Critical Race Theory and the Long March Through the Institutions

The second in a series . . .

Up until a few years ago, virtually no one in the United States had ever heard of Critical Race Theory (CRT). At most, it was known to a small minority of people as a rarefied “academic” theory that was first developed in the late 1970s and early 1980s by legal scholars and is currently being taught in American law and graduate schools.

Ordinary Americans got their first real taste of Critical Race Theory in 2019 when the New York Times published a special issue of its weekend magazine dedicated to what it called the “1619 Project,” which was a compilation of essays, commentaries, poems, and photographs demonstrating the racist roots of American history. Then, starting sometime in the Spring of the 2020-21 school year, CRT exploded onto the American scene.

Local school board meetings all over the U.S. erupted into rancorous debates over the nature and meaning of Critical Race Theory and whether it was being taught in the nation’s schools. And that’s when things really hit the fan. In short order, CRT became one of the most talked about subjects in public life. The mainstream media went all in to cover CRT. Suddenly, everyone in America was talking about it. The CRT genie was now out of the bottle. The Virginia governor’s race between Terry McAuliffe and Glenn Younkin was fought, in part, over the teaching of CRT in the state’s government schools.

In short, Critical Race Theory claims to be a way of thinking about racism and how it shapes public policy. CRT teaches that racism is embedded in all aspects of American life, including the education system (preschool, K-12, and higher ed), health care, housing, the criminal justice system, and even in the water that black Americans drink. According to the proponents of CRT, racism is ubiquitous in American life.

True racism, they claim, is not the kind you see in the ideas or actions of intentionally bigoted individuals such as the men and women who wear hoods at a KKK rally; instead, it is an invisible and omnipresent presence in American society. And that is precisely what makes twenty-first century colorblind racism worse—much worse—than say what we might call Jim Crow racism or Bull Connor racism, which were self-evident for all to see.

The new racism is, we’re told, everywhere and nowhere. It’s lurking in every corner. It pretends to be dead but it’s more invidious than the old racism precisely because it is unseen to all but new America’s race seers. Ordinary white Americans who thought of themselves as lifelong opponents of racism and who fought it wherever and whenever they could, are now told that, “no,” they are in fact racists whether they know it or not and so are their kids. They’re racists by virtue of being white. The new anti-racism forces Americans to swallow a very bitter pill.

And with the introduction of Critical Race Theory to the national consciousness, a whole new lexicon of words and phrases entered the American dialect such as “unconscious racial bias,” “whiteness,” “white privilege,” “white fragility,” “white identity development,” “internalized racial superiority,” “color consciousness,” “systemic racism,” “race essentialism,” “white-washed curriculum,” “intersectionality,” “intergenerational trauma,” “culturally responsive education,” “pedagogy of liberation,” “emancipatory curriculum,” “racial mapping,” “decolonization,” “spirit murder” (what government schools do to “children of color”), “oppressor/oppressed,” “anti-racist therapy,” and so on.

For a time, the proponents of Critical Race Theory claimed that CRT was a benign and obscure academic subject that was only taught in America’s law schools and certainly not in America’s elementary schools. When the evidence clearly suggested otherwise, the defenders of Critical Race Theory quickly shifted their rhetorical tactics and claimed that CRT was only a realistic but harmless method for teaching children the comprehensive truth about American history. The goal of CRT, they claimed, was to promote racial sensitivity, tolerance, and inclusion by making sure that all American kids knew the full story of America’s tragic history of slavery and racism. When these arguments didn’t win the day, the proponents of CRT did what they always do when the evidence does not support their claims: they lazily, shamelessly, and boringly accused their opponents of being racists.

The opponents of Critical Race Theory—i.e., a broad racial and ideological coalition of parents (blacks and whites, conservatives and liberals)—have risen like a phoenix in the last couple of years to oppose the teaching of CRT to America’s children. These parents claim that CRT is in fact being taught in the schools (they provided enormous amounts of evidence to prove it), and that it promotes a new kind of racism and racial segregation. The parents don’t want their children being exposed to what they consider to be the racist indoctrination of CRT. Following the lead of angry parents and taxpayers, 16 state legislatures have banned the teaching of Critical Race Theory and another 19 states are considering anti-CRT bills.[1]

Not surprisingly, there has been a great deal of heat but little light on the subject of Critical Race Theory. Wherein lies the truth?

Maybe we should begin by asking what Critical Race Theory is and where it came from. In this essay, I present a brief philosophic genealogy of CRT and what its core teaching is. In next week’s essay I will explain 1) how CRT was brought into America’s K-12 schools, and 2) how it is actually used in the classroom.  At some point in this series, I may also write something on how to fight and not fight Critical Race Theory and its proponents.

The Philosophical Roots of CRT

Critical Race Theory is the bastard brat of an early twentieth-century system of philosophical ideas known as Critical Theory (CT). Changing the metaphor, CRT is downstream from CT, which is in turn downstream from Marxism.

Critical Theory was a philosophic system given life in the 1930s by a group of neo-Marxist theoreticians collectively known as the Frankfurt School. The leading thinkers of the Frankfurt School included Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Erich Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse. These “critical” theorists rejected traditional Marxism’s belief in the inevitability of a proletarian revolution that would overthrow the bourgeoisie in order to destroy capitalism and to establish a communist State. The Frankfurters and their intellectual descendants argued that the eschaton could only be immanentized by a slow and long march through the cultural institutions (the arts, entertainment, news media, and, most importantly, the universities and schools) of the West. They rejected Marxian means but accepted and worked for Marxian ends.

The overweening goal of Critical Theory was and is the theoretical and practical delegitimization of all Western moral, social, cultural, religious, legal, political, and economic institutions. CT is less a philosophy and more of a weapon used in a never-ending critique of Western civilization. The point, however, was not to destroy the West’s institutions through armed revolution and violence as with traditional Marxist-Leninists but rather to infiltrate, undermine, and silently reconstruct those institutions from within. Eventually, the Frankfurters broadened the universal conflict from that between proletariat and bourgeoisie to oppressors (fill in the blank) and oppressed (fill in the blank).

Critical Theory is primarily concerned with deconstructing and delegitimizing the “narratives” that justify Western values and institutions. The revolutionary process is carried out by weaponizing what might be called the “technique of critique,” which seeks to analyze and expose the dominant ideology and institutions of society in order to demonstrate their function in subjugating the ever-growing coalition of victims oppressed by white, cis-gendered, conservative, Christian men. The political goal is to first demoralize and then destabilize Western cultural values and institutions in order to transform them into something else.

The most direct line of influence between Critical Theory and Critical Race Theory can be seen in the “philosophic” writings of Herbert Marcuse and Paulo Friere, both of whom provided the CRT movement with a strategy for acquiring cultural power.   

Marcuse was a German-American philosopher (considered by many to be the “Father of the New Left”),  who is best known for his notion of “repressive tolerance,” which means that intellectual and political tolerance should be given only to left-wing ideas and organizations, whereas right-wing ideas and organizations must be suppressed with force if necessary. In his best-known essay on “Repressive Tolerance,” Marcuse proposed the “withdrawal of toleration of speech and assembly from groups and movements which promote aggressive policies, armament, chauvinism, discrimination on the grounds of race and religion, or which oppose the extension of public services, social security, medical care, etc.” Even more ominously, Marcuse demanded that toleration be denied to “regressive movements before they can become active,” which means that active intolerance (i.e., the violence of the State) must be applied to the “thought, opinion, and word” of “self-styled conservatives.” In Marcuse’s purely Orwellian state, “liberating tolerance” means “intolerance against movements from the Right, and toleration of movements from the Left.”[2]

Paulo Freire was a Brazilian Marxist whose work is near canonical in America’s teacher-training institutions. Freire is best known in education circles for having applied the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School to the subject of childhood education. In his most influential book Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968), Freire claimed that teaching and learning must be acts connected directly to certain (Marxian) theories of “social justice.” The primary purpose of education, according to Freire, is emancipation from oppression, that is, to teach students to understand the nature of their oppression (a metaphysical state of being) and to develop the knowledge and practical skills necessary to oppose and to depose their oppressors. This means that “Critical” teachers must take a psychological leap of faith and develop a revolutionary or critical consciousness. In Freire’s words: “Critical consciousness, they say, is anarchic. Others add that critical consciousness may lead to disorder. Some, however, confess: Why deny it? I was afraid of freedom. I am no longer afraid!”[3]

The Rise of Critical Race Theory and What It Is

The Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School was adopted in the 1960s and 1970s by a group of New-Left legal scholars (mostly at Harvard Law School) and applied to examining how the law and American legal institutions serve the interests of the wealthy and powerful at the expense of the dispossessed and marginalized. What was known as the Critical Legal Studies movement (CLS) was then adapted in the late 1970s and 1980s by one of Harvard Laws School’s CLS scholars, Derrick Bell, to the narrower issue of race relations. Bell, along with fellow legal scholars Richard Delgado, Jean Stefancic, and Kimberlé Crenshaw, launched the Critical Race Theory movement, which claims that American values and institutions are inherently and systemically racist.

Critical Race Theory is an ideological mutation of Marxism applied to the issue of race. CRT substitutes Marx’s class conflict between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat with what it sees as a perpetual attempt by whites to oppress black Americans. Because racism is embedded in the American mind and in the nation’s social structures, according to CRT’s supporters, its eradication can only be achieved through a cultural revolution and a radical restructuring of the nation’s social conscience. CRT is a Marxian formula to remake society through a race-based, class struggle.

The common link that unites Critical Theory, Critical Legal Studies, and Critical Race Theory (and Critical Gender Theory) is a hatred of Western liberalism, by which I mean the classical liberalism associated with Enlightenment notions of nature, reason, objectivity, truth, science, free will, individual rights, freedom, individualism, toleration, merit, competition, virtue, rule of law, equal protection, constitutionalism, limited government, freedom of thought, speech, and association, color blindness, integration, and laissez-faire capitalism. According to Richard Delgado, “[c]ritical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.”[4]

 “Crit” theorists believe that claims to reason, objectivity, and truth are really just arbitrary assertions—or what might be called narrative hypnotics—aimed at acquiring power over the poor and marginalized. In fact, the whole free-speech regime (i.e., the freedom of non-Marxists to think, speak, and assemble) is rigged in favor of the white power structure, according to CRT supporters, which means that free and open debate must be purged as well. On top of that, CRT supporters such as William F. Tate IV (President of the Louisiana State University system) believe that America is so hopelessly racist that even the moral-constitutional principles of freedom, equality, color blindness  are considered to be little more than “camouflages” for white supremacy and racial oppression.[5]

Critical race theorists old and new reject the attempt by both classical and 20th-century liberals to create a colorblind society via legal institutions that do not discriminate on the basis of race. Racism is not only baked into the “system,” it is an omnipresent force of human life that Richard Delgado has described as the “law of racial thermodynamics,” which says: “[t]here is change from one era to another, but the net quantum of racism remains exactly the same. Racism is neither created nor destroyed.”[6] In other words, racism is a metaphysical feature of “whiteness” that can never be eradicated and which will always reappear in one form or another.

The various manifestations of white racism can be seen everywhere in American life and culture if you wear your special CRT glasses. According to CRT’s champions, “whiteness,” which means anti-blackness, can be found in certain manners and mores that, apparently, are only associated with white people or blacks who suffer from false consciousness. Such values include politeness, hard work, self-reliance, objectivity, logic, one-dimensional thinking, long-range planning, time management, and family cohesion. 

What all of this means in practice is that those American social, legal, and political institutions that attempt to ameliorate racism over time actually serve the cause of racism and perpetuate it because they mask the true motives and predatory goals of white people who will always seek to promote their race-based interests by virtue of their privileged status. The result is that racism infects all aspects of both private and public life in America to the disadvantage of black Americans.

This kind of “structural racism” functions to maintain racial hierarchies and the dominance of white people over blacks. In the words of CRT proponent Frances Lee Ansley, a professor at the University of Tennessee law school:

[By] ‘white supremacy’ I do not mean to allude only to the self-​conscious racism of white supremacist hate groups. I refer instead to a political, economic, and cultural system in which whites overwhelmingly control power and material resources, conscious and unconscious ideas of white superiority and entitlement are widespread, and relations of white dominance and non-white subordination are daily re-​enacted across a broad array of institutions and social settings.[7]

And what does “systemic” racism actually look like in practice, according to its proponents?  In August 2020, a racial task force in Durham, NC, issued a 68-page report to the cities’ leaders claiming to demonstrate the nature of structural racism in North Carolina. According to the report, the North Carolina criminal legal system was designed to “protect white people by controlling people of color”; the housing system was designed to “create and maintain private white land by controlling the access people of color have to such land”; the economic system was designed to “build and sustain wealth for a select group of white people by ensuring that people of color and poor whites lack access to build and sustain wealth”; the health-care system was designed to “privilege the health of white bodies at the expense of the bodies of people of color”; and, most importantly, the education system was designed to “indoctrinate all students with the internalized belief that the white race is superior.”[8]

This is what they mean by systemic racism. It’s here, it’s there, it’s everywhere, but, oddly, the only people who can actually see it are the CRT Shamans, who see racism where no one else does. According to Kimberlé Crenshaw, Critical Race Theory “is a way of seeing” for those with special sight.[9]

In more recent years, the leading advocates of Critical Race Theory—including Ibram X. Kendi (Boston University), Robin DiAngelo (University of Washington), and Nikole Hannah-Jones (New York Times and Howard University)—have, in addition to monetizing CRT very much to their own personal benefit, brought CRT down from the legal heavens to examine its hidden cultural manifestations. These new critical race theorists see racism everywhere you don’t.

The younger CRT theorists believe that formal educational, cultural, legal, and political institutions are just a façade for what is more fundamental, namely, the fact that all whites are inherently—that is, by nature—racist. Critical Race Theory teaches that all white people are afflicted, whether they know it or not, by “unconscious racial bias” and they benefit from “white privilege.”

To “prove” the point, Ibram Kendi claims that measurable differences between whites and blacks (e.g., on standardized tests) can only be explained in one of two ways: either you believe that systemic racism explains different outcomes between the races, or you believe that that whites are intellectually superior to blacks. According to Kendi, if you reject the first explanation then you must, by definition, accept the second explanation, which of course means that you are a racist.[10] Kendi’s feeble attempt at setting a variation of the rhetorical fallacy known as the Kafka trap is absurd and easily dismissed. (The Kafka trap, first identified by Eric Raymond works like this: “Your refusal to acknowledge that you are guilty of {sin, racism, sexism, homophobia, oppression . . .} confirms that you are guilty of {sin, racism, sexism, homophobia, oppression . . .}.”) [11] There are multiple ways to explain human differences and inequalities other than systemic racism or just plain racism. Such inconvenient truths, however, must be banished from civilized conversation.

Still, the CRT position comes down to this: racism can be reduced to race, that is, to one’s “whiteness,” which is of course racist! Race grifter extraordinaire Robin DiAngelo has written in her best-selling book White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism that “white identity is inherently racist,” that “white people do not exist outside the system of white supremacy,” and that “the white collective fundamentally hates blackness.”[12] In fact, according to CNN talking head Van Jones, the brains of all white people are literally infected with the racist “virus.” In fact, white racism is so pervasive that even the most liberal, Hillary Clinton supporting, well-intentioned “white person has a virus in his or her brain that can be activated at an instant.”[13]

Ironically, Critical Race Theory has become a secular form of Original Sin that must result in the acceptance of a doctrine of racial predestination, which means that some are condemned to social hell or heaven depending on their skin color. As with Christian sin, racism is a never-ending problem that requires never-ending repentance to correct.

The 1619 Project and the Racial-Industrial Complex

Critical Race Theory reached its maximal visibility and influence in 2019 when the New York Times published its infamous 1619 Project, which filled an entire issue of the Times’s weekend magazine. The 1619 Project represents the mainstreaming of Critical Race Theory.

The general purpose of the 1619 Project (organized by Nikole Hannah-Jones), which is derived directly from Critical Race Theory, is to “reframe” or retell the narrative of American history from the ground up and to “redefine” America’s “national memory.” The project’s authors assert “it is finally time to tell our story truthfully.”

The 1619 Project’s pedagogical claims are fivefold: first, that America’s true founding moment was not in 1776 or 1787 but in 1619, the year that slaves were first brought to America from Africa; second, that American Revolutionaries fought a war of independence from Great Britain in order “to protect the institution of slavery”; third, that America’s “founding ideals of liberty and equality were false when they were written,” but “black Americans have fought to make them true”; fourth, that “nearly everything that has made America exceptional” grew out of slavery; and fifth, that American-style capitalism is rooted in slavery and racism. In other words, “anti-Black racism runs in the very DNA of this country.”[14] (Virtually all of these claims have been debunked by America’s leading historians.[15])

By this telling, slavery is a uniquely American crime, the consequences of which have tainted virtually every aspect of American life good or bad ever since. The essays, for instance, explore how many of the major maladies of 20th- and 21st-century America—economic exploitation, draconian labor practices, union busting, poverty wages, violence, high incarceration rates, inequality, obesity, a lack of free health care, Republican extremism, dirty Republican politics, and even rush hour traffic, etc.—grew out of slavery, racism, and capitalism.

The hope of the 1619 Project is to shame all Americans into believing their country is actually bad because everything good about it is grounded in racism and slavery. And what this means, of course, is that all of the wealth enjoyed by some Americans (i.e., think Barack Obama’s 2012 statement, “You didn’t build that”) had its unjust origin in exploitation and plunder. Only by acknowledging this “shameful history” and “its powerful influence on the present,” according to the Times’s editorial board, can Americans assume their justly earned collective guilt and then prepare themselves “for a more just future,” which of course means massive wealth redistribution.

For the authors of the 1619 Project, slavery, racism, and capitalism are indistinguishable from one another. Simply put, the lesson of the 1619 Project is this: capitalism is synonymous with slavery and racism. Ergo, capitalism must be destroyed and replaced with socialism.

To achieve this long-term goal, however, we must begin with the children. Interestingly, the most important audience of the 1619 Project is not the adult readers of the New York Times but the hundreds of millions of school children who will attend America’s elementary and secondary schools over the course of the next few decades.

The real strategic goal of the 1619 Project is, therefore, to change the way American children understand and think about their country by taking its reframing message to America’s schools and colleges. This means America’s children must be taught to believe that  their country was founded in sin, that the sin of slavery infects all American institutions to this day, which means that America is, always has been, and always will be immoral until the racism is forever purged from the collective soul of white Americans.

If the nation’s children come to hate their country and think it illegitimate, then the groundwork will have been laid for radical social and political transformation. The formula is simple: teach America’s children to believe their nation is founded in sin and they will eventually come to hate their country. This is the necessary precondition for radical social, political, and economic change.

Thus, the underlying goal of the 1619 Project is to educate America’s school children to hate their country enough so that one day they will be the vanguard leading the revolution to destroy capitalism in the name of a progressive, socialist future. That’s what Critical Race Theory and the 1619 Project are really all about.

To that end, the Times is working in collaboration with the well-endowed, far left Pulitzer Center to develop curricula and an educational outreach effort directed at America’s 132,000 public and private schools and their 50+ million students based on the agenda of the 1619 Project. Random House, one of America’s most prestigious trade publishers, has also announced that it will publish a series of books for all ages based on the 1619 Project. This is where the Education Deep State meets the racial-industrial complex.

What Is To be Done?

In the meantime, the only way to root out structural racism (if that’s even possible) is to fundamentally change American cultural, legal, and political institutions from within. What this means in practice is that American institutions must actively and aggressively promote race-based programs that affirmatively discriminate in favor of black Americans and against white Americans. According to Ibram X. Kendi in his bestselling book How to Be an Antiracist, “[t]he only remedy to racist discrimination is anti-racist discrimination”; and the “only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination”; and the “only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.”[16] This is straight out of the Marcuse playbook.

Still, this is not enough. More is needed. The full coercive force of the State must be used to bend the collective will of white people toward the arc of history, which is to purge and punish the recalcitrant.

Not surprisingly, the solution to all this invisible institutional racism is to abolish capitalism and to establish a new federal agency with the power to nullify any law or to silence political speech that is not considered by the new Race Czars as “antiracist.” Racebaiter-in-chief, Ibram Kendi proposes to do this through a constitutional amendment that

would establish and permanently fund the Department of Anti-racism (DOA) comprised of formally trained experts on racism and no political appointees. The DOA would be responsible for preclearing all local, state and federal public policies to ensure they won’t yield racial inequity, monitor those policies, investigate private racist policies when racial inequity surfaces, and monitor public officials for expressions of racist ideas. The DOA would be empowered with disciplinary tools to wield over and against policymakers and public officials who do not voluntarily change their racist policy and ideas.[17]

America’s critical race theorists such as Kendi are fully invested in what we might call racial engineering, which means that the coercive force of the State must be used to actively discriminate in favor of blacks and against white Americans in order to achieve social and economic “equity,” which means to achieve social “sameness.”

But let us not be fooled into thinking that the ultimate goal of Critical Race Theory is racial harmony or a society of true equality of opportunity as its proponents suggest. It is not and it never was.

We must never forget that CRT is just one tactic among many in the neo-Marxist playbook for destroying capitalism and achieving a classless, raceless, genderless society, where all can live according to the highest moral principle: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” Critical Race Theory in practice means race-based wealth redistribution.

Critical Race Theory should be rejected by good people as morally repugnant and utterly anathema to the principles of a free and decent society.

Next week, I will examine how Critical Race Theory is actually being used in America’s schools.

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[1]. Kiara Alfonseca, “Map: Where anti-critical race theory efforts have reached,” ABC News, March 24, 2022: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/map-anti-critical-race-theory-efforts-reached/story?id=83619715.

[2]. Herbert Marcuse, “Repressive Tolerance,” in A Critique of Pure Tolerance, by Robert Paul Wolff, Barrington Moore, Jr., and Herbert Marcuse (Boston: Beacon, 1965), 100, 110, 109.

[3]. Paulo Friere, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 50th Anniversary Edition, Translated by Myra Bergman Ramos and with an Introduction by Donaldo Macedo (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), 35.

[4]. Richard Delgado, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction (New York: NYU Press, 2017), 3.

[5]. William F Tate IV “Critical Race Theory and Education: History, Theory, and Implications,” Review of Research in Education, Vol. 22, No. 1 (January 1997), pp.195–247.

[6]. Richard Delgado, “Does Voice Really Matter?” Virginia Law Review, 1990, 76: 105-06.

[7]. Frances Lee Ansley, “White Supremacy (And What We Can Do About It),” in Critical White Studies: Looking Behind the Mirror, ed. Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997), 592.

[8]. Report of the Durham Racial Equity Task Force: An Urgent and Loving Call to Action”: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1rDUZyJtM6RlND8WYQhP8W-gl0Ga8HCFTgr2rD2Cnxq4/edit.

[9]. Crenshaw quoted in “Critical Race Theory: A Brief History” by Jacey Fortin, The New York Times, November 8, 2021: https://archive.ph/dhM4r.

[10]. Wilfred Reilly, “The New Definition of Racism,” Commentary Online, May 2022: https://archive.ph/XaTte.

[11]. Eric Raymond, “Kafkatrapping,”: chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://antifeministpraxis.files.wordpress.com/2017/06/kafka-trapping.pdf.

[12]. Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism (Boston: Beacon Press, 2018), 149, 95.

[13]. Valerie Edwards, “‘Even the most well-intentioned white person has a virus in his or her brain’: CNN's Van Jones says it's the ‘white, liberal Hillary Clinton supporter’ who is more worrisome than the KKK after ‘Central Park Karen” called the cops on black bird watcher,” Daily Mail, May 31, 2020: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8374027/CNNs-Van-Jones-says-white-liberals-worrisome-KKK.html.

[14]. Nikole Hannah-Jones, “Our Democracy’s Founding Ideals Were False When They Were Written. Black Americans Have Fought to Make Them True,” New York Times, August 14, 2019: https://archive.ph/bXbAH.

[15]. See, for instance, Phillip W. Magness, The 1619 Project: A Critique (Great Barrington, MA: American Institute for Economic Research, 2020), and Peter W. Wood, 1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project (New York: Encounter Books, 2020).

[16]. Ibram, X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist (New York: One World, 2019), 19.

[17]. Ibram X. Kendi, “Inequality: Pass an Anti-Racist Constitutional Amendment,” Politico Magazine, 2019: https://politico.com/interactives/2019/how-to-fix-politics-in-america/inequality/pass-an-anti-racist-constitutional-amendment/ (emphasis added).