Critical Race Theory as Metaphysics

T he balance of opposition to critical race theory in schools is not led by people who have an alternative comprehensive vision of education and schooling. It’s led primarily by people who, inchoately and inconsistently, believe in John Dewey’s vision for public schooling as an institution meant to mutually assimilate diverse children to each other, and to provide a civic and social touchstone. They want school to give their kids a few critical skills, extracurriculars to support the development of character, to prepare the brightest pupils for college, to give all students a basic familiarity with each other, and to inculcate broad allegiance to a loosely defined American civic creed.

But an allegiance to even a loosely defined American civic creed can only be the product of a broad consensus about the goodness of America itself, the basic terms of the American project of self-government, and the like. Political polarization is dissolving that consensus. Progressives, who have disproportionate representation in the culture-forming institutions of schools and mass media, have abandoned the broad center for their transformative agenda.

But what strikes me about the forms of critical pedagogy that are leaking into publication is that they go so far beyond taking a more critical view of the American founding. The National Education Association, for example, adopted resolutions committing itself to the project of critical race theory and producing a report “that critiques empire, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, racism, patriarchy, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism, anthropocentrism, and other forms of power and oppression at the intersections of our society.”

Christopher Rufo reported on a school district in North Carolina that put its teachers through training in the new forms of anti-racism.

At the first session, “Whiteness in Ed Spaces,” school administrators provided two handouts on the “norms of whiteness.” These documents claimed that “(white) cultural values” include “denial,” “fear,” “blame,” “control,” “punishment,” “scarcity,” and “one-dimensional thinking.” According to notes from the session, the teachers argued that “whiteness perpetuates the system” of injustice and that the district’s “whitewashed curriculum” was “doing real harm to our students and educators.” The group encouraged white teachers to “challenge the dominant ideology” of whiteness and “disrupt” white culture in the classroom through a series of “transformational interventions.”

What’s striking is that this project is so broad that it transgresses upon widely held notions of anthropology that are intertwined with religion. For proponents of critical pedagogy, that’s a feature. But for opponents, it’s simply ridiculous. Denial, blame, control, punishment, scarcity, and one-dimensional thinking are not “values” in themselves; they are phenomena common to all humanity.

I almost want to give them a dose of their own theories. The inadequate thinking of our Founders about religion led them to write the First Amendment in a way that left it easily open to abuse by their free-thinking descendants. The Establishment Clause is now regularly used to prohibit anything that even resembles a belief shared by religious people from transgressing upon public schools. The theory being that the state should not be in the business of compelling people to believe in controversial — and contested — metaphysics, and the moral projects that go with them.

But that is precisely what we have in progressive goals today. The contested and unprovable metaphysics behind modern egalitarianism means nuns must buy birth control for anyone they might hire. For progressives, it makes perfect sense to compel nuns to violate their Catholic faith in the name of equality and feminism. Equality and feminism don’t trade under the banner of religion; therefore, this can’t possibly be a violation of the Establishment Clause.

“Cisheteropatriarchy” is the name of a heresy, but it’s a heresy in relation to a religion to which I do not adhere. Just as in the medieval era — perhaps just as in all eras — the wrong belief is believed to be the cause of injustice, therefore the wrong belief threatens the entire commonwealth. The project of “disrupting white culture” sounds like an exorcism.

Try not to laugh at this hypothetical. But imagine the story of critical race theory and public education were reversed, and it was a conservative theory being brought into the classrooms.

Let’s say it was the “new natural law” theory that had escaped its obscurity from law schools and started gaining adherents throughout the high places in corporate America and educational systems. Let’s imagine that there were blockbuster best-selling books touting it by legal scholars Robert George and Ryan Anderson, which regularly caused the most powerful companies in the world to pay them high-five- and six-figure speaking and consulting fees. The new natural law theory had sparked a broader movement that went under the banner of “practical reason” — who could object to practical reasoning? And school districts and teachers’ unions regularly paid Catholic apologists and priests who had good training in this theory significant fees to act as their “NNL consultants.” These hirelings drew up elaborate pledges and programs to promote the common good and practical reason at their schools. Student groups dedicated to “the rule of reason” had been popping up and getting favorable notice in newspapers for promoting pro-life and anti-transgender causes, though it was widely believed they viewed progressive and liberal students as victims of parental oppression and insanity, or outright malicious.

I think in such a situation, people might stand up in school boards and say, “Stop teaching my kid this crypto-Catholic stuff.” I’m not sure it would do well for the NNL consultants and defenders to point out that, “Hey, we’re not making kids read legal scholars like John Finnis,” or to say, with faux-innocence, “Hey, the people who oppose NNL are against teaching reasoning itself.” Or that, “Hey, Aristotle and St. Thomas are just part of philosophical history, and opposition to introducing natural theology to seven-year-olds is ridiculous. These truths don’t require the grace of baptism to apprehend and are available to reason. Be a better parent!”

From my perspective, all that and more would be true about natural theology. But it would obviously violate the norms and expectations of my neighbors to subject them to it.

If public-school teachers are determined to use their positions to confront “cisheteropatriarchy” and to help people identity “shame” with “whiteness” — then it’s probably time to admit that education is an induction into a metaphysical and moral worldview. That is a competence that the American states can no longer justly possess.