A Tent Big Enough for Bigots but Too Small for Critical Race Theory

Recently at The Argument, Matthew Yglesias made the case that critical race theory is an illiberal Trojan Horse destroying liberal institutions from within. In this conspiracy theory, critical race theory is “one of the most successful” threats to the liberal order, designed to undermine due process and the equal treatment of individuals. Liberals themselves—not the conservative fearmongers who started a moral panic over teaching about race—have helped hasten their destruction by defending dangerous ideas that both proponents and critics “poorly understood.” 

The idea that proponents of critical race theory poorly understood the ideas they were defending does not hold up. At the height of the moral panic over critical race theory, founding critical race scholars and the tradition’s inheritors—including me—wrote for mainstream publications to explain and defend the scholarship. 

Nonetheless, Yglesias has a point. His essay does display an incomplete and warped understanding of the ideas he claims to challenge. When Christopher Rufo launched his public assault on critical race theory—an actual Trojan Horse designed to discredit higher education—he admitted that he was lying by stringing together unconnected ideas to discredit critical race theory and beat back racial justice movements. Yglesias’s argument is Rufo-lite, as he claims critical race theorists are somehow responsible for bad (but unrelated) organizational diversity programming and other misapplications of their work. 

Yglesias fails to engage with core parts of critical race theory, like intersectionality, as philosophically grounded and empirically tested phenomena. Instead, because Hillary Clinton cynically invoked the concept during her presidential campaign, readers are supposed to assume that intersectionality is bad. What Yglesias actually seems to be taking issue with here—and perhaps the only thing in his essay I can get behind—is the ways that pundits and politicians co-opt and misapply academic concepts, distorting their meaning and intent. Crenshaw is no more responsible for the appropriation of her work than Dr. King is responsible for conservatives taking his “content of their character” quote out of context. In both cases, the responsible parties are bad actors hoping to undermine clear thinking about the causes and consequences of discrimination. Yglesias claims it’s “his job to educate you.” But rather than using his considerable platform to debunk an admitted fabulist, Yglesias further muddies the water. 

Yglesias cites a total of one book that is in the tradition of critical race theory proper, Delgado and Stefancic’s Critical Race Theory: An Introduction. It’s an excellent beginning text that I assign in the first week of my undergraduate class on the subject. If this introduction were all my students learned about critical race theory, they’d come away—like Yglesias’s column—with a superficial and perhaps misguided grasp of the subject. Introductory texts introduce, and are thus guided by the assumption that good students and committed interlocutors will keep reading. Unfortunately, these assumptions are not evident in Yglesias’s summary. For a column that purports to be a takedown of critical race theory, there is surprisingly little scholarship present. Instead, we get rehashed culture-war tropes about the unfairness of microaggressions (a concept that is not central to CRT) with no citation of the actual scholarship on microaggressions. I can only speculate as to why these elisions are there, but I assume it’s because dealing directly with some of CRT ’s central claims would be more difficult than the superficial derision that makes up much of the piece. 

Yglesias is bothered that “critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order,” but doesn’t explore the nature of these questions. Some critical race theorists are undoubtedly to Yglesias’s left on questions of economic redistribution or affirmative action. But most critics aren’t questioning liberalism in hopes of destroying it. Rather, like Dr. King’s condemnation of white centrists who “prefer order to justice,” critical race critiques aim to force liberals to live up to the philosophical tradition’s highest ideals. 

For instance, Charles Mills’s The Racial Contract is the book most responsible for making me a critical race theorist. Mills writes a devastating critique of the ways Enlightenment liberal thought has failed nonwhites in practice. Foundational liberal thinkers were often invested in the worst social institutions of their era: John Stuart Mill was an employee of the East India Company; Locke invested in slavery; Kant believed that Black people should be “whipped with split canes” because of their allegedly thicker skin (this is a greatly condensed list). Liberal pretensions of universalism were betrayed as people of color were largely written out of the social contract. In the real world outside of philosophical abstractions, a racial liberalism saw nonwhites’ rights as relatively expendable. Nice if you can get them, but not totally necessary to form a coalition. This racial liberalism isn’t dead: we see it in every reactionary centrist plea to collaborate with racists for short term political gain. 

Mills’s critique of racial liberalism wasn’t aimed at the destruction of individual evaluations or hoping to replace individual rights with group rights. He spent much of his subsequent career on a philosophical project that hoped to reconstruct a truly universal liberalism. He realized that achieving universalism required confronting how racism warped seemingly neutral abstractions forthrightly. Critical race theorists disagree with one another, and some undoubtedly harbor animosity towards liberalism. Nonetheless, Mills’s work shows how critical race theory’s analytic tools can strengthen liberalism. Yglesias’s choice to promote reactionary critiques says more about his politics than it does about anything inherent to critical race theory.

Yglesias is also unhappy about critical race theory’s focus on the way that neutral rules and evaluation procedures can be used as tools of oppression. The idea that neutral rules can’t be employed cynically is honestly baffling. A cursory glance at America’s racial history shows that lots of seemingly neutral rules and evaluation procedures were adopted because they could be used as plausibly deniable tools of racial exclusion. Poll taxes and literacy tests were supposedly race-neutral policies explicitly designed to skirt the 15th Amendment. These “neutral” rules helped to consolidate a century of white supremacist rule. 

Following the passage of the Civil Rights Act, some universities and companies adopted “neutral” tests designed to exclude Black people. The University of Texas adopted tests that administrators hoped would simultaneously exclude Black applicants and pass constitutional muster. In Griggs vs. Duke Power, those unhinged race radicals on the 1971 Supreme Court acknowledged that Duke Power had adopted a discriminatory employment test to circumvent the anti-discrimination provision of the Civil Rights Act. To combat this, the Court recognized that neutral rules could have a racially “disparate impact” and later created a legal compliance test. Yglesias’s watered-down Rufoism would have readers believe these obvious facts are a radical betrayal of liberal principles. In fact, critical race theorists’ critique of race-neutrality was drawn from real-world experiences with racists trying to deny Black folks their constitutionally protected rights.

Pointing out that neutral rules can be discriminatory isn’t illiberal overreach. It’s a simple descriptive reality that anyone interested in achieving fair outcomes should take seriously. Yglesias claims to think “rights are good,” but would have us ignore how neutral rules can be used to deny people their rights. Earlier this month, the Trump Department of Justice issued a memo that follows from Yglesias’s reasoning, remedying what they saw as the unfairness in disparate impact tests that allowed people of color to challenge facially neutral (but discriminatory) procedures. 

Liberalism faces unprecedented challenges. The MAGA right is led by a weird cabal of men who would like to repeal the 20th century’s freedom expanding reforms, and they appear to be winning. The recently released United States National Security Strategy calls for a retreat from liberal internationalism and cheers the rise of far-right authoritarian parties. The Department of Justice is destroying the Civil Rights policies that led to America’s unfinished integration. Red states are gutting independent higher ed in a crusade commentators have likened to McCarthyism and Orban’s illiberalism. And even leading GOP women are starting to think the misogyny at the center of their political project is a bit much. 

It is not serious to place critical race theory—a 40-year-old academic framework that was relatively obscure before the right-wing moral panic—among these threats to liberalism. Rather than facing these threats, Yglesias would “defend” liberalism by joining the anti-critical race theory crusade started by the right’s most successful propagandist. He appears to want a tent big enough for bigots but too small for critical race theorists.

Featured image is Ron DeSantis, by Gage Skidmore