The Dangerous Mischaracterization of CRT
by Manu Samriti Chander
“The public use of reason,” wrote Immanuel Kant in 1784, “must at all times be free.” This was not simply a matter of free speech or the right to say whatever one might be thinking at any given time. It was, rather, about the obligation of the learned person, der Gelehrter, to carry knowledge to the reading public, to inspire his fellow man to realize his own intellectual capacities. According to Kant, the free and public exercise of reason alone can deliver Enlightenment to humankind.
Marc A. Thiessen’s recent Washington Post opinion piece, “The Danger of Critical Race Theory,” presents itself as a defense of Enlightenment rationalism against a threateningly irrational Critical Race Theory (CRT) but is more an exercise in free speech than the public use of reason. Thiessen, via historian Allen Guelzo, whom he quotes throughout the essay, consistently misrepresents Kant, the Enlightenment, and CRT. It is by way of these misrepresentations that he reaches the alarmist conclusion that CRT is coming for America’s children and must at all costs be stopped. But the real danger, I would suggest, lies in the willful rewriting of intellectual history that makes a mockery of public discourse.
The first instance of this kind of distortion is Thiessen’s suggestion that Kant rejected “the principles of the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason on which the American republic was founded.” Thiessen’s argument here is that reason is American and the critique of reason un-American, toward which end he turns the German philosopher into an enemy of the United States. In fact, Kant was a supporter of the American Revolution and argued in his 1793 essay on theory and praxis that the three fundamental principles of the state are a citizen’s freedom, equality, and right to self-sufficiency, all of which arise from his status as a rational being.
Indeed, Kant’s beliefs were, some would argue, American through and through, plagued by the same disregard for Indigenous and African peoples that made possible early colonial expansion and slavery. In his early works, sometimes grouped together as his Racenschriften, or “race-writings,” Kant argued for the absolute inferiority of non-Europeans, and, while there are ongoing debates about whether and how much these ideas persisted in Kant’s more mature works, no one who has read these works would align Kant with the antiracist ideals of CRT.
What we see in Thiessen’s piece, then, is a familiar idealization of the “Age of Reason” that passes over all of the contradictions of the Enlightenment that more careful scholars elaborate upon. Such a reductive reading of the period is necessary in order to authorize Thiessen’s claim as the rightful inheritor of unbiased rational thought: reason, as it was championed by the founding fathers, transcends race and so too, therefore, does the modern, rational thinker.
That figures like Kant held racist views doesn’t mean we shouldn’t engage with their writing, especially if we are working to understand the history of race. Rather, understanding both the methods and limitations of eighteenth-century philosophical thought can and should be part of what Michel Foucault, reflecting on Kant’s method in particular, called “[t]he critical ontology of ourselves,” that is, “the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them.” Foucault, certainly no enthusiastic supporter of reason’s absolute sovereignty, nevertheless saw in Kant’s method a means of illuminating who we are and what we might become.
Despite, then, the obvious incompatibility between a CRT that challenges white supremacy and a Kant who held that dark skin was naturally foul-smelling, there is one area in which, at their best, both of these share a common strength. That point of contact is what we call “critique” and what Thiessen erroneously understands to mean “criticism” or, worse, “rejection.” Exactly what “critique” means for Kant changed slightly as he wrote and revised his major works, the Critique of Pure Reason, the Critique of Practical Reason, and the Critique of Judgment, but at no point did it mean a dismissal of that which was under investigation. More consistent across the various uses of “critique” is the idea of self-reflection. When Kant set out to critique reason he wasn’t, as Guelzo puts it, “being critical of reason” but asking how we can rationally approach reason.
It is in this sense that I understand Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic’s idea that “critical race theory questions…legal reasoning [and] Enlightenment rationalism.” Immediately after quoting this passage, Thiessen writes, “Because critical theory rejects reason, it cannot be questioned.” In one gesture he misinterprets “questions” as “rejects” and suggests that questions aren’t themselves also meant to be questioned. To the contrary, making sense of how we make sense lies at the heart of both CRT and Kantian projects.
To be sure, there are some few who would write off reason altogether as a faculty that derives its value from its elevation by a small group of European men in the eighteenth century, just as there are some who, as Thiessen’s piece demonstrates, misread Kant as being “critical of reason.” But, if that cartoonish version of CRT is, as Thiessen writes, “dangerous,” it is equally dangerous to present the rejection of reason as the stock-in-trade of CRT. Such a maneuver moves us away from academic freedom and feeds misinformation to voters — simply put, it obfuscates rather than enlightens.
There are, as I’ve mentioned, robust intellectual conversations about how we might address Kant’s racist beliefs in seeking to understand the other enduring aspects of his work that we recognize as valuable, such as his program for an ewigen Frieden, or perpetual peace. This same spirit of informed engagement has to guide our discussion of CRT, what it is, how it’s taught, where it might do the most good. One place to start is by insisting on precision, turning away, perhaps, from the idea of a monolithic critical and turning toward a discussion of the full range of critical race theories that are out there and the range of critical methods they employ.
Manu Samriti Chander is Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University-Newark. He is the author of Brown Romantics: Poetry and Nationalism in the Global Nineteenth Century (Bucknell UP, 2017) and Series Co-Editor of Race in Nineteenth-Century Literature & Culture (Oxford UP). His current book project, Browntology (SUNY Press, under contract), considers the philosophical groundings of brownness in Enlightenment European thought.
