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An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2021/05/24/john-mcwhorter-on-how-critical-race-theory-poorly-serves-its-intended-beneficiaries [economist.com]

THE TRIUMPH of an anti-racist movement that harms black people began with a black man’s murder. On May 25th 2020, a white police officer suffocated George Floyd, sparking protests around the world and a national “reckoning” about race. It quickly became de rigueur for organisations of all kinds to air statements in support of the protests. Black-related clues in crossword puzzles started appearing more frequently, as did cooking shows devoted to African-American cuisine. Cries to make Juneteenth, marking the end of slavery, a national holiday grew louder. Crayola had just released a new set of crayons with a wide range of brown skin tones. But soon things got mean: critical race theory took over.

As popularised, this framework, previously little known outside of academia, makes fighting perceived power differentials the paramount commitment of intellectual, moral and even artistic endeavor. It deems unquestionable claims of racism from non-whites, out of an idea that they speak from a group-wide and existentially defining experience of oppression by an all-powerful “whiteness”. Many proponents of critical race theory include, as aspects of oppressive whiteness, such things as objectivity, punctuality and clear writing.

Critical race theory has become a religious movement in all but name, in which white privilege is original sin, the blasphemous is “problematic”, and transgressors are banished from the public sphere just as heretics were in medieval Europe. The people wielding this ideology genuinely believe that they represent reason and morality in flower. But for a movement purportedly intended to improve the lives of the disadvantaged, its proponents are incongruously obsessed with mere cultural policing.

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