CRT/I partakes heavily of the bogus notion of “social justice,” which makes equality of outcomes the ideal, and, indeed, a right. But this is manifestly not a biblical standard, either in this world or the world to come. As Thomas Sowell typified social justice, it’s “envy plus rhetoric,” which, again, lacks scriptural favor. In his “I Have a Dream” speech, Martin Luther King Jr. didn’t insist upon equality of results, but rather upon treating equals equally, without regard to race, whether individuals were equally admirable or equally deplorable.

At a recent gathering of Baptists, an adept assured us that Critical Race Theory and Intersectional Theory supplied us with “analytical tools” offering us “selective insights” for employment in our quest to “understand multifaceted social dynamics.” We just had to be careful to not receive these theories as “transcendent ideological frameworks” that could be “absolutized as … worldview[s],” displacing allegiance to the teachings of Scripture. Most of us were puzzled, even skeptical. But what did we know?

I’ve been trying to sort this out. First, what exactly is the theory in CRT? We have germ theory in biology (with toxic microbes), molecular theory in chemistry (with electrons), and plate tectonic theory in geology (with continental drift). These supply narratives about how people might get TB, build a nuclear plant, or decide, as seismophobes, to leave California. As scientific theories, they’re supposed to be testable and falsifiable. Alas, by these standards, social science theories are notoriously loose, more like tinted goggles one might choose to wear, with lenses designed to filter out certain rays. Freud’s goggles bathed everything in sexuality; Marx saw history in terms of economic conflict, and all sorts of conflict theories followed, some focused on race, some on gender, and some on the very notion of truth itself (including the canons of Western civilization). They look eagerly for haves and have-nots, oppressors and oppressed, privileged and disadvantaged, and then for the systems by which the power structures are maintained, consciously or unconsciously. In the case of CRT, the narrative says essentially that people of color are in a terrible fix, thanks to the historic and continuing activity of white folks.

So, then, one must ask whether that theory holds water. It’s sort of like questioning the soundness of Al Gore’s “inconvenient truth” regarding anthropogenic global warming. It seems fair to ask whether things are really as bad as all that and, if so, whether the blame is being fairly distributed. But in the case of CRT, this sort of talk is ingeniously deflected with a range of “King’s X” tactics. Doubters are labeled “fragile” and “racist,” afflicted with “whiteness.” They’re counseled to “just listen” while “we have a conversation” (the “conversation” being accusatory lectures from the aggrieved). They dramatize small slights, whether real or imagined, with talk of “micro-aggressions” and “safe spaces” and season speech with patronizing psychobabble, e.g., “Otherness.” The word,“racism” gets a crazy new definition restricting its application to the advantaged, and the word “widespread” is tricked up into “systemic.” In postmodernist fashion, CRT deploys a range of logical fallacies, disparaged in real science but now celebrated by this “theory”: ad hominem (attacking the person), ad misericordiam (appealing to pity), and false dichotomy. It snorts at the venerable ideal of “color-blindness” and lionizes the grim “insights” of Ta-Nehisi Coates, while treating Thomas Sowell as a “Tom.”

Actually, the goggles analogy falls short, in that CRT is not just a way of receiving impressions, but also, and avowedly, a way of burning off blemishes and malignancies — more like Superman’s “heat vision,” more a blowtorch than an analytical microscope. This is how critical theory rolls in general, whether its feminists are cauterizing the word “chairman” or queer theorists are incinerating titles such as “Mr.” and “Ms.” and grafting on “Mx.” in their place. Of course, virtually all theories generate action plans; Joseph Lister picked up on Louis Pasteur’s work in microbiology, making surgery safer by sterilizing his scalpels in carbolic acid. But, in critical theory, praxis far outruns scientia. It’s more akin to opposition research for a political campaign, driven by the desire to dig up dirt (or manufacture it or construe as dirt that which is not dirt). It’s the province of gotcha!s, histrionics, and slander — partisan muckraking and scandalmongering, dressed up in fancy words, the aim being more power, not more truth. As such, it’s textbook postmodernism, where the enemy’s words are “deconstructed” to expose shameful motives, where overarching metanarratives (or worldviews) are meant to be tactical, not veridical.

That being said, how exactly could one could use CRT/I theory as an analytical tool without buying into the basic conviction and spirit of the theory itself. Think of how odd it would be to commend the use of a dowsing rod while dismissing water witching. Or what of marketing craniometric calipers while shunning phrenology. Yes, of course, investigations based on dumb or evil assumptions can be productive. Alchemists were hard at work trying to turn lead into gold, but one of them was able to isolate phosphorous in the 17th century. And though Nazi physician Karl Brandt was hanged for war crimes, he did help us understand how long you can survive while floating in frigid salt water (an experiment conducted fatally on Holocaust Jews for the sake of Third Reich air crews, who might be shot down over the North Sea). Fact of the matter is, you can learn something from anything. Philo Farnsworth got the idea for television’s image scanner watching farmers plow their fields. But it’s reasonable to ask whether this or that approach is a waste of time or even deleterious.

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