The Critical Mom: The Critical Mom and the Postmodernists (a Glance at Critical Race Theory)

Wednesday, May 26, 2021

The Critical Mom and the Postmodernists (a Glance at Critical Race Theory)

As a rule, I can't stand 'em, but announcing that baldly puts me in the rank of the curmudgeons, the boomers, the illiterates, so I'll try again: the one I like especially is Oscar Wilde, not officially in the "postmodern" category, though any reader of his essays--of remarks like truth being "one's last mood"--will see how he does fit in with Lyotard (has been compared to him) and others.

One difference between the raft of postmodernist and poststructuralists who tend to run too far down the aporia rabbithole and Oscar Wilde--who went far down that rabbithole himself--is that he emerged laughing. Not always happily, but his strong sense of the absurd sustained him. In a prisoner's striped uniform on a train platform, he asked to read the newspaper and the guards turned him down. He asked to read it upside down. That they allowed, and he remarked that it made a great deal more sense that way. Noting that criticism reveals more of the critic than the art work, he felt anything but disturbed. He laughed. We gauge almost nothing of the artist's or the culture's intentions, perhaps, but criticism is still the best method we've got for understanding art and culture. I'd compare Wilde's remark about truth to Churchill's statement on democracy, the one in which he lists all the ways it's terrible but reminds us it's the best we've got.

Democracy is taking hits now, and postmodernism, in the form of popular ideas of forms of critical race theory, is assaulting it. But here are some things that help:

https://www.fairforall.org/

and https://www.thefire.org/

The notion that all inequality descends from racism makes about as much sense to me as the accusation that "The Jews killed Christ"--a belief that got a former professor of mine routinely chased up (and once, tied to) a tree by the Irish Catholic kids in his neighborhood, whose nun teachers had sicced the kids on their Jewish friends, the ones with whom, the rest of the year, they played stickball. The tree incidents were confined to Christian holidays, Easter being the more dangerous.

Hate crimes aren't waning, but they won't be reduced by critical race theory. But before carrying on, here's what Wilde said about history, and I think he'd say the same about the current climate: "As one reads history . . . one is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted; and a community is infinitely more brutalised by the habitual employment of punishment than it is by the occasional occurence of crime." How I wish Robin DiAngelo and co. would absorb that.

But rather than type out a lengthy rebuttal to her and her pals, I'll paste in some of my recent favorites:

https://www.aspeninstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Chapter-2_Ali_The-Flawed-Premises.pdf

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=bill+maher+and+john+mcwhorter&t=newext&atb=v225-1&iax=videos&ia=videos&iai=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3D-tjgXQDyqno

https://uniteyouthdublin.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/richard_delgado_jean_stefancic_critical_race_thbookfi-org-1.pdf (background)

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/15/magazine/white-fragility-robin-diangelo.html?referringSource=articleShare

https://www.city-journal.org/how-to-be-an-antiracist

https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-death-by-us-police-by-race/

https://quillette.com/2020/06/11/racist-police-violence-reconsidered/

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/10/black-lives-matter-loury-mcwhorter/409117/

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/19/opinion/race-theory-us-racism.html?showTranscript=1

https://www.deseret.com/indepth/2021/3/2/22309605/the-silenced-majority-bari-weiss-new-york-times-cancel-culture-free-speech-democrat-republican

https://newdiscourses.com/2020/06/reasons-critical-race-theory-terrible-dealing-racism/