in the arts and humanities, the social sciences or the natural sciences—that takes as its starting assumption the notion of a God who has created both the scholars and the world they are studying.”
Metaphysical naturalism is the view that only natural objects and properties are real. In such a philosophy there is no place for the God whom C. S. Lewis describes as the hunter, the warrior, the king—the God who approaches at infinite speed. . . . Despite the flourishing of religious beliefs among Americans, the elite, who are trained by the top universities, are highly secular and largely determine the direction of the country.
A good question is how pragmatism and postmodernism relate to naturalism. They seem poles apart, but we would argue, are in fact close cousins if not triplets. Modernity, and thus naturalism, took a severe beating in the twentieth century, so that the very notion of the “real,” let alone the possibility of our knowing it, has come into question. (Bartholomew and Goheen 182)
This philosophical cancer has metastasized into the very challenging times we are presently facing. Critical Race Theory (hereinafter abbreviated as CRT) is one particular outgrowth of this mass confusion. At stake are questions about truth, knowledge, ethics, and human rights, as spelled out, for example, in the Declaration of Independence. Each of these issues, with an anti-theistic bias, is being promoted heavily by those who are seeking to influence our current social framework. Each of these issues deserves at least some attention on our part. Because we are exploring the philosophical foundations of CRT, I will point more in that direction than in other areas that could also be studied.
An initial question to start this process would be whether or not we can identify some the battles we must fight. Once again, a whole host of new terms has sprung up, with which the readers may not be familiar. We hear the word woke and may wonder if someone thinks that we need to be awakened from a dead sleep. But, the word woke is a slang term referring to social awareness. Advocates of this might be heard to say, “We need to stay angry, and stay woke.” For some time now, we have heard about “political correctness,” which simply means that you must adopt the viewpoint of the mainstream media and also of the political elites. We are also hearing the expression “cancel culture,” and probably wonder what is meant by this statement. I rarely agree with Bill Maher, but on or about February 27, 2021, on his Television broadcast, he took on the “cancel culture,” when he said:
Liberals need a Stand Your Ground law . . . for cancel culture so that when the woke mob comes after you for some ridiculous offense, you’ll stand your ground, stop apologizing” . . . . Is this really who we want to become? A society of phony, clenched . . . Avatars walking on eggshells, always looking over your shoulder about getting ratted out for something that actually has nothing to do with your character or morals?
Maher then asked: “Think about everything you’ve ever texted, emailed, searched for, tweeted, blogged, or said in passing. Or now even just witnessed, ‘Someone had a Confederate flag in their dorm room in 1990 and you didn’t do anything?’ ‘You laughed at a Woody Allen movie?’” (Hanchett)
In other words, you need to be “cancelled,” or at least all of your influence must be abolished, because you are a systemic racist, and you have done nothing (or, little to nothing) about all these “social injustices.” Dear reader, you need to be aware that the “woke mob” is coming after you too. Bill Maher is a militant atheist and an aggressive pro-abortionist liberal, consequently, it is strange indeed to find that we have common ground regarding this issue. But, we do have common ground and that should be enough to raise legitimate concerns for all of us.
There are also many disturbing trends coming out of Washington, D.C. For instance, in a recent debate on the proposed Equality Act, which legislation makes no room for God anywhere (not in Congress, the workplace, social services, medicine, schools, or Christian schools), a Representative from Florida quoted from Deuteronomy 22:5 where a man should not wear women’s clothing nor the woman wear men’s clothing. He said:
It’s not clothing or personal style that offends God, but rather the use of one’s appearance to act out or take on a sexual identity different from the one biologically assigned by God at birth. He said that, when men, women and children do this, “they’re making a statement that God didn’t know what He was doing when He created them.” (Congressional Debate)
He was immediately attacked from the House floor, with statements suggesting that he was transphobic and intolerant. However, the statement that was most concerning came from a Representative of New York. He said: “. . . [W]hat any religious tradition describes as God’s will is no concern of this Congress.” The representative from New York is Jewish, and what was also interesting, even though the main stream media attempted to downplay the whole thing, was a reaction from The Coalition for Jewish Values (CJV), a coalition of more than 1500 traditional Orthodox Jewish Rabbis. These Rabbis harshly condemned those comments, but little has been said about their reaction. Remember, CRT is supposed to be describing how widespread and systemic racial bigotry is in the United States. There has been a huge rush to teach CRT in public schools, in the military, and in very large companies. Apparently, CRT is so pervasive and “white privilege” so dominant that we must all be retrained and disabused of this horrible disease.
Another word switch that we are hearing is the change from equality, which we would likely all agree needs emphasis, to equit,y which is not equality, but rather, an attempt to coerce the public into acceptance of the social justice mantra. Even though the purported legislation is entitled the Equality Act, the real meaning of the bill is to remove any and all traditional gender distinctions in favor of a bias toward LGBTQ adherents. If someone opposes such sweeping changes, they are quickly labeled racist which, once again, fits within the general discussion of CRT. The attempt is to break down the opposition in order to pressure them into silence, or at least, to attempt to put them at a serious disadvantage.
This is the first in a series of articles addressing the philosophical foundations of critical race theory appearing monthly throughout the remainder of 2021. Dick Sztanyo studied Philosophy of Religion and Apologetics under Thomas B. Warren at Harding Graduate School of Religion, and has done doctoral studies at University of Dallas. He has authored an apologetics textbook, Graceful Reason: A Study in Christian Apologetics, along with Is Worldview Only a Buzzword?, and contributed to The Utterance of God. Sztanyo serves as a staff writer and regularly reviews for Sufficient Evidence.
WORKS CITED
Bartholomew, Craig G., and Michael W. Goheen. Christian Philosophy: A Systematic and Narrative Introduction. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2013.
Congressional Debate on the Equality Act. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtB4vh72aGc.
Hanchett, Ian. “Maher: We Need ‘a Stand Your Ground Law for Cancel Culture.’” Breitbart.com. Feb. 27, 2021.
Pearcey, Nancy. Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity. Wheaton: Crossway, 2004.