Critiquing Race Theory

I may be the only critic of critical race theory who’s actually worked with Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, founding mother of intersectionality. It was just a handful of meetings for one dubious initiative, but she’s one of the more formidable personages I’ve met.

Larger than life, accompanied by several assistants, she glided into the Columbia Law School faculty lounge with an ethereal yet earthy aura I’d only experienced from icons like Pete Seeger and Howard Zinn. Her charisma overshadowed her words, implying a transcendence far beyond banal specifics. Suddenly I understood why so many institutions showered her with grants.

The project it became my task to edit and promote was far less impressive—Black Girls Matter: Pushed Out, Overpoliced, and Underprotected, a shoddy study purporting to prove that statistical disparities of in-school disciplinary action were due primarily to prejudice.

As someone from a suburban school district with a sizeable desegregation program, the report was absurd: claiming African-American girls were disproportionately disciplined and suspended mainly because the racist/sexist system was threatened by their sheer exuberance about learning, as opposed to countless factors manifesting as disruptive behavior. Discrimination was no doubt part of the picture, but it was irresponsible to pretend the issue was so one-dimensional, or that keeping consistently disruptive students in the classroom wouldn’t undermine the other kids’ educations.

Regardless, it was my job to work through the draft pamphlet and press release line by line. In cleaning up and copyediting what were supposed to be near-final versions, many of the statistics and tables seemed off, and the more I tried to reproduce their calculations the clearer it became that the basic methodology was unsound—slicing and dicing the data for striking but meaningless numbers.

So gingerly I tiptoed through a diplomatic group email suggesting that most of their stats needed to be recalculated, and talking points reassessed from there. The adjusted figures several days later were much less dramatic, but in the range enough that we could get away with softening a bunch of the text without starting from scratch. And then off it went into the media cycle, generating a brief boomlet of furrowed-brow attention.

Part of me regretted having flagged the problem—it was my professional obligation to my client, but the authentically flawed original might have been more revealing for the public. At the end of the day it didn’t matter: nobody cared about the numbers, the math never would have been double-checked, because the product wasn’t about data or facts but affirming what its audience wanted to believe.

I was familiar with critical race theory long before it resurged as a culture war flashpoint. At Brown, I’d written some papers for Professor Glenn Loury tracing the development of Black Studies and associated fields, including the contributions of Crenshaw, Derrick Bell, Richard Delgado et al. They’d done some good work, among the first sustained efforts to systematize ongoing impacts of historic injustice.

But by the mid-2010s their once-searing insights had become frozen in time like it was forever the 1980s—that even with the federal bureaucracy and Fortune 500 on board they remained scrappy underdogs against all odds. Even as America grew vastly more diverse, old black and white categories blurring and dissolving, the systematized version insisted that little had changed.

At least the campus wars of the ’80s and early ’90s around political correctness had offered critical race theorists spirited pushback in the public square, encouraging them to hone and diversify their ideas. With critique verboten in the age of Black Lives Matter, they’ve become increasingly insulated, cranking out the same faded dogma even as ill-conceived schemes like cashless bail and defunding police take disproportionate toll on minority communities.

Whatever the latest disaster, it’s always somebody else’s fault, and further proof that ever more DEI officials and administrators are needed to fix things. If not for white and adjacent privilege, plus the rest of the intersecting spectra of oppression, statistical parity of all indices across all groups would be the default state of global society.

As much as critical race theorists truly believe they’re righteously dismantling the reactionary establishment, the reality is that they’ve inherited that mantle and become what they used to despise—at least as complacent and closed-minded as their predecessors. Absent rediscovering the lost arts of conversation and debate they’re condemned to do more harm than good.

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Next: The Limitations of Courage

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