The word theory signifies proposed
knowledge that is not merely subjective sentiment or belief that is being
prescribed or advocated as an ideology; the purpose of a theory is rather to explain.
Only in terms of better understanding is the implication that a better world
could result (i.e., from the enhanced understanding). Even though a theory does
not constitute established knowledge, that ideologues have seized on the label
as a way of legitimating their respective cherished ideologies should come as
no surprise because ideology sells better in the guise of knowledge even though
a theory has yet to gain sufficient support epistemologically to be recognized
as established knowledge. The epistemological subterfuge—a Trojan horse of
sorts—also hides the fact that the ideologue seeks to persuade or advocate
rather than primarily explain. Under the patina of a knowledge-claim lies quite
another instinctual urge. Nietzsche’s claim that the content of a
thought is none other than an instinctual urge of sufficient power to burst
into consciousness—a manifestation of the will to power—provides an explanation
for why the slight of hand is so easy for ideologues to make in sliding over to
present the veneer of knowledge-claims even though such claims do in fact
differ qualitatively from ideological claims. I contend that critical race “theory,”
as well as the related interactionist “theory,” is in its very substance
ideological in nature, rather than knowledge or even a theory.
Controversial ideologies—and the
ideologues behind them—can gain a lot under the rubric of theory. Nevermind
that a theory is hardly synonymous with objectivity or proof; in fact, the word
theory connotes a want of support. “That’s just a theory,” one scholar critical
of another’s work might say as a way of demanding further argumentation or
empirical data. Einstein did not get a Nobel prize for his theories of
relativity because neither one had garnered any empirical proof by the time the
Nobel committee was looking at his novel theories. It was not until a solar
eclipse in 1918 that his theory of general relativity from 1905 finally had
some evidence. Even with a mere theory being less than solid in academic terms,
labeling an ideology as critical race theory has done much to legitimate the questionable
ideas and hide the advocacy that has motivated the construction and selling of
the “theory.” Besides contending that the “theory” is actually an ideology, I submit
that at least one of the major knowledge-claims behind the theory is spurious.
It is important in terms of the knowledge-construction to note that one
of the founders of the “theory,” Kimberlé Crenshaw, studied government and
Africana studies at Cornell University as an undergraduate (having transferred
in from Akron Community College), and then studied law at Harvard and earned a bachelors
in law (which is the JD or LLB, degree), after which she studied law at
Wisconsin and earned the masters in law, the LLM, for which the LLB/JD is a
prerequisite and thus not a doctorate). Therefore, even though she went on to
be hired as a distinguished professor at UCLA, she was not a scholar because
she had not earned a doctoral degree. As for her “theory” on race and gender, it
should be noted that she did not study sociology, biology, or anthropology and yet
she nonetheless has claimed that race is merely a socially-constructed concept
without any relation to our species as we are constituted biologically and
anthropologically (e.g., natural attributes delimited by race). Similar (and related)
to why power hates a vacuum and thus seeks to fill one, ideology cannot resist
filling an epistemological vacuum. That too is a function of power, rather than
of seeking to explain.
Although earning a doctorate,
such as the Ph.D., Th.D., Ed.D., J.S.D. (law), D.B.A. (business), or D.Sci.M.
(medicine) does not necessarily prevent a person from wandering into other
fields as a dilettante, or from advocating as an ideologue under the subterfuge
of academic knowledge, it is arguably easier for people with less education to
hyper-extend their alleged ken or misrepresent an ideological claim as if it
were a Kantian fact of reason. That both law and medical schools in the United
States allow graduates with only the first (i.e., undergraduate) degree in law and
medicine, respectively, to be titled as professors rather than instructors exacerbates
the problem because the public reasonably assumes that what a professor
professes as knowledge must surely be solid. By the twenty-first century, it
was no longer widely known that the founders of public education in the U.S. believed
that a well-rounded citizenry was essential given the extraordinary popular
sovereignty reserved with the electorates, and thus that a liberal arts degree
should be gained in addition to an undergraduate (i.e., first) degree in most
of the professional schools at a university. The former degree does not render
the second as a graduate degree because the respective schools of knowledge are
different. For example, when I started my studies at Yale’s divinity school
(before going on to take courses in Yale College), that I had already earned a
Ph.D. in another knowledge area did not somehow mean that my first degree in
theology was a doctorate in that field. That Yale had changed the name of its B.D.
to M.Div in 1968 did nothing to change the knowledge-content and so the “masters”
degree was still a bachelors degree in spite of the misnomer. How did such
misnomers as the M.Div., M.D., and J.D. get started in America? When I was
registering to take a law class at Yale, the registrar at Yale’s law school
supplied me with a citation—the book of which contained the answer: when the University
of Chicago relabeled its LLB degree as a “Juris Doctor” to attract students in
1893 because students entering law schools were complaining about having to
spend seven years in college with only two bachelor degrees to show for it. The
first degree in the discipline of law was nonetheless the undergraduate degree
in law schools, and the shift from liberal arts or business was lateral rather
than ascending into graduate school because the knowledge in the respective
schools was and continues to be different. Having studied English Literature,
for example, does not qualify a student to enter into advanced law seminars
without having first taken the survey courses in law. Put another way, one
degree in a school of knowledge does not a doctorate make. It is foolish and
arrogant to presume otherwise, and yet the convenient assumption is commonly
made by the “highly-educated professionals” in hospitals, law firms, courts,
and houses of worship. A lateral move between schools at a university means more
but not higher education. To be sure, more is better than
less. In terms of contributing scholarly knowledge, having a doctorate in a field
of knowledge really does make a difference.
So even though critical race
theory, “which Crenshaw developed, argues race is not natural, but [is instead
merely] a social construct meant to maintain inequality,” we can subject the
claim to critique without having to push back against assuming that Crenshaw
had adequate knowledge in the relevant fields, which exclude constitutional
law and even government, for the claim to be presumed valid epistemologically.
We can treat that “theory” as making an ideological rather than a factual
claim in part because Crenshaw cannot be assumed to be knowledgeable concerning
the existence biologically of clusters of natural physical markers, such as
hair naturally being what is called “afro” in the Black race, and
eye-shape being distinctively “narrow” rather than wide in the Oriental race;
nor can it be assumed that she knew that such empirical features did not play a
role in the development of race in the field of anthropology.[1]
Such observable, empirical markers are natural rather than merely contrived
socially. To be sure, considerable genetic differentiation occurs within a given
race, and multiracial individuals do not display the markers as distinct, but
to claim that race is and has been only a social construct and was and
continues to be motivated to subordinate a particular race as unequal bears
the markers of ideology rather than fact.
That people of a subordinated
race would even claim that there is no such thing as race is at the very least
suspect, given the rather obvious (and understandable) motivation, but to deny
knowledge as if it does not exist is nevertheless a red flag from an academic
perspective. Were race merely socially-constructed and merely a feature of
culture, a race that contains a sordid, violent urban sub-culture Besi
Besides insisting that race is
only socially-constructed, Crenshaw’s unsubstantiated claim that the biologists
and anthropologists who first studied race by observing clusters of observable
markers that differ by race were motivated by a desire to impose inequality is utterly
unfair to the scholars themselves. This shows that Crenshaw has not understood,
or been a part of, the community of scholars wherein gaining knowledge rather
than imposing ideology is valued. Crenshaw’s own motivation can be understood
to be consistent with ideological advocacy from her personal experience and
lack of study at the doctoral level.
At a talk at UCLA, Crenshaw said “that
she experienced gender discrimination in her all-Black study group at Harvard
Law School, adding that she was expected to show solidarity as a Black person
while also being excluded for her gender. She inherited her willingness to
stand up to injustice from her mother and grandparents who defied racism, she
added.”[2]
Her thoughts on “intersectionalism” of race and gender can be understood in
Nietzschean terms as manifestations of her instinctual urges that have been of
sufficient power to break into her consciousness and motivate her “theory
construction,” given her past emotionally hard experience at exclusivist
Harvard. Of course, it could alternatively be that she was diminished or
sidelined in the study group because the other members sought to study law
cases rather than be preached to by an ideologue who was oriented so strongly to
social justice. In other words, Crenshaw’s claim of having been treated as
unequal may be overblown because she misconstrued reasonable reactions of other
students against advocacy under the subterfuge of studying. If so, her concept
of race could be expected to be warped. At the very least, when a person with a
masters in constitutional law nonetheless wades into sociology and anthropology
as if an expert in those academic disciplines, the resulting claims of
knowledge should be taken with a grain of salt. I’ve sat in on enough courses
in constitutional law to know that Crenshaw’s claims in the fields of (philosophical)
ethics, biology, sociology, and anthropology cannot come out of study of court
cases in constitutional law.
Race is not just a sociological
construct devoid of any association with natural observable physiological markers
on human beings, and the concept of race in anthropology did not come out of a
dogmatic motive to subordinate some human beings even though sadly that did
indeed happen. The race “theories” of the Nazi, for example, and of the
American antebellum Southerners demonstrate just how badly the concept of race
has been abused, but even the existence of such sordid conceptions does not
mean that the concept of race is devoid of observable content and even does not
even exist! Visit Japan, or Kenya, and Norway or Sweden, and the respective clusters
of natural, observable markers for the majority of the respective populations are
obvious; race is not just a social concept or figment of a prejudiced mind bent
on sowing inequality. There is no normative inequality implied in observing
markers that cluster as races, for the empirical/descriptive is not in itself
normative. Hume’s naturalistic fallacy is the claim that ought can be
plucked out of is without any need of argument as to why ought
should be.
In short, a theory that denies the
obvious is highly suspect, and, moreover, is likely of and fueled by ideology
rather than constituting knowledge. This is especially likely when the “knowledge”
construction is done by someone who has no (advanced) education in the given
field. Lest it be claimed that “Africana studies” constituted a major in
sociology, anthropology, and biology, I would retort that such a contrived
major is problematic precisely because whether it constitutes a sufficient amount
of knowledge in any of the three basic disciplines is difficult to ascertain. Ethnic
studies, for example, is especially problematic in this regard, given the likelihood
that the content is ideological social-justice advocacy rather than knowledge
per se. If universities in the U.S. would follow the practice in the E.U. of appointing
scholars (i.e., people who have earned the J.S.D. degree) as professors of law,
perhaps the office-holders would be less concerned to use their role to advocate
an ideology as if they were lawyers or politicians. Such a pursuit is exogenous
to the mission of teaching and research at a university, and to the extent that
scholars of advanced knowledge are at the very least socialized into that
mission, less indoctrination would be likely in the classroom and in academic
books and articles. Teaching and research are explanatory in nature; neither
activity is advocacy of a deeply held belief or value, except of course that of
learning. It is certainly no crime in academia to delimit higher education to academic
learning and teaching by expunging ideologues from faculty rosters and eliminating
their toxic, one-sided ideologies from being taught as if knowledge. That critical
race “theory” admits of only one ideology renders the “theory” partisan in the
sense of being partial (as well as in the sense of constituting advocacy), and
thus suspicious from the vantage-point of scholars. I would venture to say
after decades of having been in academia in the United States that invasive
ideology by insidious ideologues of whatever stripe, “left” or “right,” had
become a formidable threat to the American academy of higher education by the 2020s.
Simply put, it may be that an insufficient number of professors at American
universities value scholarly learning and teaching knowledge enough to resist putting
ideology first. As the saying goes, a person cannot serve two masters.
2. Ibid.
