CRITICAL RACE THEORY (CRT) is fast acquiring in New Zealand the political salience it already possesses in the United States. CRT’s elevation of skin colour over all other historical factors relating to inequality and injustice has provoked legislative action in a number of American states. In Florida, for example, it is now illegal to teach CRT in any public educational facility. Even the doctrinally and politically conservative Southern Baptist Convention, representing 14 million American Protestants, has been split right down the middle by CRT.
Being a highly centralised unitary state, New Zealand enjoys none of the advantages of America’s federal system. Certainly, CRT cannot be combatted here in the same piecemeal fashion. Indeed, it could be argued that this country is acutely vulnerable to the ideology. Should CRT become embedded in New Zealand’s key state institutions and its mainstream news media – as many Kiwis would say is already the case – then CRT will become extremely difficult to resist.
What, then, is Critical Race Theory? According to the University of California, Los Angeles, Luskin School of Public Affairs:
“CRT recognises that racism is engrained in the fabric and system of American society. The individual racist need not exist to note that institutional racism is pervasive in the dominant culture. This is the analytical lens that CRT uses in examining existing power structures. CRT identifies that these power structures are based on white privilege and white supremacy, which perpetuates the marginalisation of people of colour. CRT also rejects the traditions of liberalism and meritocracy. Legal discourse says that the law is neutral and colour-blind, however, CRT challenges this legal “truth” by examining liberalism and meritocracy as a vehicle of self-interest, power and privilege.”
Now, a professor may have written this definition of critical race theory, but one most certainly does not need a PhD to grasp how it works in practice. In a nutshell, CRT operates according to the principle: “If you’re white, you cannot be right.”
The first major eruption of CRT in the United States came in the form of The 1619 Project. Sponsored by the New York Times, and subsequently released as a special educational package for use in American schools, this major piece of historical revisionism, authored by Nikole Hannah-Jones, located the birth of the United States not in 1776, with the Declaration of Independence; but in 1619, with the first sale of black African slaves in Jamestown, Virginia.
It is racial oppression, not freedom, Hannah-Jones asserts, that lies at the heart of American history. Slavery, and the white supremacist assumptions necessary to its maintenance, have driven the American narrative for 400 years. Not even the crushing of the Confederacy and Abraham Lincoln’s emancipation of the slaves could drive the serpent of racism from America’s Eden. Within 10 years of the North’s victory over the South in the Civil War (1861-1865) African-Americans were being terrorised into a new form of “involuntary servitude” – the system known as “Jim Crow”.
Needless to say, The 1619 Project provoked a cacophony of dissent. In December 2019, five of America’s leading historians – White and Black – penned a letter to the NYT challenging Hannah-Jones’s revisionism. Interestingly, the fightback against The 1619 Project was kicked off by the hardline Trotskyist World Socialist Website. It was the WSWS that came up with the idea of asking leading American historians for their reaction to Hannah-Jones’s take on American history. Traditional Marxists condemned The 1619 Project as grossly simplistic and historically illiterate – an important fact for those who condemn CRT out-of-hand as a “cultural-Marxist plot” to bear in mind.
By now, of course, bells should be ringing in the ears of all those New Zealanders currently agitating against the new and compulsory New Zealand History Curriculum. Any similarities between the material currently being developed for use in this country’s primary and secondary schools and The 1619 Project are, almost certainly, not coincidental. Informed by CRT, both documents place the blame for all of their respective country’s ills on the wholly malign impact of Whites. Slavery has, naturally, been swapped out of the New Zealand version of CRT for Colonisation. Otherwise, the whole grim narrative of subjugation and exploitation has an all-too-familiar ring to it.
The most dramatic example of CRT at work in New Zealand, however, came to light only this past week (13-19 June 2021). To the consternation of most ordinary Kiwis, the Greta Thunberg-inspired School Strike For Climate Auckland metaphorically poured petrol over itself and struck a match. Not since the days of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, or Joseph Stalin’s show-trials of the 1930s, has political self-abasement been taken to such agonising extremes. This, in part, was their confession:
“We apologise for the hurt, burnout, and trauma. We also apologise for the further trauma caused by our slow action to take responsibility. We recognise that this apology can never be enough to make up for our actions on top of years of systemic and systematic oppression, racism, and the silencing of those who are the most affected by climate change. This apology is just one of our steps in taking accountability for our actions.”
For those holding conservative views, it is all-too-easy to laugh out loud at such political naivety. It is not, however, the least bit funny. Not when one imagines the degree of emotional pressure that must have been brought to bear on these idealistic middle-class kids. (Who were, let’s not forget, instrumental in persuading tens-of-thousands of their fellow secondary-school students to march against climate change.) It was enough to make them lash themselves abjectly in public and wind up the organisation they had all worked so hard to build.
Conservatives should also ponder the almost total absence of political, institutional and media reaction to this extraordinary incident. Has any politician spoken up on the students’ behalf? Have any school principals made the slightest attempt to counsel and comfort these young people? Where was the Human Rights Commission? More importantly, where were the mainstream news media? What have the nation’s journalists had to say about the fate of the group they were once so eager to please and praise?
The explanation for this disgraceful absence of action is worryingly simple: these kids were the wrong colour. Imagine if a mostly Maori and/or Pasifika student group had been pressured into winding itself up by a squad of ideologically-driven white supremacists. Is it even remotely plausible that politicians, bureaucrats, school principals and news editors would have opted to remain silent and do nothing?
No. What the absence of action in response to this incident has revealed is just how unhealthily strong CRT’s grip on the policies of institutional New Zealand has become. Exposed has been the growing unwillingness of those in authority to defend the rights of Pakeha with anything like the energy they defend the rights of Maori and Pasifika. Also on display has been the shameful cowardice of New Zealand’s mainstream news media when confronted with a story that just might call into question the “official” CRT narrative.
On the other hand, it has given all those Kiwis who have yet to swallow the CRT Kool-Aid some measure of the scale and ferocity of the backlash this divisive ideology is one day bound to provoke.
All the worst fears of the critical race theorists will be confirmed – but not in a good way.