Edward Feser, PhD, is Professor of Philosophy at Pasadena City College in Pasadena, California. Called by National Review “one of the best contemporary writers on philosophy”, he is the author of many books including Five Proofs of the Existence of God, By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed, The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism, Aquinas, and Scholastic Metaphysics.
His most recent book is All One in Christ: A Catholic Critique of Racism and Critical Race Theory (Ignatius Press, 2022). Ryan T. Anderson, President of Ethics and Public Policy Center, describes it as “the best book I’ve read on the topic.” And Deacon Harold Burke-Sivers states it is an “absolute must-have for all Catholics who want to be well informed about racism and Critical Race Theory.”
Dr. Feser recently corresponded with Catholic World Report about his new book, the Church’s teachings about racism, and why Critical Race Theory is not only problematic, but has a deeply cultish and gnostic quality to it.
CWR: You note, at the beginning of your book, that the Church’s teaching against racism has different foundations and focus than the antiracism found in the secular realm. How is it different? And why is it significant?
Edward Feser: Secular debates on the subject often focus on questions about purported biological differences between races, whether race is grounded in something real or is instead socially constructed, and so on. But as I show in the book, the Church explicitly teaches that her condemnation of racism is rooted in considerations that go deeper than anything biology could either establish or undermine.
First, it is grounded in the claim of traditional Catholic philosophy and theology that the human intellect and will are immaterial or non-physical powers of the human soul. This soul is specially created by God with each new human being, and cannot arise from purely material biological processes. Its reality is knowable only through philosophical argumentation and divine revelation, rather than through empirical investigation. Now, human dignity and basic human rights are grounded in these powers of the soul, because it is by virtue of these powers that we can come to know and love God. Because all human beings of whatever race have souls, it follows that they all have the same dignity and basic rights.
The second foundation of the Church’s condemnation of racism is the theological truth that, just as all human beings have sinned, so too all have been offered redemption through Christ’s sacrifice, and the opportunity for the beatific vision. This supernatural end adds to the dignity afforded to us by our nature as rational creatures, and because it has been given to all human beings of whatever race, it follows that all human beings equally have this added dignity.
This is important because, since the basic equality of the races is grounded in these philosophical and theological truths about human nature, it cannot be undermined by the outcome of debates about whether race is socially constructed, biological claims about racial differences, and so on.
CWR: It’s a common claim that the Church either strongly supported slavery for centuries or at least tacitly turned a blind eye. Any truth to that? What has the Church done and said about slavery over her 2,000 year history?
Feser: Nothing could be further from the truth. As I document in the book, the Church has for five centuries, ever since the start of the modern slave trade, consistently condemned the enslavement of the peoples of the Americas and Africa. A long line of popes in a series of documents thundered against the practice, threatened excommunication against those who persisted in it, and so forth. It is true that many Catholics ignored this teaching, but the teaching was definitely there.
Part of the reason for confusion on this matter is that the word “slavery” has been used in different senses over the centuries. What people usually have in mind when they hear this word today is chattel slavery, which involves claiming complete ownership over another human being in the way one might own an animal or an inanimate object. It is the kind of thing we associate with slavery in the American south before the Civil War. The Church has always condemned this practice as inherently evil.
Now, there are other, less extreme but still highly problematic practices that have fallen under the “slavery” label. One of them is called “indentured servitude,” which basically involves a prolonged period of forced service to another person as payment for a debt or the like. Another is called “penal servitude,” which is a matter of forcing someone to labor in punishment for a crime.
Neither of these practices has anything to do with race, and at least in theory neither amounts to chattel slavery. For that reason, the Church traditionally held that such lesser forms of servitude are, at least in theory, not always evil. However, each of them is still very morally hazardous and has a tendency in practice to degenerate into chattel slavery. For such reasons, the common teaching of Catholic theologians has long been that in practice it is morally better never to permit even these lesser forms of servitude.
Those who claim that the Church once condoned slavery ignore these distinctions and this history. Often they have an ax to grind. For example, sometimes they want to badmouth the Church by claiming that she was complicit in evil. Or they want to justify changing certain teachings of the Church, and use the false allegation that the Church changed her teaching on slavery as a pretext for this.
CWR: You have a chapter on the rights and duties of nations and immigrants. What are a couple of key points about Church teaching on immigration that are either often ignored or even misrepresented?
Feser: People often quote the Catechism, papal speeches, and other Church documents teaching the moral duty of nations to welcome immigrants, especially those fleeing persecution, economic hardship, and the like. They are right to do so because this is an important and longstanding teaching of the Church.
The problem is that they often quote very selectively from the documents in question. They leave out the qualifications that the Church and the popes have always recognized. For example, the Church has explicitly acknowledged that a nation has to take account of the economic circumstances of its own citizens when deciding how many immigrants to take in. She has taught that a nation may also take account of cultural considerations and how best to assimilate immigrants. She has taught that immigrants must obey the law, and that a nation has a right to protect the integrity of its borders and to prevent illegal immigration. I document all of this in the book with many quotations from various Church teaching documents, including statements from popes such as Pope St. John Paul II and Pope Francis.
When all aspects of the Church’s teaching on this subject are taken into consideration, what follows is that hammering out the details of immigration policy is a matter of prudential judgment about which Catholics of good will can reasonably disagree. It is definitely true that Catholics have to take a generous attitude toward immigrants. But it does not follow that there can be no restrictions on immigration, and indeed the Church has taught precisely the opposite of that. Hence, it is unjust and uncharitable to pretend that anyone who has reservations about immigration policy, illegal immigration, and the like must be motivated by racism.
CWR: How do proponents of Critical Race Theory (CRT) present the key tenets of their belief system? What problems do you find with those presentations and claims?
Feser: CRT started out as a movement in academic legal studies, but its key ideas soon spread far beyond that to various other fields in the social sciences and humanities, and then through them outside the universities altogether and into education, corporate human resources departments, criminal justice reform movements, political activism, and so on.
The central thesis of CRT is that racism runs far, far deeper in Western society than what most people think of when they hear that word. When most people hear “racism,” they think of segregation, the KKK, discriminatory hiring practices, and the like. CRT writers claim that even if all of that sort of thing were completely eliminated, we would barely have scratched the surface. They hold that racism actually permeates every nook and cranny of society – the entire legal system, popular culture, and the mindset and actions even of people who think of themselves as opposed to racism.
For example, popularizers of CRT like Ibram X. Kendi claim that any “inequity” between races constitutes racism. For instance, if some ethnic group makes up 10% of the population but does not make up 10% of stockbrokers, or doctors, or whatever, then for Kendi that is definitive evidence of racism. And anyone who proposes an alternative explanation (for example, in terms of cultural differences between groups) is dismissed by him as racist. It’s that simpleminded and dogmatic.
CRT writers also claim that the racism they say permeates society is to be found in “implicit bias” and “microaggressions.” “Implicit bias” involves hostility or negative attitudes that are so subtle that the person who harbors them is not even aware of them. “Microaggressions” are racist actions that are so subtle that the people committing them are not even aware they are doing so. Imagine, for example, that a white person who is politically liberal and thinks of himself as free of any racist attitudes fails to smile at a black person at the supermarket. CRT writers propose that this is a “microaggression” that manifests “implicit bias,” and that if the person in question denies it, then that simply shows how deep and unconscious his racism really is.
Another CRT popularizer, Robin DiAngelo, gives the label “white fragility” to this sort of denial. For her and Kendi, if you deny that you harbor any racist attitudes, that is itself evidence that you are racist. This alleged racism is so subtle that only people versed in CRT can be trusted to see it, and to disagree with the CRT analysis is itself just further evidence of racism. Naturally, this is a recipe for fanaticism. There is no evidence for the specific kinds of racism CRT posits, and there could not be given that it is defined in such a way that it is invisible unless you read CRT into what would otherwise seem to be innocuous phenomena.
But it gets much worse. Familiar traditional themes of the civil rights movement such as color-blind policy, judging people as individuals rather than as members of groups, individual rights, anti-discrimination laws – all of this is rejected by CRT writers. They think of these ideas as masks for racism that serve to uphold white supremacy. Kendi, for example, advocates discrimination as a way of equalizing outcomes, DiAngelo holds that “anti-blackness” is inherent to “whiteness” so that all white people are complicit in racism, and so on.
There are no good arguments for any of this. It is all just asserted as if it were revealed from on high, and all possible disagreement is demonized right out of the gate as racist. It is also obviously a recipe for massively increasing racial tension rather than providing any solutions. And it gives the lie to the disinformation peddled by defenders of CRT when they characterize it as interested merely in teaching about the history of racism. It is not about that at all. It is about pushing an extreme ideology that even many liberal voters find disturbing when they learn the content of it.
CWR: “Like Marxism,” you write, “CRT is a grave perversion of the good cause it claims to represent, and it is utterly incompatible with Catholic social teaching.” First, does CRT—historically, politically, philosophically—have a relationship with Marxism? Secondly, what is the crux of the incompatibility you mention?
Feser: Individual Marxists like Antonio Gramsci had a direct influence on the movement. Gramsci famously held that oppressive bourgeois power maintains itself by way of “hegemony” over the cultural assumptions and institutions of society. CRT posits the same sort of thing, except that it puts “white supremacy” in the driver’s seat instead of bourgeois economic power. Gramsci also advocated countering this hegemony by working to get an alternative, revolutionary Marxist worldview to permeate the institutions of society. CRT has adapted this into its own playbook, and the prevalence of CRT ideas in the universities, schools, government agencies, corporate human resources departments, and popular entertainment is the result.
In a more general way, CRT has been influenced by Marxism by way of the central Marxist theme that social life and history are at bottom about the struggle between inherently hostile classes. For the Marxist, these classes are to be understood in economic terms, with the struggle between them being the conflict between oppressive capitalists and exploited workers. CRT alters this by interpreting social life and history instead in racial rather than economic terms, as a war between the oppressive forces of “white supremacy” and oppressed “people of color.”
In this respect, CRT is disturbingly similar to German National Socialism, which also replaced the Marxist’s obsession with class with an obsession with race. The players are different insofar as for the Nazis the alleged oppressors were Jews and the allegedly oppressed group was the German nation. But the basic worldview is in other respects alarmingly similar. For CRT writers, as for the Nazis, absolutely everything is about race, no one can escape the perspective of his or her race, and races are inherently at odds.
Marxists also tend to evaluate ideas in ideological terms. If you present a criticism of Marxist ideas, the reaction is not “Is this correct?” but rather “Whose interest does this serve?” CRT writers are very similar. They tend not to engage the actual arguments of their critics, but rather to attribute bad motives to them, to put emphasis on the race of the person who raises the criticism, and so on.
The Church has strongly and consistently condemned these sorts of attitudes. She condemns the thesis that social life and history are fundamentally about a struggle between inherently hostile classes, and insists that the groups that make up society must see themselves as in partnership rather than intrinsically at odds. She condemns the tendency to evaluate ideas in terms of which ideological interest is served rather than by appeal to objective standards of truth and rationality. She condemns the socialist assumption that all inequalities are as such evidence of injustice. She condemns a vengeful attitude toward alleged oppressors and policies such as reverse discrimination. I quote the relevant documents in the book. These various condemnations that the Church has issued against Marxism and other totalitarian ideologies manifestly apply no less to CRT, because the reasons for the condemnations apply in the one case no less than in the others.
CWR: Is CRT best understood as a political philosophy or as a sort of secular religion? Or something altogether?
Feser: There is nothing per se wrong with religion, so I wouldn’t use that characterization to criticize CRT. What I would say, though, is that it is fair to characterize the CRT movement as a cult, which is a perversion of religion. People drawn to it have a cult-like tendency both to treat CRT as if it were some divine revelation that at last has uncovered the unseen truth about the world, and to dogmatically refuse even to consider any criticism of it.
More specifically, I would say that CRT has many features in common with what are historically known as Gnostic systems of thought. Like Gnosticism, it tends to portray ordinary everyday reality, including the parts that seem perfectly innocuous, as in fact the manifestations of a sinister power. It tends toward a simplistic Manichean division of society into warring forces of darkness and light, with an omnipresent and near-omnipotent “white supremacy” playing the former role and CRT-inspired “antiracist” activists playing the latter. Like Gnosticism, it represents this alleged truth about the world as something that has been hidden by these dark forces, and which has been revealed only to those with special insight, in this case, those who have been enlightened by CRT and its gurus.
CWR: What is the overall approach, in terms of analysis and criticism, that you take to CRT in your book?
Feser: I first devote a chapter to setting out the basic themes of CRT as it is developed in the work of founders of the movement like Derrick Bell and Kimberlé Crenshaw, and popularizers like Kendi and DiAngelo. I provide many quotes from their writings so that the reader can see how extreme their views really are, and that this extremism has not been exaggerated by the critics of CRT. In the following chapter, I discuss the philosophical problems with CRT, such as the many logical fallacies routinely committed by its proponents. In the chapter after that, I show how the claims of CRT are unsupported by any actual evidence from social science, and in fact conflict with the social scientific evidence. Then, in a final chapter, I spell out the relevant teaching from the social doctrine of the Church, and show how CRT conflicts with it. So, I try to provide a fairly comprehensive critique that considers all the main issues.
CWR: When word of your book was first posted on Twitter, a number of people made remarks along the lines that you, being a white man, shouldn’t write about CRT, that you have no idea what you are talking about, and so forth. Is it fair to say that such dismissive and adolescent attacks are not so much a bug as they are a feature of CRT proponents?
Feser: This reaction illustrates the way in which CRT is a cult rather than a serious academic enterprise. The critics you cite were not raising objections to the specific claims and arguments of the book, because it hadn’t been published yet. So, naturally, they hadn’t even seen it. What they found objectionable was rather the very idea that someone was criticizing CRT. That is not the sort of attitude taken by a scholar or any other rational person interested in the pursuit of truth. It is the sort of attitude characteristic of a fanatic or an ideologue.
These sorts of reactions are indeed a feature rather than a bug of the CRT worldview, because of its essentially relativist view of knowledge. If you take the view that no one can transcend his race, then you are bound to judge all criticism in terms of the race of the person raising the criticisms. What the CRT proponent fails to see is that this cuts both ways. If criticisms of CRT have no objective validity but just reflect the biases of the critic, then in the same way, CRT itself can be dismissed as having no objective validity, but as merely reflecting the biases of its proponents. CRT has no coherent way of avoiding this basic and rather obvious problem, and it shows how superficial and intellectually flimsy the whole project is.
CWR: Any final thoughts?
Feser: This was not a book I wrote because of any inherent value or interest in the subject. CRT articles and books are among the most depressingly unpleasant and intellectually uninteresting things I’ve ever had to read. People attracted to this stuff are absolutely fixated on race, seething with anger, and unable to string together a coherent argument. It’s a deeply irrational and ugly vision of human life.
The reason I wrote it is that faithful Catholics and other people of good will need to be aware of this, and of how extreme and dangerous these ideas are. There is a foolish tendency among some people to think that, because this movement cloaks itself in noble-sounding rhetoric and innocuous phrases like “anti-racism,” there must be some good in it. That is as naïve as thinking that there must be something good in Marxism, on the grounds that Marxists talk a lot about the plight of the poor.
Well, the Church is second to none in her concern for the poor, but she has also always insisted that Marxism is an evil ideology and that Catholics cannot collaborate with it, but must reject it root and branch. As I show in the book, CRT is no less noxious, and must be firmly rejected by Catholics for analogous reasons. It can only make things worse, not better.
But it would be a mistake to end things on that negative note. The good news is that the Church already provides sound principles for criticizing racism, and in fact has done so for centuries. And that is what the first part of the book is about.
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“Racism” as understood in today’s Western “culture” has nothing to do with human persons and everything to do with politics. Where accusations of racism are leveled is simply the nomination of certain groups as “victims” in order to use them to gain ascendancy in power over others. It is a “cause of convenience.” How do I know this?
Firstly, if those making the accusations of racism were truly concerned about persons, these same people would not be supporting abortion which purposely targets Black women who have contributed disproportionately to the genocide of the unborn. Secondly, if racism were truly about persons, then African-Ameticans who publicly declare conservative political ideology wouldn’t be hounded, persecuted, silenced and eliminated from political discourse as they are time and time again.
As far as immigration policy is concerned, why is it that extreme Leftist politicians and the Catholic chorus of bishops and social justice elites never ask the simple question: “What are the conditions and causes of poverty in the countries from where immigrants are coming and what can we do to ameliorate them so families and communities aren’t fractionated because of massive immigration?” If those rushing to the defense of poor people were really concerned about poverty, we’d hear more about the poorest country in the world – Haiti. It’s because Haiti is so poor and its being located on an island that it hampers their being able to immigrate. So everyone can just ignore Haitian poverty.
When I was the Director of Catholic Charities for my diocese (Charleston SC) I started organizing medical missions to Guatemala. My interest was in assisting people where they lived as there was no intrinsic condition about the geography of Guatemala that militated against Guatemalan self-sufficiency. In 2010, Haiti had a devastating earthquake centered around its capital Port-au-Prince. I traveled there to see what we as a diocese could do. I saw poverty in Haiti like I’ve never seen in Guatemala. I returned to my diocese and presented the situation with an accompanying slide show to the CC Board of Directors which included the then bishop. I was shocked that the response I got was silence. No, “We must do something to help…now!” Rather, like all good bureaucracies in government and the Church, the response was to “kick the problem upstairs” by saying that Haiti could be helped by Catholic Relief Services. Like Pilate, we could wash our hands free of the problem. Twelve years later, Haiti is as poor as ever, no one really cares about their poverty but we open our immigration doors to those who can come here easily because they are part of a contiguous land mass.
And we should not fool ourselves about immigration policy: its no more about people than racism is; it’s about power, politics and using people as a convenient means to score political points.
Some of my family lived in Haiti years ago under Duvalier & things were much, much better then, even under a brutal dictatorship. The nation was at least functioning, businesses & hotels were open to tourists, streets were safe (unless you were a political foe of Papa Doc.)
Haiti’s had its “restavek” children: a cultural form of child slavery/forced indenture that continues on today. Haitian immigrants have actually brought restaveks to the US in the past unaware that’s illegal here.
I don’t know how much worse things can get in Haiti. It’s terribly sad & Haiti’s an absolutely beautiful country with some wonderful people, amazing food, Art, music, & history.
I greatly appreciate Feser’s analysis of race, slavery and CRT. What concerns me is that the civil rights movement, along with various civil rights laws, paved the way for CRT and the Black Lives Matter crowd. Martin Luther King prepared the way for the likes of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton and all the race-hustler intellectuals populating colleges and universities. I do not think that normal people, those with a committment to a just society, can do much about CRT and BLM without dismantling the legal and cultural apparatus which now goes by the name of ‘civil rights.’
I greatly appreciate Dr. Feser’s book and look forward to reading it His identifying CRT as a cult seems fully appropriate. The author of the future version of ‘Animal Farm’, must unmask the unreasonable, malevolent and deadly precepts of CRT. Only a work on George Orwell’s level of subtly of story line, clarity of message and broad readability will make an inroad into this soul killing pathology found it CRT.
We read: “CRT started out as a movement in academic legal studies…”
Indeed. What is needed, then, is a new and different start point–the multiracial (!) wisdom attributed to several different racial sources–Chinese, Turk, Greek: “A fish rots from the head down.”
And, we shouldn’t be happy until racial groups including white dudes are all proportionately represented in high-paid professional sports! Wait, what?
The existence of a culture in southern Iraq that built the first cities on the planet, and invented writing — the Indo-European Sumerians — was unknown until the 19th century. Found in the ruins of their cities were white calcite votive statuettes that have lapis lazuli (blue) eyes. This culture was erased from the ancient records of every other culture. Even today, few people are aware of this.
It’s rather amazing that the Sumerians, in their spoken language, referred to themselves as the “Shum,” and that this name is the linguistic equivalent of the Hebrew name “Shem,” son of Noah, according to the late German Sumerologist, Arno Poebel. Their neighbors directly next-door to the east were the Elamites. The eldest son of Shem was named Elam. The public hears nothing of this history, and I patched this together from my years of study in this direction. No doubt, Arno Poebel saw the entire picture.
The name “Adam,” prior to the addition of vowel points in the Hebrew text, appeared exactly the same as the name “Edom(ites),” meaning “red.” This reinforces what Dr. Thor Heyerdahl concluded concerning the physical appearance of the Sumerian hierarchy. They might well have consisted of a Scandinavian-like people.
Whenever it is discussed as to who took the land from whom, these facts ought to be included in the discussion.
When discussing the displacement of cultures from one land to another, the ideas of parental responsibility, and the promises of the Covenant agreement ought to be included. At Lev 26.3-6, good weather and prosperity are linked to keeping the terms of the Covenant.
It is in the nature of being a sinner to spend a lifetiime tempted to pursue exoneration while avoiding the pangs of actual remorse. Thus, we are all prone to creating our belief systems in such a manner that explain evil in the world exclusively in terms of those who are safe to conceive of as being dissimilar to ourselves and associate goodness with those we think of as similar to ourselves, and we all have to contrive a lot of lies to get there.
Feser’s assumption that Whites cannot be [inherently] responsible for the ills of the Black community is correct. Unless it’s proved that Whites are responsible in all or most instances at times subconsciously. Protagonists for CRT will offer as evidence disparity between the races. Their logical resolution would be equanimity.
This argument is powerful because of the disparity. So convincing that Deacon Greydanus in a debate with me on the issue appealed to a USCCB subsidiary committee documented acknowledgment. I agreed that there is some merit to this premise, although there’s no convincing evidence that there is a ‘White’ universal moral responsibility for Black inequality. The question was reduced to consciousness [Greydanus], acknowledgment of slavery, a long history of prejudice and oppression.
CRT’s primary error is inherent prejudice by Whites. The historical argument cannot be attributed to Whites today. Resolution based on complete equanimity is also a false proposition, since we are, in this Nation, primarily responsible for our own advancement. Nor can a ‘level playing field’ be used as evidence there is intentionally driven inequality when there remains and always will be grades of personal ability and achievement.
CRT as an argument does have a degree of historical merit, no merit as evidence of a White inherent presumption of superiority. As such it is an immoral ideology based on presumption of evidence found in manifest inequality, that actually deepens the divide between the races, absolves Blacks of their moral responsibility to the community, fomenting license. Whites are subjected to a false sense of guilt, are compelled to believe they must make financial compensation, unequal performance recognition, adding further detriments to Black advancement.
All this underlies the repudiation of our inherent humanness, a humanness motivated by grace and fulfilled by love for our brother.
“Gramsci held that oppressive bourgeois power maintains itself by way of ‘hegemony’ over the cultural assumptions and institutions of society” (Feser). Dr Feser addresses a virtual universal dynamic that requires a further look. Most reasonably well read know Fr Antonio Gramsci was a Catholic priest, origin Sardinia, a relatively impoverished Italian province. If we examine Gramsci’s premise and remove “oppressive Bourgeois power” we may find precise power structures existing in virtually all nations including the US. Which is why Gramsci’s premise is adoptable by Marxism and critics of power structure in general.
Gramsci was incarcerated by Mussolini who installed a similar socialist structure as later adopted by Hitler and National Socialist Germany. Power structures are necessary in rule and order, benevolent or otherwise. As in the US they can be corrupted. We may legitimately argue Gramsci’s critique was correct as a response to Fascism. For example, if a Christian socialist movement replaced Mussolini.
Another point is that Feser is correct in citing Catholic doctrine and the argument against CRT [his book a welcome contribution to understanding the issues] that we as Catholic consider all men from a philosophical theological premise, as created in God’s image with inherent rights and dignity.
Our issue has been how well do Catholics and others observe these essential principles? Although the basic ideas of CRT ideology are false it does address an apparent truth in the subtlety of racist tendencies in our culture.
Some interesting comments, Father. If you and others want to dig a little bit more into the problems of Critical Race Theory and how to counteract it, also pick up a copy of Dr. James Lindsay’s “Race Marxism” that has apparently eluded Dr. Feser even though it was published this past February. Lindsay explores and exposes the problems with critical race theory in greater detail than what Feser does, and, as I suspected and wrote about in another comment regarding Dr. Feser’s book a few weeks ago, Feser’s chapters and almost all of his analysis of critical race theory in and of itself is in many respects a shortened version of what Lindsay’s book sets forth. Feser’s book is also good because of his chapters on the Catholic approach to racism, but what I believe makes Lindsay’s book a bit more valuable overall is not only the greater depth and details in his book, but also an entire chapter of more than 30 pages devoted to how good people can successfully fight the evil that is critical race theory.
Would someone please define racism?
By the bye, Fr. Morello, you are way too kind and concede way too much to the straw man arguments that S. Greydanus uses ad nauseum to avoid cogent points made by others that demonstrate the falsity of the “white people need to come to grips with their inherent racism and related sins” maliciously false narrative proudly touted by S. Greydanus.
In an early attempt to engage S. Greydanus (I have since learned my lesson that directly doing so is a waste of time because he refuses to honestly engage.), I wrote the following as part of a comment challenging his nonsense about white racism in his article regarding the Buffalo shooting, etc. (I believe this article’s comment section also houses the “debate” you mention having with him):
May 23, 2022
DV:
“Now, instead of me also going into a lengthy refutation of the unfounded declarations set forth by the article author, I will now provide a list of many excellent sources that present compelling narratives backed by facts which unequivocally demonstrate why the author is basically guilty of making false accusations and wrongly stereotyping too many white people in the process.
First, a website known as PragerU (aka Prager University) provides many insightful, fact-supported videos of differing lengths, but here I recommend the following ‘5-minute’ videos presented by a variety of people of different races:
‘What I Can Teach You About Racism’ by Dr. Carol Swain
‘Is America Racist?’ by Larry Elder
‘Are the Police Racist?’ by Heather MacDonald
‘Black Fathers Matter’ by Larry Elder
‘How to End Systemic Racism’ by Amala Ekpunobi
‘Who are the Racists?’ by Derryck Green
‘The Ferguson Lie’ by Larry Elder
‘Police Go Where the Crime Is’ by Heather MacDonald
‘A Short History of Slavery’ by Candace Owens
‘Are Some Cultures Better Than Others?’ by Dinesh D’Souza
‘What Happened in Charlottesville?’ by Steve Cortes
‘The Media’s Very Fine People Myth’ – PragerU Short Clip (~2 minutes)
For those of you who have the time, check any or all of the following books (among others):
‘Race Marxism’ by James Lindsay
‘America’s Discrimination Circus’ by Kathleen Brush
‘The War On Cops’ by Heather MacDonald
‘The War On the West’ by Douglas Murray
‘Black Rednecks and White Liberals’ by Thomas Sowell
_____________________________________________
Warning: All of the videos and books set forth above contain many claims and declarations that are supported by objective facts. They are not supported by silly opinion surveys that ignore facts, nor by made-up narratives, and not by bogus history.”
…
___________
And the following, Father, is how S. Greydanus replied regarding my suggested videos:
“REPLY
SDG
MAY 23, 2022 AT 7:00 PM
PragerU. Ah haha.”
____________________________
You see, Father, he did not even have the decency to check out and honestly engage even a few of the videos, and instead he unjustly tarred and feathered PragerU by his dismissive laughing it off. Ironically, this is an example of abject bigotry and false stereotyping (the kind he would rightly criticize if directed at minorities) toward legitimate voices because they do not agree with the bogus narrative pushed by S. Greydanus. Also, many of the resources I set forth are presented or written by black people who have not swallowed the falsehoods of the “white man automatically bad and racist” narrative, and so dishonest people frequently avoid engaging these people who they also unjustly dismiss and falsely stereotype as being nothing more than “house negroes” and so on.
Father, I now invite you and others to at least watch the videos I set forth, especially because many of them address and refute some of the elements/claims of CRT that you have conceded to S. Greydanus, at least in part.
Lastly, unlike S. Greydanus, I actually reviewed his oft-referenced USCCB’s “we adopt the CRT theory narrative of white racism” document entitled “Open Wide Our Hearts.” Check this out, too, if you have the time and you don’t have a weak stomach, and note, as is quite typical of such documents based on an accepted narrative that is low on facts, how accusations upon accusations upon accusations fill the document based primarily on unsupported assumptions that X, Y, and Z bad things of the past are still very much with us today, that racism is basically the sole property of white people, that slavery is primarily a white man’s sin despite the history of slavery practiced by all races everywhere throughout the world (in fact, blacks have engaged in more slavery than white people), that native Americans were only traumatized by white people even though they, too, engaged in slavery and tribal warfare among the various tribes led to taking over lands once occupied by the conquered tribes, and so on and so on. In short, a completely one-sided and unjust narrative that could have easily been written by any proponent of critical race theory to try to justify making false accusations about white people in general.
Lastly, the notion of “unconscious bias” has been put to the test and shown to be mostly wanting, so please do not grant too much to this bogus claim. In the book by Kathleen Brush set forth in my list, the accomplished researcher Brush dedicates 2 small chapters to exposing this false claim, and she sets forth actual data, studies, and related findings that illustrate the reality of what unconscious bias really is and how it is being exploited by race hustlers and fellow travelers to yet again falsely accuse white people of being inherently racist, and that “white people can’t even help themselves,” which is indeed a most malevolently false charge accepted by way too many people who promote harmful and hateful narratives that are not based on objective facts.
God Bless.
I appreciate your comments of which I basically agree, particularly the false notion of a universal White unconscious prejudice, and the resources you recommend.
Thanks, Father. You will indeed enjoy the wisdom that is presented in any of the recommended resources you choose to engage.
Now, even though it shouldn’t matter, but because the Left and the Extreme Left “Woke” place too much emphasis on it, please note the following regarding the people behind my recommended resources that SDG and others with similarly arrogant prejudices unjustly dismiss as sell-outs, lacking in understanding, and so on simply because they do not swallow the Left/Woke’s bigoted and false narratives:
Black Scholars/Independent Thinkers:
Dr. Carol Swain
Larry Elder
Amala Ekpunobi
Phd Candidate Derryck Green
Candace Owens
Dr. Thomas Sowell
_______________
Dinesh D’Sousa is originally from India
Steve Cortes is of Colombian descent.
Terrific interview — thank you, Dr. Feser and CWR. Devastating logic.
Leftists, with their insanely rollicking, self-contradicting and diabolically unsound ideas, truly are a laugh a minute.
CRT boils down to this: if you treat everyone the same, regardless of the color of their skin, then you are a racist. So only by being a racist can you not be a racist.
(Think about it, and then remember — they’re smarter than we are.)
Same thing with feminism. Leftists are so committed to the rights of women that they deny that women even exist as a distinct biological genotype. Obviously, if women and men can change places now, no one can be at a disadvantage.
Pretty neat, eh?
And, naturally, to protect inner city minorities from the evil racist police, leftists reduce funding to police departments and empty the jails. Whereupon, the residents of the cities are robbed and murdered at unprecedented rates when serious crime skyrockets.
(It’s good that so many leftists work in academia. Ideas like these are too stupid to be taken seriously anywhere else.)
Oh, and I’ve always marveled at the way leftists deny that objective truth exists. But they insist that Trump and Fox News and Tucker Carlson still somehow manage to lie.
I mean, come on!
And, maybe best of all, they insist that the people trying to save scores of millions of children around the world each year from being dismembered or scalded to death or puréed alive by powerful vacuums, are uncaring and insensitive.
Conservatives just need to mock leftists and their clown-car thinking. Satire is kryptonite to lefties because they’re all about appearing intellectually edgy and au courant and outré.
So pointing out what silly, superstitious buffoons they are takes a bit of a toll on the effect they’re going for.
Brineyman, how right you are. We can forego the vitriol when it comes to responding to the Left. The best response is to treat everything that comes out of their mouths as laughable. We should practice laughing more.
As for American racism, consider the thoughts of Confederate Vice President Alexander H. Stephens shortly before the Civil War actually began:
Stephens was right about the founding generation believing that slavery was “in violation of the laws of Nature.” The reason the American Constitution, quite temporarily in the eyes of the founders, “secured every essential guarantee to the institution while it should last,” was that, as Stephens puts it, “It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with,” and they were convinced it would soon be gone anyway, as Horace Greeley confirmed in 1856:
To accuse the founding generation of being fundamentally racist (which is done by critical race theory) because their revolution didn’t end slavery is as ridiculous as it would be to accuse today’s Christians of being pro-abortion because they don’t see clearly how to end “legal” baby murder. We are working on it; and we will continue to work on it.
It is telling that CRT advocates all seem to be vehemently pro-abortion.
(1) Cornerstone Speech; Savannah, Georgia; March 21, 1861
(2) A History of the Struggle for Slavery Extension or Restriction in the United States from the Declaration of Independence to the Present Day; Horace Greeley; New York: Dix, Edwards & Co., 221 Broadway; 1856
Alexander Stephens’ nephew and General Sherman’s son are buried next to each other in the Jesuit cemetery in Grand Coteau, Louisiana.
I *think* it’s his nephew but in any case, a close relative.
It’s a beautiful setting and a center for retreats.
In Louisiana slavery wasn’t as much based upon skin colour. Free Creole people of colour owned slaves and some owned quite a few on large plantations. That had been the case also in Haiti. Even in Anglo colonies like Jamaica people of colour owned slaves but less frequently.
History is complicated for sure and we look at it through a present day filter.
Yes. It is complicated. And as Feser points out CRT is “simpleminded and dogmatic.”
Is there any pre-1960s discussion of human rights in catholic documents? Human rights always sounded like a secular term to me
Indentured servitude was very little different from chattel slavery. The contracts of indenture were indeed sold from one person to another as an item of personal property (chattel). The indentured could not just quit and depart until the terms of his/her indenture were fulfilled, unless they came up with the cash value of the contract, and they were indeed pursued and detained if they tried to escape. Considering how unjust many imprisonments have been over the millennia, often deliberately to raise a labor force, I don’t see that as being different that chattel slavery either.
Early in our colonial history thousands of indentured laborers in the Virginia and Maryland tobacco fields were British convicts who had been sold into servitude. Two of Stonewall Jackson’s ancestors were among those.
Before the Revolution, the American colonies served as a dumping ground for Britain’s unwanted. Convicts were cheaper than African slaves and more expendable. A child convict could be purchased for a couple pounds. After American independence Britain used Tasmania and Australia to ease the load on their prisons.
I am supremely grateful that the noxious critical race theory is being subjected to laser sharp analysis of Dr. Feser. His book, as previewed in this interview, dismantles it thoroughly. As for immigration, I guess his remark that Catholics should always have a generous attitude towards immigrants is subject to some interpretation. For example, what does it mean in regard to the Muslim immigration to the West? For many reasons, significant Muslim populations are simply a terrible problem for European nations and their offspring in North American and Australia. As Dr. Feser states, a nation has a right (really a duty) to take into account the economic and cultural impact of immigration when formulating its policies. I would add that there are also religious, political, security and ethnic factors that also need to be examined.
Tony:
For a much more thorough and deeper analysis of the dangers of Critical Race Theory that goes well beyond Dr. Feser’s short contribution, and which also includes some 30-plus pages on how to successfully combat this pestilence in real world situations, see Dr. James Lindsay’s “Race Marxism” that was published earlier this year.
Critical Race Theory? I`ll see you and raise you White Replacement Theory.
It’s all different flavors of dangerous foolishness.
That leftists support mass third world immigration to the US to replace the white Christian middle class is no conspiracy theory. They brag about it and openly proclaim that the country will be much better off as a result of the demographic transformation. They also assume, not unreasonably, that it will cement their political hegemony and inflict much pain on the people they despise. Their raw power calculations for the short to intermediate term are almost certainly correct; in the long run the situation will likely devolve into a horrid war of all against all in which no one, including the cultural Marxists, will be safe.
“ Purported racial differences”? I must say this book is a head scratcher for me. Why is the man of such high reputation getting into the muck of politics, and rhetoric, because that’s what “Racism” is. A rhetorical scare word, a fancy cuss word.
The idea that there may not be racial differences is the most absurd thing I have ever heard. This is a typical conservative move: there are no races. The idea of a colorblind society is an absurdity only Whites are capable of deluding themselves with!
Explain the illegitimacy rate in blacks. Explain the non existent achievements of the black race (no, blacks didn’t invent the peanut). Explain the violence and criminality of the black race.
Where are these features to be found? In the body? If we are to believe Feser that the body or biology is meaningless, then look at what you must conclude.
That the soul of blacks are different. It is quite remarkable that this otherwise good man has done this. I wonder about his motivations. Because look at what he seeks to do
TO the liberals feser says, “I’m not a racist! I’m a good White!”
and to the beaitoful losers in the Conservative movement, and to the people that are genuinely scared at the antiWhite hatred that is happening now, feser says, “ “CRT is bad”
Well no duh, sir. Tell us something we don’t know.
Difference of race or condition or sex is indeed taken away by the unity of faith, but it remains imbedded in our mortal interactions, and in the journey of this life the apostles themselves teach that it is to be respected, and they even proposed living in accord with the racial differences between Jews and Greeks as a wholesome rule.
St Augustine Commentary on Galatians.
“The idea that there may not be racial differences is the most absurd thing I have ever heard. This is a typical conservative move: there are no races.”
My copy of the book hasn’t arrived, but I’d ne surprised if Prof. Feser denies the existence of races.
One could do studies where you look at European ancestry in say African-Americans and Hispanic-Americans and see if IQ goes up as European ancestry increases. Of course these studies haven’t been done because it’s likely what the results will be.
So he misspoke in the interview when he said purported differences.
Race is indeed a social construct but there are inherited genetic differences among groups of people. And as you mentioned, most of us are to some degree mixtures of ancestries, especially in places like North America.
DNA is very important, probably more so than we realize, but it’s not about “race.”
The policy of racial “color blindness” on which the “civil rights revolution” was supposedly founded has turned out to be a fraud and a failure. Like most revolutions, the one led by non-whites such as Martin Luther King, Jr. moved from a moderate phase demanding merely equal treatment and the end of legal racial discrimination to a far more radical stage demanding outright racial privileges for non-whites (through “affirmative action”) and a myriad of special exemptions and policies designed to benefit and empower non-whites (e.g., allowing or encouraging exclusively black, Hispanic, or Indian clubs, associations, and political groups and not infrequently forcing whites to subsidize them, but rigorously forbidding and denouncing such racially distinctive groups for whites) and at the same time attacking and demonizing white institutions, icons, symbols, and heroes, and eventually whites themselves as a group. It is the radical phase of the revolution that has now become established and threatens to become even more radical as non-white numbers and power increase, as non-white racial consciousness evolves to higher and more aggressive levels of expression, and as a prohibited white racial consciousness continues to dwindle and the white capacity to mobilize resistance to racial aggression vanishes with it.
“Color blindness,” in other words, has failed if it was ever seriously intended in the first place…
Sam Francis, Introduction to Race and the American Prospect, 2006
I would suggest that the roots of CRT (Antiwhitism) is in the Civil Rights movement.