Critical race theory: a ruling-class ideology

CRT’s obsession with racial categorisation and white privilege leaves little room to consider the impact of social class on people’s life chances. Indeed, in the rush to construct intersectional hierarchies that position people of colour as oppressed victims of entrenched white superiority, the experiences of wealthy, highly educated, well-connected black people are overlooked. And rather than promoting solidarity between working-class people of all skin colours, poor white people must be taught to recognise their privileges.

Some people certainly do benefit from CRT. The academics, experts and workplace trainers that comprise the burgeoning diversity industry make a good living and find an important sense of purpose in revealing our unconscious bias, hearing penance and holding out the promise of absolution. They are morally invested in the existence of racism and cannot afford for it to ever disappear. Members of the wider graduate class of experts, bureaucrats and managers have imbibed the CRT script. They know that, to paraphrase the socialite and journalist Nancy Mitford, referring to ‘people of colour’ is ‘U’ (vocabulary that marks one out as upper class), while ‘coloured people’ is distinctly ‘non-U’. They know that three years ago, the acronym BME (Black and Minority Ethnic) fell out of fashion and was replaced by BAME (with Asian specified). And they know that BAME itself is now on its way out. Attitudes change and language evolves over time but policing vocabulary in the name of enforcing anti-racism is how today’s graduate class shores up its moral authority and social status. Their special insights into white privilege and the impact of microaggressions allow them to justify their position.

This elite anti-racist project is terrible for everyone else. Black and white people alike are reduced to their skin colour and set in opposition to one another. Black people must learn to see themselves as victims, white people as privileged oppressors. Back in the days of empire, upper-class British boys were trained up for a life in the colonies, they had a role to fulfil managing and civilising the natives. Over a century on, the natives are now at home rather than abroad, and white rather than black or brown, but the civilising mission remains the same. It is now white working-class men who are made to atone for their privilege in a neverending process of repentance. As DiAngelo puts it:

‘A positive white identity is an impossible goal. White identity is inherently racist; white people do not exist outside the system of white supremacy.’

We have a new elite that uses not racism but anti-racism to invent differences between people which it exploits for its own ends. These radicals do not want to end racism but for it to continue indefinitely. They must not be allowed to get away with this.