The Inevitable Implosion of Critical Race Theory

Critical Race Theory, or CRT, is not a new concept. Its origins stretch back over 30 years. However, its current popularity in media stories and political speech makes it seem like a new thing to most people. In brief, this theory promotes the idea that as far as race is concerned, all of the efforts undertaken in the US over the last 250 years to realize the central aspirational theme in the Declaration of Independence, “that all men are created equal”, have failed. Moreover, CRT claims many of those efforts, like Civil Rights legislation, Amendments to the Constitution, and even the Civil War have actually served to institutionalize racism even further in the US rather than evolving us to be colorblind.

Advocates of CRT propose that a radical transformation of our society is necessary to correct this wrong. That includes teaching a revised version of our history in schools, training the “white supremacy” out of white adults, enacting affirmative action programs for certain races, and redistributing wealth based on race.

Although CRT is still largely confined to academia, it has started to infiltrate our primary and secondary school systems. Its most visible application is forced antiracist “training” in parts of government and in businesses wanting to burnish their “woke” credentials.

Of course, CRT and all other race theories are premised on the assumption that there are at least two distinguishable races among us that are in tension. There is no question that racial tension has been part of America’s past – at times to a terrible extent, and with awful consequences. But to what degree does racism exist today in America? Are we, as CRT would have us believe, as racist a society as ever because racial “tension” is built-in to us from birth, at least in white people, and can’t be legislated out?

Curiously, proponents of CRT clearly state in their talking points that their theory is not rooted in biology. We believe they make this point up front because they cannot refute the argument that racism is in fact disappearing because of biology. We rarely see this perspective articulated in the media, so we will explain it here.

What becomes of CRT, or any other anti-racist movement when most of the population in our country is of mixed-race? How will people be identified for inclusion or exclusion from CRT-instigated affirmative action efforts? How will the CRT authorities know who to redistribute wealth to based on race?

It’s only been relatively recently that the Census Bureau began counting mixed-race individuals (since the year 2000). Included in that count are only those who self-identify as being “biracial” (having parents of different races). The census does not ask respondents about grandparents of different races which can create mixtures like ¼ of one race and ¾ of another. Two famous examples of that case are Archie and Lilibet, the children of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle (each 25% black). Even with the census count limited to only biracial people, the Census Bureau has calculated that the US population will be 30% biracial by 2060. That being the case, mathematics tells us that by 2060, the number of people with more than one race among their grandparents will easily exceed more than half the US population, making people of mixed-race the largest demographic in the US by far.

This creates a big problem for the endurance of CRT as a lasting concept and for race hustling¹ in general. We don’t have to wait 40 years to see why, as there are some obvious examples of this right now. Take Barack Obama. His genetic mix is actually more white than any other demographic. His mother is white and his father is of Kenyan and Arab decent (mostly Arab). Does that make Obama a white supremacist by birth whose “baked-in” biases require extensive anti-racist training? This is the conundrum that Critical Race Theorists won’t talk about. Obama and everyone else of mixed-race today appear to be automatically absolved because of something akin to the “one drop of black blood” rule.²  That old notion allows a mixed-race person to self-identify as black even if it is a minority of his/her genetic makeup. A big problem for CRT is that cheap DNA testing for anyone is revealing that more and more Americans who thought they were entirely white actually have a mixed-race genetic ancestry. In fact, scientifically, every one of us has the proverbial “one drop of black blood” since all our paternal genetic ancestry extends back to a single East African male 275,000 years ago. So where do the CRT folks draw the line on how much “whiteness” is enough to target a person for anti-racist training? And what about those people who have dark skin color but otherwise have no genetic link to the past sins of American racism? Our sitting Vice-President Kamala Harris is a prime example of that. Her mother is East Indian, and her father is British Jamaican (both born and raised in their native countries).

It would be technically and realistically impossible to parse the level of whiteness in every person to determine if they fall into the oppressor class or the oppressed class. This is why CRT will die a relatively quick death once any attempt is made to apply it for real in any kind of economic and/or affirmative action effort. It will rapidly devolve into a more refined version of the Elizabeth Warren game of Indian heritage. People will present themselves as eligible for race-based benefits because they can prove their genes include some percentage, even miniscule, of an “oppressed” race. The more genetically diverse we become, the more intractable the race identity problem gets. We are already biologically evolving beyond the problem CRT is trying to fix.

We can’t pass up one more spectacular case of how the complexities of a mixed-race population can create a Gordian Knot of sorts for CRT.  For this example, we go to our all-time favorite racial justice warrior, National Anthem hater, expert kneeler, and subject of five past Box Travels articles, Colin Kaepernick. Kaepernick has a white biological mother and black biological father (whose identity is unknown). However, he was adopted by white (100%) parents and grew up in a family that included a white brother and white sister. Kaepernick was literally immersed in a cauldron of unregulated whiteness during his upbringing. Worse, at least in the eyes of Critical Race Theorists, Kaepernick went on to be a successful capitalist, graduating from college, then competing and negotiating his way to millions of dollars in the NFL and with Nike. By all objective measures, Kaepernick falls into the category of the Devil incarnate according to CRT and should be subject to intensive anti-racist training. Not only that, the millions of dollars he earned as a capitalist should be taken away and redistributed as part of the CRT agenda. None of that will ever happen of course because 50% (and possibly less) of Kaepernick’s biology is black.

The US population is well on its way to having racism, and race itself, relegated to the history books. The reason has nothing to do with CRT or any other anti-racist social construct. It has everything to do with biology and the fact that we are quickly and inevitably becoming a mixed-race population. Tension between races melts away as the ability to distinguish between races goes away. Biracial people are the fastest growing demographic in our population as measured by the Census Bureau. It follows mathematically that people of mixed-race (not strictly biracial but having at least one grandparent of a different race) are growing at an even faster pace.

This is another case of a problem that will eventually fix itself.  In the meantime, however, the pernicious racism of CRT will do damage to our young people, our schools and our nation. How much damage we allow it to do before we evolve out of its relevance, is up to us.

¹ Race Hustling – the business of earning money, fame, or stature by way of fomenting racial tensions and then promoting (selling) a solution.

² In the past, this unwritten “rule” was used to FORCE a person to identify as black, when it might have been to their advantage to identify as white. Now the concept is apparently turned on its ear.