Anti-racism under attack | Red bell pepper

[ad_1]

Sign held at a Black Lives Matter event in Surrey. Photo by Martin Pettitt

Critical Race Theory (CRT) is under attack. From the Republican Party and its allies, the political right around the world, reactionary academics and advocates of white power on social media. Unsurprisingly, the Conservative Party has jumped on the bandwagon.

It’s hard not to laugh at the absurdly unlikely image of conservative and Republican politicians engaging in the intellectual writings of critical race theorists such as Derrick Bell, Kimberl Crenshaw, and David Gillborn. It is clear that CRT is something they know very little about. To them, it’s just a catch-all term for anything that is supposed to challenge the racial status quo. In fact, it is a theoretical framework that allows us to better understand racial disparities in society and to see how racism is deeply embedded in social structures and systems.

After a year of Black Lives Matter protests, the alarmism is part of a concerted backlash against anti-racism. It is an attempt to consolidate conservative power by attacking both ideas and actions. It reveals a frightening defensive stance about empowering our movements. This should stimulate us.

In the UK, Conservatives have identified education as a battleground: a potential site to consolidate Conservative ideology. This is not new but rather a reaffirmation, an escalation, of a long practice of domination. Myths about leftists, Marxists and anti-racists taking over education cover the consolidation of an education system which, under the guise of neutrality, only promotes already dominant values. But these values ​​must be questioned. These values ​​kill. In a society with so much injustice, we need liberating frameworks in education, politics and throughout our society to be free.

A liberating setting

The CRT poses a threat because it rubs against the myths on which the establishment relies. It encourages us to look not only at racism in the streets, but deep within our institutions, the state, its laws and its policies. When we look at it with this critical eye, we see that schools reproduce racism; let it rampage in all aspects of policing and endure in the provision of housing, health care, border policies and counterterrorism strategies.

Racism is also present in the over-representation of blacks in prison populations, the unequal distribution of wealth, infant mortality and life expectancy. The structures of racism make some people more vulnerable to Covid-19, make the path to justice for Grenfell more difficult and facilitate the continued plundering of the Global South.

CRT allows us to see these structures as more than a coincidence. Perhaps the greatest threat he poses, however, is his insistence that we take action in the pursuit of social justice. It teaches that we cannot remain silent and that we have a duty to fight for a better world, especially for those the establishment marginalizes.

Radical anti-racist interventions, whether by the CRT or elsewhere, should be the foundation of any society with moral conviction. The CRT is not a monolith, not without limits and not the only framework necessary for liberation. Nonetheless, if taken seriously, its teachings contain the seeds of the social transformation we need.

Desmond Tutu said: If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. From its foundation, the CRT urges us to be on the side of the oppressed.

Remi Joseph-Salisbury is Presidential Fellow in Sociology at the University of Manchester. This article originally appeared in issue 230: Struggles for the Truth. Subscribe to Red Pepper today!

[ad_2]