The Heritage Foundation: Critical Race Theory, the New Intolerance, and Its Grip on America

Summary: Critical Race Theory (CRT) makes race the prism through which its proponents analyze all aspects of American life—and do so with a degree of persistence that has helped CRT impact all of American life. CRT underpins identity politics, an ongoing effort to reimagine the United States as a nation riven by groups, each with specific claims on victimization. In entertainment, as well as the education and workforce sectors of society, CRT is well-established, driving decision-making according to skin color—not individual value and talent. As Critical Theory ideas become more familiar to the viewing public in everyday life, CRT’s intolerance becomes “normalized,” along with the idea of systemic racism for Americans, weakening public and private bonds that create trust and allow for civic engagement.

Authors: Jonathan Butcher and Mike Gonzalez - As its name should make abundantly clear, Critical Race Theory (CRT) is the child of Critical Theory (CT), or, to be more precise, its grandchild. Critical Theory is the immediate forebearer of Critical Legal Theory (CLT), and CLT begat CRT. As we discuss in this Backgrounder, however, there are strong thematic components linking CT, CLT, and CRT. Among these are: 

• The Marxist analysis of society made up of categories of oppressors and oppressed; 
• An unhealthy dollop of Nietzschean relativism, which means that language does not accord to an objective reality, but is the mere instrument of power dynamics; 
• The idea that the oppressed impede revolution when they adhere to the cultural beliefs of their oppressors—and must be put through re-education sessions; 
• The concomitant need to dismantle all societal norms through relentless criticism; and 
• The replacement of all systems of power and even the descriptions of those systems with a worldview that describes only oppressors and the oppressed. 

Far from being merely esoteric academic exercises, these philosophies have real-life consequences.

CRT scholars likely cite CLT, not CT, as their genesis: “Critical race theory builds on the insights of two previous movements, critical legal studies and radical feminism,” wrote one of the architects of CRT, Richard Delgado, with his wife, Jean Stefancic, in perhaps the most widely read primer on CRT, Critical Race Theory, An Introduction. 

Angela P. Harris—also a major early figure of CRT—agrees, though she attributes co-parentage to a different source. She said: (continue reading)

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