Requiem for Reality: Critical Race Theocrats and Social Justice Dystopia

By Harry G. Hutchison

Critical Race Theory, like most ideologies before it, promises an earthly paradise premised on ceaseless revolution, but instead of delivering on this promise, it produces a terrestrial hell echoing the inner nihilism of modern life. Contemporary social justice movements, just like progressivism, the New Deal, and post-Civil War Southern Democrats, place Westerners in bondage rather than delivering on the promise of unlimited freedom.

Requiem for Reality responds to the widening pendulum shifts of our age. These developments consume and incense the nation. These shifts offer a bewildering set of claims grounded in the presumption that race and other forms of human identity explain all forms of disparity and inequality. Against such claims, it is crucial to distinguish between a development narrative and a bias narrative for the purpose of explaining ethnic disparity. The development narrative is grounded in data that often deliver unwelcome facts. The facts show that Asian Americans, as well as West Indian blacks, often do better than white Americans in schooling, per capita income, and crime rates. Indeed, Syrian Americans, Korean Americans, Indonesian Americans, Taiwanese Americans, and Filipino Americans experience significantly higher median household incomes than whites and higher test scores, lower incarceration rates, and longer life expectancies. Oblivious to such facts, the bias narrative, on the other hand, grounds itself in the “white privilege” thesis suggesting that only race matters. Surfacing from the toxic pit of ideology, the bias narrative emphasizes the racist claim that African Americans are the only ethnic group in the world who cannot succeed under less-than-ideal conditions. Separated from important facts, this narrative often substitutes absolute Neo-pagan certainties originating in a make-believe world for commonplace notions of truth and reality. As such, the “white privilege” thesis, rather than improving the conditions of African Americans and others, offers a utopian dream that threatens to become a national nightmare. The urgent pursuit of utopia reflects trends that are largely anthropological, sociological, and more spiritual than political. Responding to these developments, which have given rise to victimhood claims within gender and transgender categories will require more than argumentation, rational analysis, superior logic, or even the inauguration of a Hanging Judge. It will require courage because otherwise, Chairman Mao’s forecast, stating that there is a great disorder under heaven and the situation is excellent, may come true here just like it has already come true for China.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Post Hill Press
• Release date: Feb 14, 2023
• ISBN: 9781637586563

Harry G. Hutchison

Harry G. Hutchison is Senior Counsel and Director of Policy for the ACLJ. He also serves as a frequent commentator on the Sekulow radio broadcast. He has also appeared on the Sean Hannity Show. He has served as a Professor of Law at the Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University for more than a decade. He has also served as a Visiting Fellow at Harris Manchester College, Oxford University, and as a Founding Fellow at the M.G. Robertson Global Centre for Law & Public Policy. Currently, he serves as a Distinguished Professor of Law at Regent University Law School and as a Co-editor of Religious Organizations and the Law, Chapters 24 & 25 (with William W. Bassett, W. Cole Durham, Mark A. Goldfeder & Robert T. Smith) (West Pub., 2021). He has published more than sixty law review articles. He has published articles in the New York Times, the Detroit News, and the Detroit Free Press. He has also written more than 100 blog posts on matters of public policy including failing public schools, religious liberty, and constitutional law.

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© 2023 by Harry G. Hutchison

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Table of Contents

A Note from the Author

I.          Preamble: Three Questions Surface from the Arrival of Social Justice Warriors in the West

II.        To Change the World: The Rise of Critical Race Theory and Social Justice Warriors

III.       On the Road to Catastrophe?

IV.        The Foundations of Liberalism’s Obsession with Race and Identity

V.         The Road to Racial Essentialism

VI.       Expanding the Liberal Stage to Accommodate More Actors

VII.      Progressivism: A Model for Revolutionaries

VIII.    Three Primary Explanations for SJWs’ Arrival Suggest a Looming Religious Conflict is in the Offing

IX.       Plumbing the Religious Depths of the SJW Enterprise

X.         Religious Conflict Surfaces Out of Moral Superiority

XI.       Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Endnotes

A Note from the Author

I begin with a confession. To paraphrase Stanley Crouch,¹ the notion of drafting a new book in an endless cycle of books on race, the mural of identity, and societal fragmentation has no more appeal than attending yet another three-hour funeral service. Whenever the latest such book is published, just like the latest overlong memorial celebration, it suggests the hysterical nature of sentimentality, allows other authors to invent relationships, knowledge, and concerns they never had, and permits authors of earlier books to breathe more easily because the new book’s dishonesty exceeds their own. As waves of anger and fear circulate in the West’s gathering gloom,² I hope this book escapes this trap.

Requiem for Reality: Critical Race Theocrats and Social Justice Dystopia examines the origin and history of a cluster of ideas implicating liberalism’s increasing surrender to its contradictions, the populace’s rising rage in an age of anxiety, the creation of a new lexicon offering nonneutral notions of race and identity, and the arrival of new secular faiths in an epoch torn apart by rising controversies that feature the flight from the truth and the embrace of absolute certainty. Advanced by moral superiority, progressivism, and dreams of utopia, these developments herald the swift ascent of Critical Race Theory and Social Justice Warriors. This viewpoint represents nihilistic trends in post-modernism that amount to a systematic misperception of the nature of reality.³ Equally apparent, this view is premised on a reductionist conception of the universe that sees the cosmos as being comprised simply of material things and virtualized abstractions that often reflect little more than electronic memes. Our rising morally superior commodity culture rejects the view that the globe primarily consists of complex human relationships and an equally complex history rather than a devitalized version of reality⁴ fashioned from isolated, detached elements that are useful for bureaucratic manipulation and control. This reductionist version of reality caters to self-absorbed elites. It inevitably leads to politics and a society engulfed by woke contradictions and riven by antiracist policies that inevitably advance exclusion rather than freedom.

These developments and their origins should alarm everyone who believes that truth and reality exist, as well as those who believe the universe is morally configured. To be sure, this group includes Christians, Jews, Hispanics, Asians, and African Americans, but especially those who refuse to accept the enslaving bonds of paternalism, and the contemporary world’s core conclusion that we are nothing but a bundle of colliding, senseless, pointless, molecules, whose existence is purely material⁵ and whose future is easily manipulable. Against this backdrop, alarm explodes because what we are witnessing is not a revolution of the oppressed, but a counterrevolution of privileged elites. This surging flight from reality instrumentalizes African Americans and other identity groups as vehicles to entrench progressive globalist elites in power.

In an age featuring a vortex of instability, this book is also about missed opportunities and fabrications by our leaders within the corporate, religious, governmental, academic, and social media arenas. Instead of facing the hard facts, our leaders engage in an emotive refrain that gives them more power as the nation falls apart. Rather than seriously examining the issues, the nation’s leaders placate the gullible with virtue signaling; they castigate the working class and lecture independent-minded African Americans, as progressive elites revel in the benefits enjoyed by their donors, shareholders, and themselves. At the same time, income inequality mounts as citizens increasingly rely on the state and the state’s power to compensate for rising vulnerability.

Provoked by liberalism’s contradictions and failures, social justice innovations take center stage as anti-Christian assertions multiply. At the same time, fashionable remedies for discrimination, inequity, and privilege resemble legal segregation rather than the promised land of liberation. This process, rich in paradox, guarantees that the pursuit of liberation results in more racism, less social justice, less tolerant faiths, and more inequality. Following trends deeply embedded in modern liberalism, critical race theorists seek more control as part of a pattern matching the Progressive Era and the New Deal’s success in depriving the disadvantaged among us of their humanity while transforming them into vassals.

The rise of new dogmas within this framework explains why our duplicitous leaders—as human beings without chests—ignore their complicity in creating conditions that may lead to the nation’s funeral gala accompanied by a dispiriting requiem for reality. Cognizant that the available evidence is terrifying, leaders offer dishonest claims designed to distract from the truth. This book vindicates Stanley Crouch’s message in a different but related context: The nation’s circumstances justify growing calls to bring on a Hanging Judge.

The views expressed herein reflect my independent views entirely, and my opinions should not be attributed to any of the above-referenced institutions.

I. Preamble: Three Questions Surface from the Arrival of Social Justice Warriors in the West

[T]he operative view among progressives was that historical racism is the overriding cause of racial disparities between black and white Americans today…⁶

We live in an immense universe on an extraordinary little blue ball. There is no question it’s a masterpiece, and at its center is the human species.⁷ At the same time, Western nations must brave gathering storms, fostered by the rise of moral superiority and pugnacious secular faiths offering strange doctrines. These moves dispute the legitimacy of America’s founding, Western values, and Christian intuitions, while contesting the place of race, ethnicity, and gender in a divided country—representing a tiny sliver of the cosmos—resulting from what Paul Halpern calls flashes of creation in a creation story that has not yet been entirely written.⁸ Intensifying gloom overwhelms a nation formerly characterized by open debate, commonplace notions of truth, an agreement on reality, and a shared notion of what constitutes justice. The departure from truth and reality obscures the fact that today’s arguments are mainly anthropological, sociological, and more spiritual than political, as Western elites surrender to an addictive quest for power and utopian redemption.

Today the Orwellian flight from truth and reality deeply afflicts the West. For instance, it manifests itself in Sweden, where Lund University professors face the prospect of prosecution, because their scientific study found that ethnic migrants commit more rapes per capita than native-born Swedes.⁹ Prospective prosecutions were advanced because the researchers lacked ethical permission to discover that migrants were overrepresented in statistics of convicted rapists, meaning that this empirical study is racially offensive.¹⁰ Similar social justice intuitions afflict the United States and imply three things: that truth is cruelly offensive, that enforcing the law against the lawless is racist, and that victimhood trumps reality.

In our increasingly pluralistic nation, mounting disputes fracture society as America’s leaders succumb to ideological abstractions, highlighting modern liberalism’s imposing contradictions and accelerating departure from any universally acknowledged principle. Departure from principle hobbles the nation’s capacity to dispute ideological innovations such as Critical Race Theory (CRT), which primarily originated from European sources and which prompts the militant men and women of words to spawn Social Justice Warriors (SJWs) like Chanequa Walker-Barnes, a progressive Christian and public theologian, and Malikk Austin, an African American parent in Fort Worth, Texas. On one account, Ms. Walker-Barnes, after aligning her thinking with Germany’s National Socialist thinker, Heinrich Himmler, prays to God for help in becoming more hateful to white people.¹¹ Fleeing prayer but brimming with tingling urgency, Mr. Austin offers this lock-and-loaded defense of CRT, telling opponents at a school board meeting to shut up¹² as he delivers this warning:

For those who got an issue with this critical race theory equity, this is something I fight for, for my children…. How dare you come out here and talk about the things that my daddy and my grandparents went through…. We are not our ancestors…. I got over 1,000 soldiers ready to go.¹³

Illustrating that the allure of revolutionary abstractions is not limited to the arena of race, the Los Angeles Unified School District promotes left-wing gender theory and transgressive sexuality—including two-spirit sexuality—to four-year-olds;¹⁴ a Denver elementary school teaches kindergartners to disrupt the nuclear family and flee patriarchal practices, as part of an effort to advance transgender-affirming black families and globalism.¹⁵ Against this background, and suffering from self-inflicted immobilization, the nation’s leaders—viewing humans and the more than 120 billion galaxies inhabiting the universe as less than God’s masterpiece—are unwilling to appeal to a principled framework, as radicals offer ideological innovations that promise freedom while instituting such bondage as tyrants have only dreamed of.

Amid the storm surge facing our progressively destructive culture,¹⁶ a flood that is oblivious to Solzhenitsyn’s claim that the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being,¹⁷ the drumbeat of bias and discrimination rages like a percussive nightmare. Arguing that historical racism is not the singular cause of racial disparity, Samuel Kronen observes that the progressive ethos on race is summarized by novelist William Faulkner’s remark: ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past.’¹⁸ Consistent with Faulkner’s observation, SJWs argue that the United States has created an arbitrary hierarchy that presses down on blacks, thus provoking the demand that white oppressors acknowledge their bias and unearned privilege, to free America from the prison of caste, once and for all.¹⁹ Dismissing the Christian claim that by Christ’s wounds, we are healed, this view surrenders to author Bessel van der Kolk’s authority, implying that our wounds heal us. This view thus elevates the centrality of trauma in life, consistent with the determination that there can be no progress until we reckon with the ordeals inflicted on ourselves, on those around us, and on human collectivities that have been inscribed on our flesh.²⁰ Van der Kolk’s perspective echoes poignantly in the writings of Ta-Nehisi Coates, who argues that the traumas to the black body are central to the black experience.²¹ These contentions succumb to an impending sense of urgency regarding the task that lies ahead. Often triggered by the fear of one more violent interaction between a police officer and an unarmed African American, the demand for urgent change leads to the conclusion that simple reliance on race-neutral principles would only allow the privileges of whites and the disadvantages of blacks to accumulate in perpetuity while historical racism is left to repeat itself.²² Ibram X. Kendi, America’s leading woke theorist, argues that [t]he most threatening racist movement is not the alt right’s unlikely drive for a White ethnostate but the regular American’s drive for a ‘race-neutral’ one.²³ Kendi’s views mirror Robin DiAngelo’s claim that the ‘regular American’ is worse than the cross-burning Klan member²⁴ and that America today is worse than in the days of Jim Crow.²⁵ Aroused by the nation’s imperfections and the troubled record of history books that describe the enslavement of the first black Virginians,²⁶ it is argued that, rather than settling for neutrality on racial or identity issues, and rather than accepting the force of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and its explicit rejection of racial discrimination, Americans must first come to terms with the moral and political implications of living in a country that oppressed…entire class[es] of citizens for hundreds of years on the arbitrary basis of ancestry [or otherwise] while flaunting democratic ideals of freedom and equality it was failing to uphold.²⁷ Despite statutory rules granting parents the right to inspect instructional materials as a way of protecting their children from Woke Indoctrination in public schools,²⁸ antiracists’ views reach their pinnacle in the assertion that white parents shouldn’t condemn CRT lessons, because whites in the historical past and the present have been participants in oppression.²⁹ Subordinating the nation’s educational system to the proscriptive and prescriptive injunctions of race and identity as part of a startling move that evokes the single-minded determination of Germany’s National Socialist educational program, which initiated a school for barbarians,³⁰ SJWs also assert that members of minority groups must reject habits and ideas practiced by other cultures, even if the activities promote community cohesion and individual well-being³¹ Presumably this conclusion advances because the scent of oppression infects healthy habits and healthy families even though the force of this claim transforms free humans into vassals.

Introducing Critical Theory (CT), theologian David Cassidy notes that proponents of this theory presume that those in power are necessarily oppressors of those who lack access to power.³² This supposition advances the contention that all reality issues forth from power and provokes the claim that those with power create unjust social structures to maintain control and exclude those without it. This theory furthers the belief that those in society with power are often unaware that they are oppressors.³³ Owing a deep debt to such views, theorists insist that the powerful and the privileged must be attacked for being who they are,³⁴ as a predicate to the necessity of overthrowing institutions.³⁵ This analysis is grounded on an essentially Hegelian-Marxist formulation, locating the doctrine of the Fall not in the hearts of humans, but in the presence of power in various persons and structures.³⁶ Therefore, the Christian Church—which does not deny the reality of sin and evil in the world—is the subject of an accusatory firestorm designed to discredit its truth claims and diminish its influence in society.³⁷ Equally plain, other organizations and individuals possessing any discreditable gender, sexual orientation, or skin color are seen as oppressive powers, thus placing them in CRT’s lethal crosshairs.³⁸ Still, even though antiracists are driven by the smug moral superiority of the present, they are handicapped by contradictions. First, they endeavor to demolish immutable white supremacist power structures, but if their effort succeeds, it destroys their claims about the immutability of those structures.³⁹ Second, such actions reveal that CRT, like all successful revolutions, is inherently conservative, because—at least within the academy—critical race theorists do not necessarily want to eliminate institutions. Instead, they wish to take them over for their own purposes.⁴⁰ Like Marx’s objective, they aim to control people through the existing power structure.

Building on Karl Marx’s destructive views, CRT proponents teach schoolchildren and others to hate the United States, as well as opponents of social justice. While preaching freedom and liberty, antiracists become especially incensed when opposition to CRT is espoused by people of color.⁴¹ Such an espousal provokes outbursts of racial essentialism, suggesting that opposition is grounded in multiracial whiteness—the African American version of white supremacy.⁴² Matching this pattern of despotic paternalism that diminishes rather than enriches African American humanity, Nikole Hannah-Jones, curator of the 1619 Project, argues that there is a difference between being black and being politically black,⁴³ a distinction that permits blacks to be expelled from the African American community when they fail to meet her exacting standards of victimhood membership.⁴⁴

Proponents of CRT often avoid using the term Critical Race Theory, and instead substitute softer and often undefinable words such as equity, culturally responsive scholarship, social innovation, and courageous conversations on race, as they focus on multiculturalism, action civics, cultural competence, inclusion, ethnomathematics, transformation, and implicit bias.⁴⁵ In other instances, children are introduced to the notion of social and emotional citizenship.⁴⁶ These trendy moves indoctrinate kids with extremist ideas⁴⁷ and reach their apex in the Abolitionist Teaching Network’s bid to label Whiteness a form of oppression, as it blames the U.S. educational system for the spirit murder of Black, Brown, and Indigenous children.⁴⁸ In reality, such claims understate the radicalism of the antiracist platform, which now includes thirteen Black Lives Matter Guiding Principles that encourage globalism,⁴⁹ the disruption of the Western nuclear family by creating black villages, and efforts mandating that elementary and middle-school students transform themselves into transgender- and queer-affirming individuals.⁵⁰

CRT’s impact intensifies by applying its corollary—intersectionality—to the domain of race.⁵¹ Intersectionality proponents argue that overlapping sources of oppression compound one another, rendering racial and ethnic minorities, gays and lesbians, and economically disadvantaged groups even more marginalized and victimized by society, in proportion to their accumulating victim identities.⁵² Such views spur efforts to rewrite history to achieve political ends. University of North Carolina (UNC) students enrolled in the university’s Global Whiteness class are taught that Japan’s military aggression during the 1940s was merely an attempt to roll back Euro-American colonialism, as part of the first global attack on white Anglo-American oppression.⁵³ Exhibiting profound hatred for the United States and its E Pluribus Unum motto—which constitutes human history’s most successful diversity project—and dismissing the fact that America has become a beacon of hope and a source of dreams,⁵⁴ this UNC class is devoured by its contradictions. It thus fails to acknowledge that Japanese aggression advanced Auschwitz and the pursuit of racial purity, rather than promoting global justice.

Other antiracist commentators assert that racism has become the most common denominator of today’s political controversies. Issues long debated on other grounds—the Senate’s filibuster rule, voter ID laws, standardized testing, math, statistics, and meritocracy⁵⁵—are now subject to racialized skepticism. To this list mirroring the nation’s radicalized discourse on gender and sex,⁵⁶ the right to bear arms—embedded in the Constitution’s Second Amendment—has now been reframed as a race issue.⁵⁷ Seeing everything through the lens of race, Ibram X. Kendi, after arguing that [t]he use of standardized tests to measure aptitude and intelligence is one of the most effective racist policies ever devised to degrade Black minds and legally exclude Black bodies,⁵⁸ now claims that a Radical Revolutionary Jesus came to free people from the clutches of…the American Empire.⁵⁹ Accepting such tribal views, the Salvation Army—a previously apolitical Christian organization—now promotes racialized ideologies under the banner of its International Social Justice Commission, as it encourages its members to repent and apologize for their racism,⁶⁰ as part of its Black Lives Matter (BLM) program that allegedly improves the plight of black Americans.⁶¹ In reality, antiracists’ inner drive demands the overhaul of American society along Marxist lines.⁶² CRT, SJWs, and BLM are simply the latest iterations of a long effort—first undertaken by white ideologues in the Soviet Union—to whip up racial hatred and urban unrest, to remake America and the West.⁶³

However the story of the rise of SJWs is told, and whatever its moral meaning, these observations prove that America faces a Dark Age ahead, ⁶⁴ as families are rigged to fail, and education has been abandoned for credentialed indoctrination. At the same time, actual science has been forsaken for politicized faux science. The pursuit of virtue has been replaced by virtue-signaling, and the notion of citizenship has been exchanged for tribalism. Progressive and monarchical elites lead these developments, which verify that humans often prefer to live in an oversimplified, monocausal world, obscuring inconvenient facts that undermine antiracists’ preferred narrative.

The antiracist narrative proceeds by insisting that the nation reject [t]hose who respond [to claims of disparity] by pointing to the decline of anti-black racism since the civil rights movement or the subsequent success of other minority groups in the country because such assertions constitute historical denialism.⁶⁵ Antiracists reject the logic of Chief Justice John Roberts, who argues that the way to stop discriminating based on race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.⁶⁶ Antiracists respond by ridiculing Justice Roberts’ claim, secure in the knowledge that our choice of words affects how we think. Mounting ridicule—a stubborn obstacle to any effort to deal honestly with the intractable subject of race⁶⁷—issues forth from a range of identity and gender groups claiming that they have suffered immeasurable harm from past discrimination. Ridicule, scorn, and condescension are indispensable ingredients in an identity-based industry with no end in view.

Arguing that America’s discrimination record is systemically oppressive, social justice endeavors give way to the pursuit of group entitlements, a move that requires a reframing of various political demands as universal moral imperatives. Such imperatives demand that individuals who simply follow the law be denied their just rewards, based on an arbitrary understanding of race or identity that disdains existing rules and regulations.⁶⁸ Premised on the unshakable belief that people of European descent make society racist for their benefit, the quest for social justice strengthens itself by concluding that racism is baked into the system: it is endemic, and thus always present, even if no one is a racist; and lastly, all disparities in group outcomes are due to racist systems.⁶⁹

Consequently, antiracists reject contrary evidence, including data showing that Asian Americans perform better in our society than whites.⁷⁰ Responding to such evidence, antiracists assert that Asians are honorary whites. In reality, the data show that Asian American students study on average thirteen hours per week, more than twice as much as the typical non-Hispanic white student, who studies only five and a half hours per week at home.⁷¹ Consequently, Asian American students dominate educational systems committed to merit, thus leaving them open to the charge that their academic success proves they are racists.⁷² Against such claims, the stark evidence of Asian or second-generation Caribbean black success undermines SJWs’ contention that systemic racism guarantees that racial or ethnic origin, not merit, determines success. Because critical race proponents and gender supremacists⁷³ believe that the only solution worth discussing is the deliberate imposition of present-day discrimination to make up for past discrimination, contrary evidence is dismissed. This is so because antiracists believe that the only answer for present discrimination is future discrimination.⁷⁴

CRT proponents maintain that, if society wishes to escape from denialism on issues of race, gender, sex, and other forms of identity (that now include trans-nonbinary liberation as a form of ecojustice)⁷⁵ then the Western world must accept the following approach. First, grounded in the thesis that domineering power is antiliberal, social justice proponents argue that Platonist hierarchies must be rejected and reversed. Second, the world must be guided by