A Guide for the Confused: “Wokeism,” Critical Theory, and Critical Race Theory

­­Also published at dastardlycleverness.com and as Episode 48 of the Dastardly Cleverness in the Service of Good podcast.

On the one hand, Trumpist attacks on Critical Race Theory are in obvious bad faith: just more of the same race-based fear-mongering that helped put Birther 1 in office, that other Republicans have embraced, and that generates endless ad money for right-wing media outlets. It’s demagoguery 101.

On the other hand, even if you see through the phony panic, some of what you hear from critical race theorists can sound extreme, especially if you don’t know much about the context. For example, if you believe in equality, how should you interpret Ibram X. Kendi’s assertion that “racial discrimination is not inherently racist [if it’s] creating equity?”[1]

And by the way, what’s the difference between equity and equality?

I come at this topic as a non-expert who tries to be at least informed, and I see it from the viewpoint of a liberal who understands the tension between Critical Race Theory and liberalism, so I think I may be able to help liberals who feel confused about Critical Race Theory but may not be sure why. By liberalism here, I mean the broadly defined liberalism that makes up the mainstream of small-d democratic politics. That includes people on the left and right who believe in Enlightenment values of reason, liberty, democracy, and more or less regulated capitalism.

I’ll give my specific opinions where I think they’re relevant, but otherwise I’ll try to keep them out of the way until the end.

First, a short history of Critical Theory, the parent of Critical Race Theory as well as theories of gender, disability, and more.

In 1929, a group of Marxist philosophers who would become known as the Frankfurt School gathered at the University of Frankfurt’s Institute for Social Research. And yes, you read that right: when Trumpists attack Critical Race Theory as Marxist, they’re not making it up out of absolutely nothing, surprising as that may be. The early Critical Theorists, led by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, sought to update Marxism. Some critical theorists would later move away from it, such as the influential political philosopher Jurgen Habermas.

Now, it can be hard to have an intelligent discussion of Marxism, partly because it’s another favorite scary monster for right-wing demagogues (everyone to their left gets called a Marxist), and partly because Marxism has been terrifying when put into practice by despots. But we must try, because whatever one thinks of Marx, he was one of history’s most influential thinkers, on the short list of those identified by one name, like Descartes or Kant.

You don’t have to be a Marxist to agree with some of his insights. One thing he clearly got right was that the early Industrial Age produced not only great wealth but awful suffering. Anyone with a conscience would have been shocked by what he and his collaborator Friedrich Engels witnessed in 19th century slums. Here’s how Engels described the Old Town neighborhood of Manchester, where his wealthy family owned a factory:

[No account could be] black enough to convey a true impression of the filth, ruin, and uninhabitableness… of this single district, containing at least twenty to thirty thousand inhabitants… If any one wishes to see in how little space a human being can move, how little air—and such air!—he can breathe, how little of civilisation he may share and yet live, it is only necessary to travel hither… Everything which here arouses horror and indignation is of recent origin, belongs to the industrial epoch.^[2]

Such suffering, Marx believed, was the inevitable result of industrial capitalism: converting labor into private property for others. Not only did this keep workers poor, but it alienated them from their own work, as if they too were just factory machines. Alienation meant a life without meaning, beauty, or happiness, all of which were replaced by commodities for sale. The only solution was communist revolution, which he believed was inevitable.

Marx thought he had discovered a science of history, based in economics, that proved “communism is the riddle of history solved,” as he wrote in 1844.^[3] Apparently proving him right, revolutions broke out across Europe in 1848.

But when the Frankfurt School came together decades later, capitalism was still going strong, although it would certainly falter during the Depression. And while a Marxist revolution had succeeded in Russia, almost all others had failed or would fail, until China’s in 1949. Meanwhile nationalism and then fascism rose in Germany, Italy, and elsewhere. That development in particular horrified the members of the Frankfurt School.

They concluded that Marx’s analysis had been incomplete, especially as expressed in his later period. The problem was that Marx had relied too heavily on a materialist understanding of human behavior, based in economics. He lived before the human sciences of psychology, sociology, and anthropology became established, and before mass media became a cultural force. So he didn’t appreciate the extent to which people could be controlled not only by material forces, but by their own beliefs, and he couldn’t anticipate the effects of mass media in shaping those beliefs.

Thus workers who believed in some mythology, amplified by media, might act against their own interests, even to the point of embracing oppression. That mythology might be based in religion, the market, nationalism, or even Enlightenment reason. Reason was supposed to be the dissolver of mythologies, but it could become a mythology itself: a mythology of rationalism that stripped away everything meaningful from life, leaving only utility and profit. Horkheimer and Adorno explained in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947):

False clarity is only another name for myth… The [scientific] increase in economic productivity also affords the technical apparatus and the social groups controlling it a disproportionate advantage over the rest of the population… In the unjust state of society the powerlessness and pliability of the masses increase with the quantity of goods allocated to them… The flood of precise information and brand-new amusements make people smarter and more stupid at once.^[4]

In short, the Frankfurt School argued that oppression occurred not just in the material world, but in consciousness. They believed this helped account for capitalism’s ability to adapt and survive (they also pointed to other factors like “state capitalism” and the growth of monopolies). It helped all the more that capitalism could hide its rapacity behind the friendly mask of liberalism, as they saw it.

The advent of mass media like movies, radio, and magazines had made oppression in consciousness all the more likely. Just as industrial technology could power the economic exploitation of workers, so too with the manipulation of their minds.

Enlightenment philosophers had expected that reason would set people free both physically and mentally. Instead, workers’ bodies toiled in “Satanic mills,” as the poet William Blake had described factories, while their minds were trapped in what sociologist Max Weber called an “iron cage:” the post-Enlightenment worldview defined by rationalism, technology, bureaucracy, and productivity.^[5]

In his influential essay “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” (a chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment), Adorno described how mass media could create an artificial reality: people in capitalist democracies enjoyed the illusion of freedom while in fact they were just cogs in a giant machine. Entertainment and advertising turned citizens into consumers, lulling and dulling them with endless but meaningless choices. The market promised to meet all their needs, but only after limiting how those needs could be imagined, because the market had made everything into a commodity.

The culture industry “bows to the vote it has itself rigged,” wrote Adorno. “Capitalist production hems [people] in so tightly, in body and soul, that they unresistingly succumb to whatever is proffered to them.”^[6]

I think Adorno, like Marx, got some things very wrong, but it’s hard to argue with his basic position that our media-driven culture has a powerful influence on how we think. A great deal of research has demonstrated that this is true, and our consumer economy, reliant as it is on marketing and advertising-supported entertainment, depends on it being true. People of all kinds, across the political spectrum, worry about the effects of the addictive mix of consumerism, sex, violence, misinformation, and distraction that floods the traditional mass media Adorno knew and the online media we have now.

Adorno and his fellows believed Critical Theory would provide the mental weapons needed to resist. They called their theory “critical” because it was designed to challenge, or critique, all assertions of truth, especially to expose how they might be used to dominate people. Freeing the oppressed formed the moral basis of their theory, in contrast to traditional theories, which had no moral basis.  They believed scientific neutrality ended up being ideologically conservative because it  conserved the existing order, explaining, but not challenging, the way things are. Critical Theory offered a morality based in the suffering of oppressed people, the relief of which they believed should be a primary goal of both philosophy and science.

Several generations of critical theorists kept developing such ideas, but until recently their impact hadn’t reached much beyond academia and the far left. From the point of view of most Westerners, capitalist democracies had thrived while one Marxist state after another either failed or abandoned Marxism.

Still, critics of capitalism could point to its own failures. None was more glaring than continuing racial injustice in the United States and in European colonies. Stalin and Hitler, for example, were able to cite the oppression of black Americans — approvingly in Hitler’s case — to excuse their own records.

The 1960s saw the rise of a new group of philosophers who were even more skeptical of the prevailing Western worldview than the Frankfurt School had been: the postmodernists. Leading figures included Jacques Lacan, Jean-Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault. Postmodernists argued that not only should purportedly objective reality be questioned, there’s no such thing. The Modern age had been defined by science; the postmodernists said science was just another “narrative,” which should be “unpacked” through “discourse analysis.”

Like the Critical Theorists, the postmodernists saw the supposedly universal principles of Enlightenment reason as inherently oppressive, serving to colonize the minds of dominated peoples. European imperialists had not only taken over the physical territory of the colonies but had imposed their worldviews, while convincing themselves they were spreading enlightenment. Foucault argued there is not one, ideal truth, but a “politics of truth.”^[7] Which truth prevails is determined not by proof but by power.

After developing in parallel, postmodernism and critical theory have largely merged.

For example, postmodern critical theorists see the beliefs of all people and cultures as equally valid. These beliefs, even if contradicted by science or liberal values, shouldn’t be judged, but honored as “lived experience.” Education shouldn’t amount to filling students’ heads with existing knowledge, under the “banking model” critiqued by the influential philosopher of pedagogy Paulo Freire. Instead it should be a process of liberation, teaching students to critique authority, including the authority of the teacher. Test scores shouldn’t be used to assess students’ progress, because there are many kinds of knowledge, some of which can’t be measured. Measurement itself depends on how the dominant group defines what’s important to know.

Another parallel development that has largely merged with critical theory is trauma-informed politics. It borrows from psychological research on how emotional trauma affects our thoughts and actions.

Understanding of this kind of trauma has come a long way since the days when soldiers suffering from “battle fatigue” were seen as weak or even cowardly. We now know that much human behavior that we used to attribute to innate character may be driven by emotional trauma. Donald Trump’s sociopathic narcissism, for example, may originate in abuse and neglect he suffered as a child, as his niece, psychotherapist Mary Trump, has described.^[8] Studies in childhood exposure to physical or emotional violence have shown it predicts the behavior of people we used to write off as “just bad.”

Therapist and writer Resmaa Menakem believes that centuries of trauma are behind the violence white Americans have directed at black Americans, as well as at each other. He makes the case in his book My Grandmother’s Hands:

Many of the English who colonized America had been brutalized, or had witnessed great brutality first-hand…

Isn’t it likely that many of them were traumatized by the time they arrived here? Did over ten centuries of medieval brutality, which was inflicted on white bodies by other white bodies, begin to look like culture? Did this intergenerational trauma and its effects end with European immigrants’ arrival in the New World? The trauma that now lives in the bodies of so many African Americans did not begin when those bodies first encountered white ones. This trauma can be traced back much further, through generation upon generation of white bodies, to medieval Europe.^[9]

Critical theory, postmodernism, and trauma-informed politics come together in Critical Race Theory. Originating in legal scholarship, it holds that racism isn’t just a flaw in American democracy, but part of the design. Because of that, racial injustice can’t be overcome by the liberal approach of negotiated, incremental reform. Instead, the whole system has to be critiqued, with the goal of fundamental change.

“Enduring structural racism [is] self-evident to anyone spending more than 20 minutes or so studying actual American history,” wrote law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, one of the founders of Critical Race Theory, in a 2017 article.^[10]

Let’s consider why she would say that, by taking a quick look at some of the history she was referring to.

Among the early American colonists were a great many slaves and indentured laborers. But initially, relatively few of them were Africans. Far more originated in the British Isles, Europe, and Asia, as would have been expected, because slavery had been commonplace across the world for millennia.

But during the 18th century, low- and no-wage workers in the colonies began rebelling or simply running away, something that was relatively easy to do there and then, with so much open frontier still available. As labor became more scarce and expensive, the importation of African slaves rapidly increased.

And a new concept of race was invented, based on skin color.

Before, the word “race” had been closer in meaning to our “nationality,” as in “the English race.” The new definition was more like what we think of as “species.” Propped up by what then passed for religion, ethnography, and biology, this definition of race was used to justify the targeted enslavement of Africans, as well as American Indians, based on their newly assigned racial inferiority.

Pro-slavery Christians cited passages in the Bible that might be taken to mean God approved of slavery, and they linked black skin with spiritual darkness: those bearing “the mark of Cain” somehow deserved their fate. A similar interpretation was applied to the mass death of Indians from European diseases. It was seen as a sign that God wanted white people to prevail in the New World.^[11] Classical authors such as Tacitus were quoted in support of the imagined “purity” of Anglo-Saxon blood.^[12] Emerging discoveries about genetic inheritance in plants and animals were adapted to the same purpose.^[13]

It’s this part of our history that leads critical race theorists to say that whiteness is an inherently racist identity. That can sound shocking, but they’re not saying white people are born racists. They’re saying the concept of a white identity is racist.

Consider not only the origin of that concept, but how its definition has shifted over time. Until World War 2, as historian Nell Irvin Painter recounts in The History of White People (2010), those who had white skin, but weren’t Northern European, were widely seen as inferior. The Irish, eastern and southern Europeans, Catholics, Jews and others were objects of fear, contempt, and exploitation. In 1863 New York, gangs of Irish immigrants attacked black former slaves who were seen as competitors for the city’s worst jobs.^[14]

You can begin to see why critical race theorists argue the role of race in American history needs a lot more attention than it’s previously been given.

With the Founding, slavery was embedded in the Constitution, as in the prescribed counting of slaves as three-fifths of a person in the Census. The Framers were philosophically opposed to slavery, although several were slave-owners themselves (a classic liberal contradiction, critical theorists would say). They thought they had to compromise with the slave colonies for now, and they appear to have expected slavery to fade away in the near future. That seemed to be happening in the early years of the republic as the tobacco industry shrank and with it the demand for slaves. But then cotton replaced tobacco as the cash crop of the South and a source of wealth across America and Europe.

With the arrival of the cotton gin and mechanized mills, a worldwide industry boomed on a scale comparable to that of the modern oil business, which depended on extracting maximum productivity from slaves: not just bondage, but physical and mental torture were built into the business model.

In effect, the cotton and slaving industries treated human beings as if they were machines too, as historian Edward Baptist relates in The Half Has Never Been Told (2016):

Once enslavers had the cotton gin, how then did enslavers produce (or have produced, by other hands) as much as the gin could clean?… Enslaver-generals took land from Indians, enslaver-politicians convinced Congress to let slavery expand, and enslaver-entrepreneurs created new ways to finance and transport and commodify “hands.” And, given a finite number of captives in their own control, entrepreneurs created a complex of labor control practices that enslaved people called “the pushing system.” This system increased the number of acres each captive was supposed to cultivate. As of 1805, enslavers… figured that each “hand” could tend… five acres of cotton per year. Half a century later, that rule of thumb had increased to ten acres…

Innovation in violence… was the foundation of the widely shared pushing system… In Mississippi, Allen Sidney saw a man who had fallen behind the fore row fight back against a black driver who tried to “whip him up” to pace. The white overseer, on horseback, dropped his umbrella, spurred up, and shouted, “Take him down.” The overseer pulled out a pistol and shot the prone man dead. “None of the other slaves,” Sidney remembered, “said a word or turned their heads. They kept on hoeing as if nothing had happened…”^[15]

Slavery ended after the Civil War, officially. But the subjugation of black Americans continued by other means.

After the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, his successor Andrew Johnson worked with former Confederates to prevent what might have become a true “new birth of freedom.”^[16] Black Codes, which had formally or informally restricted African-American rights in both the North and the South before the war, were now broadly established in state laws. Not only did the codes roll back newly won freedoms, they created vaguely defined new crimes like “vagrancy,” which allowed for black people to be arrested pretty much at will. That created a supply of unpaid convict labor to take the place of slaves.

Betrayal and exploitation of African Americans continued through all the following years. To cite just some examples:

• The sudden end of Reconstruction as part of a sleazy deal settling the 1876 presidential election, followed by the organized disenfranchisement of black freedmen.
• Terrorism by torture and lynchings that lasted into the 1960s, with the complicity and support of authorities — some lynchings were public entertainments complete with commemorative postcards.
• Legalized segregation, maintained by anti-black propaganda and violent enforcement.
• Until the 1960s, denial of equal opportunity in all domains: voting, housing, education, jobs, health care, loans — even the New Deal and the GI Bill.
• Often grossly unfair law enforcement, improving in recent decades but still unequal.
• The bargain with racists that locked in Democratic Party control of the South until Lyndon Johnson pushed through civil rights and voting rights laws in the 60s, which sparked a flight of white Democrats to the Republican Party, and the initiation of the GOP’s race-based Southern Strategy, still in operation.
• Continued segregation and inequality, in fact if not in law. For example, half of American schoolchildren go to predominantly white or non-white schools, and non-white school districts receive an average of $2,200 less funding per student.^[17]

Of course there’s been progress as well. From the Founding, abolitionists and civil rights activists have also been an important part of the American story. But that progress  has been slow. The US military was only desegregated after World War 2. The South was still an apartheid territory until the 60s, a century after the end of the Civil War. And in 2016, a race-baiting demagogue was elected President of the United States.

This history informs the critical race theory concept of structural racism: What drives racial injustice isn’t just individual people who for some reason hate dark skin; the hatred of dark skin was deliberately engineered to support a system. In that system, economics and the law exploit one group of people to the benefit of another, by design. Although African Americans have faced the most extreme cruelty under this system, immigrants from China, Mexico, Central America, and elsewhere have also suffered greatly on the basis of supposed racial differences.

History also explains why critical race theorists believe the teaching of history must change: until very recently, much of it had been rewritten or buried. Even at this late date, many white people are incredulous to hear the full story of racial injustice. Their ignorance of that story has played an important role in allowing it to continue.

So, if you’re against racial injustice, what’s there to disagree with in Critical Race Theory?

For many, not much — especially as Trumpism forces more Americans to confront ugly truths about how much progress we have and haven’t made. But as we’ve seen, there’s a conflict between the principles of liberalism and those of critical race theory. Liberals share critical race theorists’ commitment to the goal of equal rights, but believe continued progress is the best way to get there. Meanwhile critical race theorists, like critical theorists in general, see liberals’ moderate, incremental approach as little help in achieving the kind of change that’s needed, and even a hindrance.

That’s certainly how it looked to another of Critical Race Theory’s founders, Derrick Bell. After spending the early years of his adulthood thinking and working within the liberal civil rights framework, he grew disillusioned with it, as he wrote in Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism (1992):

For years I believed law was the answer, and I still teach law, including civil rights law. Now, though, I’m convinced that racism is a permanent part of the American landscape…

While civil rights laws seem to protect blacks from bias, discrimination in fact continues under a myriad of guises… ‘The law in action’ does not reflect ‘the law on the books.’^[18]

Bell, who died in 2011, described himself as a “racial realist.” As an example of how law could be unjust when it overrode reality, he cited the 1915 Supreme Court decision Coppage v. Kansas, which allowed employers to forbid union organizing:

The Court reasoned that the Constitution’s due process clause gave workers a right to contract with their employers. The realists saw it as the issue of whether industrial workers in fact have bargaining power to choose the terms of their employment.^[19]

Similarly, Bell argued, mere equality under the law would never overcome racial injustice, because real-world racial equality was as fictional as the equality between workers and their employer. Progress towards racial equality was always met by reaction, and the interests of white people always prevailed. Since racism would never go away, Bell concluded, racial injustice wouldn’t be stopped by, race-blind ideals, but by race-aware practices that made a difference in the real, racist world, such as affirmative action or reparations.

It should now be easier to understand how Ibram X. Kendi can assert that “racial discrimination is not inherently racist.” Kendi, following Bell, believes we must discriminate in order to make a real impact on injustice.

You can also see why Kendi, like other critical race theorists, prefers to talk about equity instead of equality. Equity is about ensuring that real wealth and power are distributed fairly, not just their theoretical possibility.

Thus when critical race theorists refer to “antiracism,” they don’t mean simply being against racism. They mean acting against it, because to not act is to enable it, as mere ideals always have, in their view.

The challenge to liberals posed by Critical Race Theory is that it doesn’t just mean thinking critically about racism, as many liberals assume and which all liberals presumably support. As we’ve seen, Critical Race Theory is critical of liberalism too, as is critical theory writ large. So you can agree about the unmet need for real racial justice, and still be left negotiating the tension between critical theory and liberalism.

Some critical theorists argue that in fact key components of liberalism need to be either radically changed or abandoned, including the economics of capitalism and philosophical principles such as individual liberty and free speech.

Kendi, for example, believes that capitalism and racism are “conjoined twins:”

Antiracist policies cannot eliminate class racism without anticapitalist policies. Anticapitalism cannot eliminate class racism without antiracism.^[20]

Regarding individual liberty, critical theorists doubt it exists except for the powerful, and they favor collective action over individual action until liberation is achieved. Even then, since liberation means a liberation of consciousness, that implies that individuals will see things about the same way as the group, because everyone is now truly enlightened. In “An Essay on Liberation,” the early Critical Theorist Herbert Marcuse wrote:

Within the repressive society… spontaneity by itself cannot possibly be a radical and revolutionary force. It can become such a force only as the result of enlightenment, education, political practice – in this sense indeed, as a result of organization.^[21]

Regarding free speech, it can also be used as a tool of oppression, according to critical theorists, and therefore speech rights may need to be curtailed to protect people from cultural domination or emotional trauma. In an essay called “Repressive Tolerance,” Marcuse wrote:

Tolerance cannot… protect false words and wrong deeds which demonstrate that they contradict and counteract the possibilities of liberation.^[22]

You can see the roots here of current conflicts over what kinds of free speech are acceptable. Similarly, Freire, the critical pedagogy theorist, believed that teaching children to think freely should be conducted within the framework of class struggle.

Personally, I disagree with all of these positions, even as I do agree with other views held by critical theorists. For example, I agree that liberalism has often failed the people who need it the most. I overlap with critical theorists in seeing liberals as too often stuck in their rationalistic heads, and I agree that our media-saturated culture shapes our thinking in ways that encourage us to “amuse ourselves to death,” to paraphrase Neil Postman (who saw the issue from a liberal perspective).^[23] And I strongly agree with critical race theorists that even now, few Americans fully understand how thoroughly racial injustice was woven into our history, economy, laws, culture, and thinking.

Despite all this, though, I choose to stick with liberalism. I remain convinced that despite being far from perfect, and in part because it recognizes how imperfect we all are, liberalism has produced more human flourishing than any other system of political thought — including the flourishing of its critics. Where I depart from critical theorists is over, ironically, their imposition of an ideological framework on critical thinking, which is essentially what the original Critical Theorists thought they were challenging. For example, Marcuse’s calls for the liberation of the human spirit are paired with requirements for the form that liberation must take. The struggle for tolerance ends up introducing a new form of intolerance.

I align with the philosopher of race Charles Mills, a strong critic of liberalism who wrote about the unacknowledged “racial contract” that often overrules the liberal social contract. But Mills nevertheless thought we should preserve liberalism while reducing the gap between its ideals and our reality.^[24]

I’ll save the details of my opinions on all this for another time, though.

And of course, you should decide for yourself! If you’re looking for where to start in learning more, here are some suggestions:

About Critical Theory

The writing of critical theorists can be dense with technical terms and complex syntax, but you can get a good idea of the fundamentals by reading “The Concept of Enlightenment” in Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. It’s clear enough that even if you’re not sure what, say “reification” or “nominalism” mean, you can probably follow it if you’ve been following what I’ve been saying. You can find a PDF of the whole text of Dialectic of Enlightenment at monoskop.org.

About Critical Race Theory

Derrick Bell’s foundational Faces at the Bottom of the Well is rewarding to read whether or not you agree with the radical pessimism that he called realism. At the least it’s likely to challenge you to re-examine your assumptions — always valuable. People who knew Bell say he was not only brilliant but extraordinarily warm and open, and all of that comes through in his writing.

New York Times journalist Trip Gabriel provides an overview of Critical Race Theory and links to references in the July 9, 2021 edition of the newsletter of the Times podcast The Daily.

Critique of Critical Theory

Cynical Theories, by Helen Pluckrose, James Lindsay, and others, opens with highly readable explanations of critical theory and postmodernism, before subjecting them to stiff criticism. If you can’t spare time for the book, you can find interviews with the authors online.

Critique of Critical Race Theory

Columbia University linguist John McWhorter and Brown University economist Glenn Loury are among the most prominent serious critics of Critical Race Theory. They frequently discuss it on Loury’s podcast The Glenn Show, for example on the July 16, 2021 episode.