{"id":665833,"date":"2021-08-20T13:51:34","date_gmt":"2021-08-20T17:51:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=665833"},"modified":"2021-08-20T13:51:39","modified_gmt":"2021-08-20T17:51:39","slug":"want-to-know-what-critical-race-theory-is-watch-the-matrix-scholar-explains","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/want-to-know-what-critical-race-theory-is-watch-the-matrix-scholar-explains\/","title":{"rendered":"Want To Know What Critical Race Theory Is? Watch \u2018The Matrix,\u2019 Scholar Explains"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">26<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fwant-to-know-what-critical-race-theory-is-watch-the-matrix-scholar-explains%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=665833&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><div><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/08\/GettyImages-1047403844-matrix.jpg?w=1200&amp;h=800&amp;ixlib=react-9.0.3\" class=\"ff-og-image-inserted\" \/><\/div>\n<p>Mike Gonzalez is a think-tank academic at the Heritage Foundation who can trace critical race theory\u2019s roots through a meandering lineage from 1930s German philosophers to Columbia University\u2019s Teachers College to Barack Obama and Black Lives Matter.<\/p>\n<p>But the clearest description of the theory, he says, comes not from any textbook but from a Keanu Reaves film: 1999\u2019s sci-fi hit \u201cThe Matrix.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>First, a brief history.<\/p>\n<p><b>1930s: Germany<\/b><\/p>\n<p>Critical theory, CRT\u2019s intellectual forebearer, began in Germany in the 1930s among a handful of Marxists who longed for the oppressed classes to rise up and overthrow society. The problem, if it could be called that, was that it was becoming clear that most people were happy with their lives, enjoyed working and making money, and were not particularly itching to overthrow society. Critical theory was aimed at fomenting a Marxist revolution in a world in which the working class did not appear dissatisfied with the economy.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe term \u2018critical theory\u2019 itself is first formulated by Max Horkheimer, the director of the Frankfurt School, in a 1937 essay. Horkheimer and his assistant, Herbert Marcuse, believed that the worker was sucked into the consumer culture of capitalism,\u201d Gonzalez told The Daily Wire on Wednesday. \u201cHe says\u2026 capitalism is too good at producing goods, so the worker does not understand how oppressed he is.<\/p>\n<p>As Harkheimer himself <a href=\"https:\/\/socialtheoryapplied.com\/2014\/10\/03\/4204\/\">put it<\/a>: \u201cMarx had the ideal of a society of free human beings. He believed that this capitalist society would necessarily have to be overcome by the solidarity spelled by the increasing immiseration of the working class. This idea is wrong. This society in which we live does not immiserate the workers.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>But that\u2019s because workers were too obtuse to know they should be unhappy, Harkheimer continued. \u201cThe critical theory which I conceived later is based on the idea that one cannot determine what is good \u2014 what a good, a free society would look like \u2014 from within the society which we live in. We lack the means. But in our work we can bring up the negative aspects of this society, which we want to change.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The idea was like something out of an acid trip: Although we, the regular middle class, were all happy, there was a certain way we could see the world in which we would understand that everything we thought we knew was wrong, and actually, we should be angry. Because of our failure to see this invisible but true reality, as the philosophers thought we should, in some ways the enemy was <em>us.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Gonzalez studied the critical theorist philosophy of the era and learned that \u201cTheir position was the worker has become his own oppressor because he\u2019s bought into the idea of country and his family and capitalism. They say he has a \u2018false consciousness\u2019 by buying into the \u2018superstructure.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Then he put something together: \u201cI watch \u2018The Matrix\u2019 and I think, this is what they\u2019re talking about.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Matrix - The Matrix is Everywhere.wmv\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/qedAzTA8nY8?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/p>\n<blockquote readability=\"27\">\n<p>Morpheus: The matrix is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now in this very room, you can see it when you look out your window or turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work or church or pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you to the truth.<\/p>\n<p>Neo: What truth?<\/p>\n<p>Morpheus: That you are a slave, Neo. \u2026<\/p>\n<p>The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you\u2019re inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>A mysterious and undefinable \u201csystem\u201d that unlocks the key for why things are actually bad when we think they are good \u201cis critical theory. You may think you\u2019re happy, but you\u2019re actually oppressed. We just need to help you discover that truth,\u201d Gonzalez said.<\/p>\n<p><b>1960s: Teachers College<\/b><\/p>\n<p>When the Third Reich came to Germany, the Frankfurt School fled to America, and its academics found a home at Columbia University\u2019s Teachers College. Marxism hadn\u2019t worked, and the odd philosophical twist hadn\u2019t convinced the \u201clumpenproletariat\u201d \u2014 the working class who socialist leaders said they were fighting for, but who were too dumb to appreciate it \u2014 to demand revolution either. But on a new continent came an opportunity for a new strategy. \u201cBefore this revolt takes place, critical theory needs to Americanize,\u201d Gonzalez said. That meant pivoting from class to race.<\/p>\n<p>Looking for this \u201csubstitute proletariat,\u201d Herbert Marcuse settled on the minorities in the US. \u201cThe ghetto populations may well become the first mass basis of revolt,\u201d the white German philosopher <a href=\"https:\/\/www.marxists.org\/reference\/archive\/marcuse\/works\/1969\/essay-liberation.htm\">wrote<\/a> in 1969. \u201cConfined to small areas of living and dying, it can be more easily organized and directed.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><b>1970s: Law schools<\/b><\/p>\n<p>At the same time, critical theory also applied its ideas about invisible \u201csystems\u201d of oppression to the legal system.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cStarting in the 1970s, law professors and law students start to apply CT and the idea of a \u2018superstructure\u2019 to the legal system. Just as critical theory sowed distrust into the institutions, critical legal theory did it with the law: \u2018The law is not neutral. And even if it is, the results are not,\u2019\u201d Gonzalez said.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cPeople begin to realize, this is going to be really bad for the legal system. The legal system requires not just courts and prisons, but for all of us to believe in the law, that there\u2019s such a thing and for there to be a society we need to follow it. Critical legal theory undermines that.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Even so, a small number of radical law students, many of them black, pushed the theory further. \u201cThey said it\u2019s true that there\u2019s a superstructure. But you\u2019re missing one thing: they\u2019re all white. The original critical legal theorists believed that race didn\u2019t exist or wasn\u2019t that important. They started arguing that race is the main thing that matters.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><b>1990s: Race supplants law<\/b><\/p>\n<p>A 1989 conference at a convent in Madison, Wisconsin marked the birth of the most racialized strain of Marcusean theory, with three founders, Kimberle Crenshaw, Richard Delgado and Derrick Bell, in attendance.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe gathered at that convent for two and a half days, around a table in an austere room with stained glass windows and crucifixes here and there\u2013an odd place for a bunch of Marxists\u2013and worked out a set of principles,\u201d Delgado later <a href=\"https:\/\/digitalcommons.law.seattleu.edu\/cgi\/viewcontent.cgi?article=1039&amp;context=faculty\">said<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>The critical race theorists \u201cbegin to try to evict their white colleagues\u201d in critical legal studies, Gonzalez said, \u201csaying you don\u2019t have the lived experience\u2026 And they\u2019re Marxists, they feel guilty, so they [left].\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Bell, the first tenured black professor at Harvard, began holding protests trying to force Harvard to hire others who shared their ideology, including at a 1990 protest at which Barack Obama gave a speech. \u201cOpen up your hearts and your minds to the words of Professor Derrick Bell,\u201d the young Obama orated.<\/p>\n<p>Anther practitioner, Angela Davis, went on to influence Black Lives Matter, said Gonzales, who is the author of the 2020 book \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Plot-Change-America-Identity-Politics-ebook\/dp\/B0999RK1Y4\/\">The Plot to Change America<\/a>: How Identity Politics is Dividing the Land of the Free\u201d and the upcoming book <a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/gp\/product\/B08VGXHKQ5\/\">\u201cBLM: The Making of a New Marxist Revolution.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n<p><b>2010s: K-12<\/b><\/p>\n<p>\u201cSo it becomes dominant but really contained in the university until about 2011, where it really begins to impact K-12. Around 10 years ago, things began to change, CRT began seeping into the education system,\u201d Gonzalez said \u2014 to some extent unbeknownst to parents until coronavirus lead to virtual school.<\/p>\n<p>Of course, the overwhelming negativity of critical race theory is not something most parents of any race would agree to expose their kids to. \u201cDerrick Bell writes again and again that black people will always be subservient, that they will never gain full equality,\u201d Gonzalez said. \u201cThey call white kids racist which is a form of a child abuse and terrible. But to tell black kids that to read and write is a white thing is repulsive, it\u2019s false and it\u2019s something the KKK would say.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Because of its obvious fringe nature, schools say they are not teaching CRT \u2014 which is true: they\u2019re not teaching it, they\u2019re <i>doing<\/i> it.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhat they mean is they\u2019re not assigning Derrick Bell in the third grade. Of course they\u2019re not. I needed an aspirin to read that and I\u2019m an adult. What they\u2019re doing is practicing the ideas he wrote about. They\u2019re doing these things like saying take a step back or forward based on your privilege.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>And at the end of the day, the terminology should be irrelevant to whether something is objectionable. \u201cYou\u2019re dividing kids by race. You can call it whatever you want, call it Disneyland. It doesn\u2019t matter, it\u2019s illegal,\u201d Gonzales said.<\/p>\n<p>Whether teachers realize it or not, these ideas trace back to the handful of white academics who have attempted to foment division in society for nearly 100 years.&nbsp; So how do you recognize CRT in your child\u2019s school?<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe main belief is that racism is no longer a decision people make, it\u2019s just a system. Anything that teaches that is critical theory and don\u2019t let anyone tell you otherwise,\u201d Gonzalez said.<\/p>\n<p>In other words, when you hear clearly absurd things uttered with great conviction \u2014 like meritocracy is a myth, or equality should be replaced with equity, or that young children are inherently racialized \u2014 you\u2019re in the Matrix.<\/p>\n<p>Just unplug, Neo.<\/p>\n<p><em>The Daily Wire is one of America\u2019s fastest-growing conservative media companies and&nbsp;<span class=\"il\">counter-cultural<\/span>&nbsp;outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.dailywire.com\/subscribe\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" data-saferedirecturl=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/url?q=https:\/\/www.dailywire.com\/subscribe&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1615934302565000&amp;usg=AFQjCNHOV8alRjqO61ImZWCRpqOILgWzkg\">member<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Mike Gonzalez is a think-tank academic at the Heritage Foundation who can trace critical race theory\u2019s roots through a meandering lineage from 1930s German philosophers to Columbia University\u2019s Teachers College &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2315279,"comment_status":"close","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-665833","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/665833","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=665833"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/665833\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2315279"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=665833"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=665833"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=665833"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}