Debunking Charlie Kirk on Critical Race Theory
One of the new conservative political targets is critical race theory (CRT). While it has been a target since the Fall of 2020, the May 2021 news about the author of the 1619 Project — a CRT-grounded series of essays in The New York Times — not getting a tenured position at the University of North Carolina made the mentions grow exponentially. (Update: on June 30 that person was granted a tenured position at UNC after weeks of embarrassment for the school.)
Across the country, parents are denouncing CRT at school board meetings and conservative politicians are passing laws banning curriculum connected to CRT.
Enter Charlie Kirk, founder and president of Turning Point USA. He highlighted some of these parents and politicians on his radio show in mid-May.
While the title of the segment claimed to debunk “America’s Original Sin Narrative” it did no such thing. After playing clips of those people, Kirk merely criticized the CRT movement and talked about the history of slavery in America. The closest he came to debunking slavery as the original sin of the US was mentioning an anti-slavery group began in 1775 in Philadelphia.
At a December 2020 event by Kirk’s political arm, Turning Point Action, Kirk lists what he says are six tenets of CRT.
Kirk lacks much in terms of evidence or detail in his claims. And as usual, his claims twist or mislead from some facts, at times not creating an alternate reality. But at times his claims do move into alternatives to reality.
It is important to note that Kirk is not trying to persuade his audience, as they would already agree with him. He is offering them quick, bullet-like quips to use. In fact, one particular quip came my way when I posted a summary of CRT by a neutral outlet, Politifact. One of my Facebook followers posted the simple equation “CRT = Racism” in reply. This is one of Kirk’s tenets below.
In that video, Kirk claims CRT originated in part from German-American “Frankfurt School” intellectual Herbert Marcuse. Kirk is confusing CRT with a philosophical project known as Critical Theory. Yes, the two have ideological links but Marcuse did not start CRT. CRT is a legal academic theory began in the 1970s and gained more traction in the 80s.
Kirk is seemingly providing an extremely short summary — all of two sentences — of an hour-long reading from the libertarian Heritage Foundation on CRT and its links to Critical Theory. Heritage has written much about CRT. Heritage also has a short video that summarizes its work on CRT in which it calls Marcuse “a proponent of critical race theory…” Heritage links Marcuse to identity politics, the basis of which Heritage says is in CRT.
Beyond this name-drop, Kirk does not link Marcuse to CRT.
If you search for use of Marcuse with CRT in conservative essays, you notice the seemingly small claim highlighted in the above Heritage video: critical race theorists only replaced critical theorists’ emphasis on class with race. As the Boston Review points out, this claim seems to have some origin in briefs filed by Asian Americans fighting what they saw as discrimination at Harvard. This is a terribly simplified summary of a long litany of ideas and people.
Like most conservative critics of CRT, Kirk claims CRT is racist. So he compares it to one of the most racist US groups anyone can name: “Critical Race Theory is the most racist thing that is being spread in popular life in America. It’s no different than the teaching of the KKK.”
Whatever the source of Kirk’s opinions, he offers these tenets:
CRT argues “racism is everywhere.”
CRT argues racism is “a quotidian component of American life (manifested in textual sources like literature, film, law, etc),” according to one summary.
Kirk wants CRT to be easily denied by a rhetorical move to any particular individual not being racist, himself for example. So if he is not racist and CRT claims racism is in our DNA, CRT must be wrong. And of course Kirk is likely implying individual acts of overt racism so if those are not “everywhere” in all people then CRT is also wrong.
Second, Kirk acknowledges America has had systematic racism in its past. He downplays the power of that with examples from history that show people fighting slavery, for example. If there always were Americans fighting slavery, than it was not “everywhere.”
Kirk is obviously building a strawman — a nonexistent claim supposed by the other side — with “everywhere.” CRT’s claim of systemic and quotidian racism is not about all people being being KKK members. It is about the pervasive nature of racism in laws, culture, media, and education and more. Kirk is not being accurate with this tenet.
Kirk acknowledges “progress” on race but this fundamentally revises the claim by CRT of systemic and historic racism. Progress in such moves as the Civil Rights Act did not sustain attacks on racist structures or components, but worked through the racist legal system to succeed, to summarize CRT. This is why CRT started in legal academic circles as scholars argued about the future and impact of civil rights discourse.
One “father” of CRT, Derrick Bell, once wrote: “The traditions of racial subordination are deeper than the legal sanctions.” So then, CRT “attends not only to law’s transformative role which is often celebrated, but also to its role in establishing the very [context: white] rights and privileges that legal reform was set to dismantle,” one prominent CRT author, Kimberlé Crenshaw, told CNN.
For CRT, “there are no individuals.”
Kirk wants this to be a simple binary — we are either individuals or we are defined by societal distinctions, placing us in groups often pitted against each other.
This oversimplifies “identity politics” and intersectional thinking. Marcuse noted the ways in which individuals are positioned in many ways by race, gender, class, etc. In short, then the CRT way of understanding individuals is not solely focused on race but how race is a distinct part of how we see individuals who are complex and sometimes contradictory in the ways they live out the parts of themselves as aligned with other parts.
In the end, Kirk would like his audience to believe that race is not important. In fact, he hates focusing on race. But it is that very “race neutrality” thinking that CRT scholars aim at.
CRT doesn’t “believe in free speech.”
This is a tougher sell for Kirk since so many GOP-led states have passed laws banning race-based discussions akin to CRT in K-12 curriculum. It looks like critics of CRT are the ones against “free speech.”
Kirk himself claims he is for free speech, but he has long been only in favor of speech that he agrees with and targets speech for silencing that he doesn’t.
If a rationale for Kirk’s claim is that now whites can’t say certain things for fear being labeled racist, then that has nothing to do with the First Amendment or “free speech.”
Heritage’s report claims that the “free speech crisis on college campuses today” comes thru applications of CRT’s (and CT’s) tenets. But its examples do not tie CRT to anti-free speech events.
CRT is “totalitarian in nature.”
Kirk offers no evidence of this. But one specific use of totalitarian and CRT by its critics is criticism of a constitutional amendment proposal to create a federal Department of Anti-Racism from the anti-racist shcolar Ibram Kendi. The noted conservative publication City Journal writes this idea is totalitarian because it claims to investigate “private” racial policies. It is not at all clear Kendi means investigating private people or business. He constantly mentions public officials and public policies in his short proposal. Also he proposes a constitutional amendment, hardly an anti-democratic or totalitarian move. And in fact, Kendi says racism is a threat to our democracy and Kirk is saying CRT is.
CRT is trying to “destroy” Western Civilization.
Western Civ is one of Kirk’s favorite terms and it is often used by alt-right writers to imply a white nationalist history. While Kirk ties it to a (mainly white) heritage of Judeo-Christian values that built America, the use here is clearly a move toward suggesting the non-whites involved in CRT are trying to destroy something more than white supremacy, something more widely shared than the target of all, racism. There are likely tenets of Western Civ dealing with individualism and religion that Kirk is implying here, but we can’t known for sure.
Heritage claims that “Critical Theory was, from the start, an unremitting attack on Western institutions and norms in order to tear them down.” Critical Theory and CRT scholars have been known for critiques of capitalism and many conservatives link capitalism with Western Civ. There is also emphasis in Critical Theory on reforming Enlightenment or Western ways of knowing. [One should note here that the Frankfurt School that Kirk mentions is referring to Frankfurt, Germany. Its main scholars fled Germany to the US after the Nazis took over. Many returned to Germany, but one stayed behind: Marcuse.)
It all comes down to definitions, which Kirk lacks.
“They actually don’t want racial harmony in this country; they want racial disunity.”
If I follow Kirk’s logic, CRT folks want to further divide America by race through pointing out its racist roots and systemic racist present. This further pits white versus black and creates in the black person a hatred of America and white people, generally.
In fact, this redefines the goal of anti-racist education or CRT — to bring people together over a common set of facts or goal, to paraphrase Kendi in the above link — as the goal of CRT critics. In short, to Kirk, anyone who disagrees with their anti-CRT message are the real racists.
The question for Kirk — and for those government officials banning race discussion in classrooms — is how then do you teach the US history of race or the current presence of racism? One answer has been to not teach it at all — or severely downplay it — by teaching “patriotic” education.
While Kirk admits the presence of slavery in history of the US, he offers the fact that our first president gave away his slaves at his death. To teach George Washington was a “racist” then is contrary to that fact and also makes students hate Washington and therefore all of our founding fathers, according to Kirk’s logic.
This goes against specific lines from the 1619 Project. Its lead writer, Nikole Hannah-Jones, writes about black love for the US and her own father displaying an American flag. She wrote: “Black people have seen the worst of America, yet, somehow, we still believe in its best.” She also wrote that the project as a history of America “is not a black story, and it’s not a white story; it’s truly an American story.”
If the writers of the 1619 Project don’t hate America or white people, hard to see how the students who attend to their words will.
