Race Matters — You Don’t Need to Think Critically about Race Because We’ve Done that for You
Against the New Politics of Identity by Ronald A. Lindsay
This book examines the intellectual foundations of identity theory. Lindsay is the former CEO of the Center for Inquiry and of its affiliates — the Council for Secular Humanism and the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. These projects reject religion, often with great hostility, which would tend to place them on the left in American politics. Since identity theory is a left-wing project, one might think that Lindsay would be sympathetic to identity politics.
However, Lindsay identifies himself as a “classical liberal.” He is a critic of identity politics. This underscores a fissure on the left between traditional liberals and leftists. Classical liberals adhere to one of the core tenets of liberalism, i.e., individualism. [1] Leftists go all in on collectivism in the form of racial/sexual/gender identities, subsuming the individual in the group identity. Having been canceled by their homeland, many classical liberals have taken refuge with conservatives, who share the core foundation of Enlightenment presuppositions, such as individualism and liberty.[2]
Lindsay steers clear of using the phrase “woke,” which he feels is as meaningless as the term “racist.” Instead, he speaks of “identity theory” or “critical race theory,” which he characterizes as being predicated on the following:
The new trinity of standpoint theory, the doctrine of systemic racism, and the equity mandate is bringing about radical and extensive changes in education, healthcare, employment, entertainment, law enforcement, and government policy.
Lindsay, Ronald A., Against the New Politics of Identity (p. 8).
Lindsay’s discussion of “standpoint theory” is extremely informative. Lindsay explains standpoint theory as follows:
In a nutshell, standpoint theory holds that knowledge is rooted in and derives from a person’s social circumstances and that those who are oppressed (by some criteria) are in a better position to acquire knowledge than those who are not. To use the standard jargon, all knowledge is “situated” and the oppressed are “epistemically privileged.”
Lindsay, Ronald A., Against the New Politics of Identity (p. 20).
Standpoint theory is Marxist in orientation. It is also responsible for much of the Woke nonsense….excuse me, “CRT nonsense”…..that posits that racial minorities and the oppressed have greater insights into scientific knowledge and/or scientific knowledge is not to be trusted to the extent that it says something that CRT theorists disagree with:
Sandra Harding, a leading and frequently cited proponent of a modified version of standpoint theory, has argued at length that the findings of natural sciences (physics, chemistry, biology) are affected by bias, which cannot be recognized by the (male) scientists themselves, but only by the oppressed, and in this view she is definitely not alone: “Scientific knowledge, like other forms of knowledge is gendered. Science cannot produce cultural or gender-neutral knowledge.”4 As with sex, so too with race. There is no race-neutral knowledge. Even some aspects of physics are adversely affected by “white empiricism,” which is defined as the “specific practice of epistemic oppression paired with a willingness to ignore empirical data.”5 Moreover, “the presence of white empiricism involves a refusal to acknowledge that white supremacy has limited the scientific community’s capacity for knowledge production.”
Lindsay, Ronald A.. Against the New Politics of Identity (pp. 21–22).
As with scientific knowledge, so it goes with sociology, psychology, or common sense. “Knowledge” is context-dependent. The context that controls is that of the “oppressed.” The “oppressed” is a group identity, therefore, the vanguard of the oppressed defines reality. The technical idea in CRT theory is that oppressed minorities have an “epistemic advantage,” which is why white people should just shut up and listen.
This permits a totalization of power on the part of Leftist leadership. It also gives a formula for Leftist proles to avoid the difficult project of thinking and responding to arguments:
Among the immediate consequences of accepting standpoint theory are that one can dismiss the positions and arguments of persons in the alleged dominant group (again, typically white men) as being based on an inadequate and distorted perspective. Moreover, one can dismiss their positions and arguments without engaging at any length with them. In other words, such individuals can be dismissed out of hand because they literally do not know what they are talking about.
For adherents of standpoint theory, were a white man to address a conference focused on discussing best policies for securing women’s rights, the first reaction from attendees should be, “Why is a white man talking to us?”
One doesn’t need to ponder at length the dynamics of this relationship to see how attractive it is — to the self-appointed advocates for the allegedly oppressed. Just as Marxists dismissed arguments questioning their economics or politics by labeling their opponents “bourgeois,” so the views of anyone who might demur from some claim put forth by one of today’s spokespersons for the oppressed can be dismissed as “patriarchal,” “white supremacist,” or “heteronormative,” depending on the situation.
Lindsay, Ronald A.. Against the New Politics of Identity (pp. 26–27).
“Racist,” they shouted.
And that’s why they do it.
A person’s upbringing and social context can substantially influence what a person thinks is true. It is more than a bit of a fallacy to confuse what a person thinks is true with what is true. Likewise, it may well be the case that marginalized voices can bring a useful perspective to a subject. But it is fallacious to think that the “oppressed” are automatically more informed — that they have an epistemic advantage — because of their oppression. Their oppression may have nothing to do with the subject at hand.
Further, it may well be the case that the “oppressed” form the wrong conclusions simply because they are too close to the issue. The fact that the aristocracy oppressed peasants did not mean that they had an epistemic advantage when they blamed the Jews for their problems.[3]
Lindsay looks at the evidence for “epistemic advantage” and finds it lacking:[4]
Standpoint theory represents an ideologically motivated challenge to the possibility of objective scientific knowledge — but for all the foregoing reasons, it is a failed challenge, despite the fact that its proponents resolutely continue to promote its self-defeating claims. The theory is internally inconsistent, fails to provide clear, verifiable criteria for some of its key claims, and, as we have seen, has no supporting evidence.
Lindsay, Ronald A.. Against the New Politics of Identity (p. 77).
Epistemic advantage slides into the “lived experience” trope. “Lived experience” is supposed to be so sacred that questioning or minimizing an oppressed person’s lived experience will get you canceled. (Lindsay, supra.) Asking for evidence is “gaslighting.” Silent acceptance is the only possible response. However, many people can discuss intelligently subjects on which they have no practical experience, e.g., you may never have been fired from a job for discriminatory reasons, but you can still listen to the evidence and either be sympathetic or come to the conclusion that the real reason for the firing was because the person never showed up for work.[5]
Lindsay highlights the other side of the lived experience trope, i.e., people can get biased about their situation:
Indeed, as a competing partner to the common wisdom about the need “to walk a mile in my shoes,” we also have the common wisdom that someone “may be too close to an issue” to discuss it objectively; that is, they are too emotionally involved with a matter to deliver an informed, impartial judgment. We apply this adage routinely, for example, by carefully screening potential jurors in an effort to ensure they have no connection to the parties and have not had any experiences similar to the ones at issue in the case.
Consider also the role of a marriage counselor. Not only is it not a requirement to be a marriage counselor that one have been married to a spouse who was physically or emotionally abusive, or adulterous, or financially imprudent, and so forth, but someone with such experiences probably would not be trusted to provide impartial advice.
Were this received wisdom about the dangers of emotional involvement to be applied mechanically, it would actually instruct us to give less weight to claims of discrimination from those in groups that have historically been the victims of prejudice, as they may be more inclined to find racism or sexism in the absence of supporting facts.
Lindsay, Ronald A.. Against the New Politics of Identity (pp. 84–85).
Then, there is simply the unverifiability of the sanctimonious approach to “lived experience,” something which is particularly problematic in light of the many hate crime hoaxes that have been exposed over the last decade. (See Hate Crime Hoax by Wilfred Reilly.) [6]
It is probably not an accident that the sanctimonious approach to lived experience is designed to stop people from thinking about the plausibility of such stories.[7]
The claim of systemic racism also comes up short in Lindsay’s analysis. The problem with this claim is that the systems of racism have been dismantled. Proponents of the claim have difficulties identifying laws, regulations, or practices still in effect (or that were in effect after approximately 1980):
To summarize our argument to this point: A dispassionate review of the civil legal and social systems that have been in place largely since the 1960s indicates that blacks have been legally protected from discrimination in employment, education, housing, and public accommodations, that they have received preferential treatment (to some extent) in employment and education, and that they have received huge amounts of public resources to help them meet their needs, including nutritional and health needs, in a share disproportionate to their percentage of the population. There is no racism embedded in these systems. The laws and policies of the United States have not been systematically racist for at least the last fifty to sixty years.
Lindsay, Ronald A.. Against the New Politics of Identity (p. 102).
Hooray for Civil Rights attorneys like me!!!
The stopgap for proponents of systemic racism is to point to disparities between racial groups. There are two problems. First, there are independent reasons — reasons apart from race — that support those policies.[8] Second, there is a great deal of selectivity in deciding where racism is to be found.[9]
Past discrimination is also problematic. It is popular to argue that “redlining” by the federal Home Owners Loan Corporation in the 1930s is a cause of wealth disparity today, but this is likely not to be the case:
However, contrary to what is so often implied in the literature, the HOLC’s “redlining” had little to no direct impact on HOLC loans, to blacks or others, for the simple reason that the HOLC did not undertake its survey and the development of its maps until it had already made the vast majority of its loans. Nor did the maps reflect the loans the HOLC made; the HOLC made substantial loans in areas that eventually were D-rated; in Philadelphia, 60 percent of HOLC loans went to D-rated areas. Furthermore, with respect to the racial breakdown of HOLC loans, black households accounted for 4.5 percent of its loan portfolio; this percentage “matched the black share of nonfarm homeowners in 1930 and 1940.” Thus, the objective evidence indicates that racial bias did not deprive blacks of their fair share of HOLC loans.
But did the HOLC’s maps affect how other lenders made mortgage loans, and were the maps themselves a product of racial bias? The answer to both these questions is a qualified “no.”
Lindsay, Ronald A.. Against the New Politics of Identity (pp. 112–113).
Even the EEOC’s statistics show that race discrimination is overstated. The EEOC finds reasonable cause in only about 2 to 3 percent of all charges filed, although it does obtain relief for charging parties in around 15% of cases.[10]
The third leg of the CRT troika is “equity.” The drive for equal outcomes is premised on the false claim of systemic racism. Equity will not solve the problem because the problem lies elsewhere. Engineering “equity” in schools will require constant intervention and denial of rights to some, or rigging the numbers and/or not tracking outcomes. The reason is that there is no systemic racism in education, which means that attacking disparities at that level can’t work.
The evidence for this is found in school systems where the “oppressed” are in charge — their outcomes are among the worst despite spending more per student on education. (See Baltimore, Maryland.)
Disparities in health are likewise bedeviled by considerations that are not systemic racism:
To begin, though, we should reiterate key points from the prior chapter: health outcomes largely depend on two sets of factors, namely one’s own conduct and one’s socioeconomic situation. The relative prevalence of different behavior patterns in blacks (e.g., a greater predilection to obesity) and their relatively lower socioeconomic status account for much in the way of statistically different outcomes for various health conditions. Systemic racism is not the cause. Accordingly, equity policy initiatives which are predicated on the alleged causal effects of systemic racism are by their nature misdirected (which is not to say they can have no indirect beneficial effect).
Lindsay, Ronald A.. Against the New Politics of Identity (p. 185).
Worse, the attempt to impose solutions based on non-existent racism makes health outcomes worse for everyone:
Medical schools have taken the AMA’s guidance to heart. Besides inserting courses on equity into the already overcrowded medical school curriculum, some have replaced the traditional Hippocratic Oath recited by graduating med students with pledges by the students to uproot “structural violence” within the healthcare system. So, again, the focus is not on treating the individual patient, but on the pursuit of some ideologically motivated social goal. “Take two aspirin and don’t call me in the morning; I’ll be on the picket line.”
Weirdly, the oath recited by University of Minnesota med students also includes a pledge to “honor all Indigenous ways of healing that have been historically marginalized by Western medicine.” No doubt, over the centuries, through trial and error, indigenous people arrived at some methods of mitigating diseases and injuries. But if those methods, for the most part, are no longer used, it is not because they have been “marginalized.” Rather it is because more effective methods have been developed, mostly through rigorous clinical studies. So, this part of the pledge either constitutes pointless virtue-signaling or a failure of the med students to understand how modern medicine works. Neither alternative inspires much confidence.
Lindsay, Ronald A.. Against the New Politics of Identity (pp. 190–191).
Not the least problem with this approach is that it requires a sacrifice of freedom. This was seen in the 2023 Supreme Court decision in Students for Fair Admission, which held affirmative action unconstitutional. The Court concluded that the policy of limiting Asian-American students to what was in effect a quota was inconsistent with the equal protection guarantee of the 14th Amendment. Those Asian-American students may have felt like they were the victims of “systemic racism.” How do we discount their lived experience?
Reality is a problem.[11]
One of the areas that Lindsay points out is that scientific research is being censored in the name of equity. I found this particularly interesting since I co-wrote a law review article in 1983 with, inter alia, Professor Richard Delgado on censoring scientific research. Professor Delgado went on to found CRT theory. At the time, I had no idea what the end goal of the paper was.
Lindsay concludes with a chapter on Christian Nationalism. He doesn’t like it. I think Christian Nationalism is overstated.[12] I’ve seen that these kinds of shots at the right are de rigeur in books like this to signal that the author is one of the good guys and shouldn’t be canceled.
This is an intelligent book that examines the underlying theories of CRT in an educated and objective way. It should be read by everyone, although those caught in the coils of CRT can simply dismiss it because it was written by a white male, and they don’t have to think about things written by white males.
The theorists have already done their thinking for them.
Footnotes:
[1] Lindsay explains: “Group identity is replacing the individual as the unit of moral, legal, and social concern. Group identity determines when one can speak and when one must remain silent. Public policy is now guided by the imperative of eliminating statistical disparities between identity groups, whatever the cost to individual rights. And if some of those disparities persist, it cannot be the aggregate result of decisions by individuals; no, the ideology of group identity insists the cause must be racism or sexism or some other “ism” deeply embedded within some occult system.” (Lindsay, Ronald A.. Against the New Politics of Identity (p. 12)..
[2] Lindsay may disagree with this since he takes a pox on both houses in positioning his views as the center: Regarding the suppression of speech, the only difference between the identity Left and the authoritarian Right is the type of speech considered intolerable. (Lindsay, Ronald A.. Against the New Politics of Identity (p. 14).
[3] Of course the Jews were oppressed also, which points up another fallacy of standpoint theory, namely how do we sort out which group is most epistemically advantaged by oppression: “In short, the very complexity of intersectionality, which in one sense is supposed to be its virtue, is also the source of its weakness as a theoretical tool of analysis on the issue of the supposed epistemic advantage of the oppressed. Given the many different possible bases of identity and the myriad ways in which they can relate to one another, a precise, persuasive defense of group WXYZ’s epistemic advantage with respect to other groups seems unfeasible — at least it has yet to materialize.” (Lindsay, Ronald A.. Against the New Politics of Identity (p. 37).
[4] Which is precisely what a white male would say….see how CRT works? You can dismiss anything without doing the hard work of thinking.
[5] I am a plaintiff’s employment attorney. I have found that people randomly picked from the community can reach conclusions about someone else’s lived experience regularly.
[6] Sometimes, it seems that there are not enough White Supremacists to get the job done.
[7] The golden thread of CRT theory is “you don’t need to think because we’ve done that for you.”
[8] It is popular to point out the disparate sentencing of blacks under 1990s drug laws, but it is less popular to point out that such measures were very popular with black representatives in the 1990s.
[9] Is the preponderance of blacks in the National Basketball Association an example of racism? No one will say that.
[10] Again, speaking as someone who has practiced plaintiff’s employment law for forty years, the vast bulk of my discrimination cases have involved disability, sex, and pregnancy. Race discrimination has been in the low single digits; disability discrimination cases are above 50% of my practice. Believe me, if there were more credible racial discrimination cases coming in my door, I would be taking them.
[11] But with “epistemic advantage,” we can erase that devil reality and decree that the truth will be better. Just like creating a “New Soviet Man.” This time for sure!
[12] I say this as a Catholic, a group that Christian Nationalists exclude from the movement. I think Christian Nationalism is mostly a bogeyman for the left to distract from its far larger threats to freedom, but I will acknowledge that Oklahoma’s recent move to (a) prevent a Catholic charter school from being opened and (b) putting Bibles (presumably Protestant bibles) into the classroom should be watched. Of course, this is old-fashioned anti-Catholicism, not any new-fangled “Christian Nationalism” nonsense. It is even based on anti-Catholic legislation from the 1870s.
