Critical race theory (CRT) is transforming Canada’s social, cultural, economic, and political landscape.
Many school boards across Canada now require teachers to adopt curriculum materials that declare society to be inherently racist. In Hamilton, Ontario, for example, a primary grade lesson plan claims “Racism is ordinary, the ‘normal’ way that society does business.” Similarly, the CEOs of nearly 500 Canadian companies have signed an “anti-racist pledge” promoted by activist group BlackNorth Initiative. The Trudeau government has also launched Building a Foundation for Change: Canada’s Anti-Racism Strategy 2019-2022, that promotes “anti-racism” inside and outside of government.
CRT was spawned in the 1970s by American academics who were unhappy with the slow progress of U.S. civil rights legislation and sought more aggressive measures. Later, CRT flew the university-campus coop and began infiltrating all areas of Western society.
At its core, CRT is an attack on the basic concepts of liberal democracy. This is because race—and not the individual—is the main component of society from the CRT perspective. Further, all social division is racial; whites are “socially constructed” to be oppressors while blacks and other non-whites are fated to be the oppressed.
To eliminate systemic racism, the racial-group rights of blacks and other non-whites must take precedence over the liberal-democratic principle of individual rights. Equality of opportunity for all individuals, a key aspect of liberal democratic justice, must give way to social justice conceived as “racial equity,” meaning racial equality of conditions and outcomes.
Free-market economics and colour-blind laws are seen to perpetuate systemic racism. Racial equity can be achieved solely through anti-racist public and private sector programs that give preferential treatment to non-whites under the guise of diversity-equity-inclusion policies. The end goal of CRT is full-blown socialism.
Central to CRT ideology is the concept of systemic racism, which is very different from racism in the traditional sense. The latter is overt, conscious, and intentional, such as racial segregation or discriminatory hiring practices.
The concept of systemic racism was invented to explain racial inequalities that cannot be attributed to overt racism. As such, it attributes disparities in outcome to what CRT proponents (crits for short) consider the capitalist system’s intrinsically racist power structure. Such a society is thus declared systemically racist even if none of its institutions or members can be proven to be individually racist.
But contrary to what crits maintain, the concept of systemic racism has no explanatory value. That’s because it assumes, in circular fashion, what it’s supposed to explain: all racial disparities causally unrelated to overt racism must be the result of systemic racism. The concept is made to be irrefutable.
The consequence of this conceptual sleight-of-hand is a serious distortion of reality. This includes overlooking non-whites who don’t fit the crit conception of North America as a “bastion of white supremacy,” such as Asian-Canadians who out-earn white-Canadians.
Whatever crits offer, it is not science. As philosopher Karl Popper demonstrated, an unfalsifiable proposition is not a scientific proposition, although it may figure in a secular religion—which is what CRT is. This shouldn’t be surprising since CRT, like other woke ideologies derived from the postmodernism of French philosopher Michel Foucault and others, denies the objectivity and universal validity of reason and science.
Unwilling and unable to squarely confront CRT’s logical incoherence and blindness to inconvenient facts, crits seek instead to squelch criticism by denouncing their critics as racist, often ruining reputations and careers in the process. This is what we now call “cancel culture.”
We all suffer for CRT’s distortions of reality and the crits’ fanatical, illiberal intolerance. CRT-based policies have led to the rise of a new, anti-white racism, coupled with growing racial animosity. CRT means black people have been taught that the “Western” virtues of hard work, rationality, and punctuality are further manifestations of white racism. This is hardly conducive to preparing them for the challenges of modern life.
Other absurd new practices abound, like racially segregated, non-white university classes and graduation ceremonies, and the substitution of “Eurocentric mathematical knowledges” with “decolonial, anti-racist . . . [and] indigenous” approaches to teaching math. Anyone openly skeptical of all this risks disemployment.
No less pernicious are the long-term consequences of entrenching CRT in our education systems. Our children will be raised to despise our Enlightenment inheritance with its affirmations of liberal-democracy and science, while gaining no clarity about any sensible alternatives. They will grow up bedevilled by vague, utopian visions of government-engineered “equity.” But owing to their own poor grasp of logical, evidence-based argumentation, they will be bereft of the powers of rational scrutiny. And when CRT’s anti-racist utopia doesn’t materialize, they may descend even further into confusion and resentment.
There is, however, some hope. Citizen groups are already mobilizing across the United States to remove CRT from the education system, with some encouraging results in Virginia and elsewhere. Similar parental push-back campaigns are now starting to take shape in Canada as well. Liberal democracy may be on its back foot, but it’s far from dead.