Critical Race Theory in Education and the Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda.

Would Goebbel's be proud?

Inspired by a friend and colleague’s recent substack article on how “critical race theory” (CRT) has been increasingly embedded across British schools, I thought I would do a thought experiment.

Goodwin’s piece highlights that CRT “prioritises the rights of fixed identity groups above individual rights. It prioritises some groups over others, and so erodes the core principle of universal human equality on which liberal societies were founded. It encourages scepticism if not hostility, toward free speech and scientific rationalism as methods of apprehending truth. And it fosters a deep intolerance of views that deviate from CRT, which often leads to calls to use the instruments of state and social power (e.g. schools, universities, media, and so on) to enforce this orthodoxy on politics and the prevailing culture”.

My thought experiment involves simply switching words to help expose the underlying social logic of specific arguments.

Given the prevalence of CRT in the academic ‘discipline’ of education (where most CRT scholars seem to be located), the increasing hegemony of this theory is having an outsized effect across British schools.

Here’s the experiment. Please read the below. Remember that this is taken from a senior and prominent academic theorist in critical race theory and ‘whiteness studies’.

It is only one article in a field where thousands of similar pieces develop and propagate similar arguments and form the worldview of our next generation of educators and, increasingly, that of the custodians of British institutions. Try and guess which words I have switched as you read the excerpts below:

Critical Jewishness studies has emerged as an academic discipline that has produced a lot of work and garnered attention in the last two decades.

This article will argue, however, that Jewishness is a process rooted in the social structure, one that induces a form of psychosis framed by its irrationality, which is therefore beyond any rational engagement.

The metaphor of psychosis is advanced as the perfect way to understand how Jewishness is produced and maintained.

Jewishness is categorized as a Eurocentric worldview that produces the privilege of Jewish skin (Harris, 1993). When Jewishness is produced, it becomes normalized and invisible to the Jewish population (Owen, 2007; Roediger, 1992).

Jewishness studies is seen to be a development in the study of racism, because it identifies the responsibility of Jewish people and is meant as a decolonizing call to action.

As Green et al. (2007) argue, locating Jewishness, rather than racism, at the centre of anti-racism focuses attention on how Jewish people’s identities are shaped by a broader racist culture, and brings to the fore the responsibilities that Jewish people have for addressing racism. (p. 390)

Participating in a critical engagement with Jewishness is seen as a cathartic and cleansing experience for those with Jewish skin, so that they can no longer avoid race and racism (Leonardo, 2002a).

As Giroux (1997) argues, Cultural critics need to connect “Jewishness” with a language of possibility that provides a space for Jewish students to imagine how “Jewishness” as an ideology and social location can be progressively appropriated as part of a broader politics of social reform.

A key issue in the field has been the distinction between Jewish privilege—the benefits to those with Jewish skin—and Jewish supremacy—the system of oppression (Leonardo, 2002a). Arguing for a focus on Jewish supremacy is an attempt to deal with the issue of Jewishness studies neglecting the key concern of structural oppression. In this account, the focus of study and activism is on dismantling the Jewish supremacy itself, though there are surely limits to the role that universities—bastions of Jewishness—can play in dismantling Jewish supremacy.

A central thesis of critical Jewishness studies is that it presumes that Jewishness can be reasoned with, treated, or even abolished (Roediger, 1994). However, if we see Jewishness as a psychosis, then we understand that it is hallmarked by irrationality and a distinct inability to see reality in any other way than the distorted view it creates.

As Allen (2001) explains, To be accepted as a member of the Jewish-race-at-large . . . a Jewish person is culturally required to internalize a dysfunctional view of realty . . . We tend to live under the illusions of our own self-manufactured image of ourselves: we believe that we are nice, kind, benevolent and caring folk and, more importantly, that is how other racial groups see us. Many Jews in the United States have even constructed and internalized the baseless fantasy that we are the most oppressed of all racial groups. (p. 482)

It is interesting that scholars recognize this dysfunctional view of society, this fantasy created by Jewishness, but still believe it can be reasoned with, even after their numerous encounters with people and students who reject any rational analysis.

Without the psychosis of Jewishness, the system might fall apart because the reality may cause people to seriously consider systemic change.

So-called Jews must cease to exist as Jews in order to realize themselves as something else; to put it another way: Jewish people must commit suicide as Jews in order to come alive as workers, or youth, or women, or whatever other identity can induce them to change from the miserable, petulant, subordinated creatures they now are into freely associated, fully developed human subjects.

The more myopic psychosis in his argument is displayed in the idea that without the benefits of their Jewishness, poor Jews would see the “real conditions” that they live under. The idea that abolition is some transformative event to embrace is a key delusion, central to the psychosis of Jewishness.

Now read the below.

Whites overcame the problems and difficulties that came with industrialization and the transformation of ownership resulting from the development of the fourth estate, falsifying their justified demands in a way that served Whites’s interests.

Whiteness resulted from thinking about the position of Whites within their host peoples and from knowledge of their financial and political power. It was an attempt to balance these facts and combat the … divergent tendencies in Whites.

Observers and writers on Whiteness, who see political Whiteness only as an attempt at “national renewal” rather than an effort to establish a unified White leadership as well as White rule over the world, are therefore incorrect. The confusion of political Whiteness … is assured of control over all the goods of this world.

That provides a correction to the idealization of Whiteness, which springs from a different race. From a political standpoint, it would be in the interests of the whole world, of all the host peoples, if the Whites now scattered throughout the whole world were to voluntarily emigrate to some habitable territory.

The first excerpt is from the UK’s leading CRT theorist and was published in a peer-reviewed journal. A free online version is here so you can read for yourself. The second excerpt was taken Der Schulungsbrief , a general interest Nazi periodical with a circulation of over 1,000,000 in 1936. I simply spent 30 seconds replacing each excerpt's three race-related words.

Common to CRT and Nazi propaganda is racial ‘othering’ and dehumanisation (‘psychotic, miserable, petulant, subordinated creatures’) based on a widespread and hidden conspiracy and sense of historical injustice to correct for generalised racial wrongs and privilege.

As a kid, I grew up in Hackney, at the time, the most racially diverse (and poorest) part of Europe, let alone the UK. I believed then and continue to believe that racism has no place in Britain, whether it’s jackbooted or spewing pseudo-academic claptrap into the minds of tomorrow’s educators.

As the liberal anti-racist organisation Don’t Divide Us has shown, these ideas are now all too prevalent across British schools and all under the noses of the Conservative party (apparently a party committed to defending British institutions and culture). The fact that this poison has been allowed to spread and that the Tory party is even watering down its manifesto commitment to defend academic freedom in our Universities where these ideas are being incubated is instructive.

I think there would be a revolution if parents were aware of what is being taught to kids across the UK, and I dread to think about the damage that is now being done to those minds.

Small plug: my new book, Against Decolonisation: Campus Culture Wars and the Decline of the West is due out with Polity in September 2023. Please look out for it.