“Critical Race Theory is not Anti-Asian” — or is it?
A Tanka in honor of Mari Matsuda’s defense of constructive criticism
Critical race theory is not
Anti-Asian or Anti-White.
When Opportunists say otherwise,
Critics detect their games.
This four-line poem is my first attempt to write a Japanese form of poetry known as “tanka.” Like haiku, tanka has rules as to the total number of syllables (there must be 31 in total, exactly 14 more syllables than a haiku). I had never heard of tanka before trying to figure out how to write this.
I may be violating the rules by having two different changes in perception, first from “critical race theory is” (an objective, definitional statement), and second, in positing that “critics detect” their games.
Or maybe not. Opportunists don’t necessarily have a perspective. Amoebas? Viruses? One-celled organisms are ‘opportunistic’ — but that’s an expression of biochemical structure, not of intention. In a world full of opportunistic amoebas offering 10 tips on how to consume their next meal,
A critic, on the other hand, always has a perspective. And as a critic who is trying to be poetic…well, I suppose that’s not so common these days, even if this sort of experimentation might be reductive or otherwise improper.
Writing this tanka was inspired by a lecture delivered in 2002 by Professor Mari Matsuda called “Other People’s Children,” delivered at the Derrick Bell Lecture series at New York University.
The lecture series started as a birthday present for Derrick Bell, the “father” of “critical race theory.” Bell trained, influenced, and inspired generations of lawyers who regularly use methods he developed by supervising hundreds of lawsuits with the NAACP to challenge civil rights violations in America.
This is harder than one thinks. If you ask a white real estate investor whether he discriminates against Black tenants, he will probably deny it. To find out whether that is happening, one must ask those tenants, and then explore how to test their claims. You might arrange for Black and White applicants with identical credit histories to both apply for an apartment, and see if the treatment they receive is distinct.
That’s one of many “CRT” methods. You can imagine how terrifying that would be to real estate investors who might lose a fortune if their ways of cheating are uncovered.
One problem with this approach, however, is that even if discrimination is discovered, the market will not rectify the practice. Bring a lawsuit against a billionaire for discrimination, and 98% of the time, that billionaire could just pay off the person suing him — then continue the same practices (in a manner of speaking, that’s precisely what Donald Trump did, though he had help from the Justice Department). A legal rule enforced by the government is the only serious threat.
CRT helps detect the sort of gambit that the cheaters have created. But others must take appropriate action to remedy those forms of cheating.
A Disingenuous Report about Asian Americans
In March 2021, Helen Raleigh (an entrepreneur, writer and speaker) reported in Newsweek that Asian Americans are emerging as “strong voices” against critical race theory (“CRT”). She may be right. Two new Korean American Republican women from Orange County had just been seated in Congress (though Raleigh appears to have missed that). Neither is a fan of CRT. Odd that Raleigh forgot to mention them, but her network may be focused on Chinese businesses, and she may have missed stronger evidence of her claims than what she put in her Op-Ed.
People who argue in bad faith about things they don’t understand may be “intentionally ignorant” or working for someone. Discussing anything with them amplifies their own narrative.
Yet when something gets printed in Newsweek, someone might follow the evidence and…well, criticize it. Here, Raleigh notes that an apparently reputable Chinese American organization issued a vigorous rejection of CRT. The link she provides is to a position paper or statement that describes CRT as linked to “such hate promoters as Marx, Lenin, Gramsci, Schmitt, Marcuse, Foucault and Freire.”
Fascinating choices in that list. The thinkers who crafted CRT are indeed likely to have read all or most of these ‘hate promoters’ — and were probably influenced by their writings just as much as they were by the writings of Mao Zedong, Sun Tzu, Confucius, Jesus Christ, Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, Barry Goldwater, and…well thousands of other sources. “Influence” doesn’t mean “agree” — but rather, the process of “criticism” means reading EVERYTHING UNDER THE SUN (at least, if there’s any possibility it has some use or purpose) — then thinking about what one has read and trying to assess its value.
A good critic cannot rush to judgment before looking closely, personally at whatever is being criticized. One species of opportunist, Homo Propagandista, knows ‘evil’ before they looked — because they’re told what to say, and amplify that.
Why did the Greater New York chapter of a prominent Chinese American organization omit any reference to Mao in this list? Most likely, they have connections with people — in mainland China? in Taiwan? elsewhere in the world? — who are extremely familiar with everything Mao wrote. Highlighting Mao as a ‘hate promoter’ could cost someone somewhere some business — but surely Mao killed more people than Foucault!
This Chinese group also included Carl Schmitt in that list of ‘hate promoters.’ Schmitt proposed a framework of politics that involves distinguishing ‘friends from enemies’ and using various practices to eradicate the ‘enemies.’ For example, if one is looking at the effects of a terrible pandemic, one calculates who is most likely to die (mostly poor people in dense housing), who will not (younger people, people with good health care, richer people), and then deciding that the pandemic wouldn’t be so bad after all. We’ve had people like that near the White House recently…
Schmitt was a prominent Nazi intellectual, regularly used as a punching bag for ‘bad thinkers who caused grave harm.’ The likes of Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, and other GOP leadership acts in accord with Schmittian ideals whenever they act in purely partisan manners (I will never vote for a Supreme Court person recommended by that side — even if I just voted for her 2 years ago…). They don’t know Schmitt. But they’re full of Schmitt.
The Chinese American group Raleigh highlights selects ‘CRT’ proponents by ignoring someone like Professor Matsuda, Derrick Bell, or other actual CRT luminaries, instead identifying ‘the best-paid promoters’ as Robin DeAngelo, a sociologist, and Ibram Kendi a historian. Odd choices. CRT was born, conceived, developed, tested, and deployed, through law and legal scholarship.
Kendi’s book, “How to be an Anti-Racist” complicates numerous concepts of CRT. Kendi writes, chapter by chapter, that the process of becoming an anti-racist requires first discovering each aspect of racism one may have internalized — a long-term process of meditation, study, and careful effort, which took him many years of work (and which he’s still working on). CRT interrogates institutions, uncovering evidence of discrimination and racism which others hide. Is it possible some Black people are racists? (Kendi: yes, absolutely, in fact, several of the most important Black thinkers were racists — even luminaries like W.E.B. duBois and Booker T. Washington…just because they had some racist thoughts is no reason to dismiss or ignore them, but we can learn from their strengths AND their weaknesses, and try to do even better, if we approach them the way they approached the world — critically.)
For Kendi, ‘racism’ is somewhat comparable to ‘sin’ — we all struggle, some more than others. But ‘racism’ is also something deliberately created (and re-created). To many theologically minded people, ‘sin’ is something that all humans are prone to — it’s a natural condition of the human soul. To atheists, ‘sin’ may be a different sort of social construct that has immense power to influence human psychology. (Money is also a social construct. Just because a thing is ‘constructed’ doesn’t mean it’s ‘not real’ — or ‘not powerful.’)
I have no idea if Kendi is the ‘best-paid promoter’ of CRT. Neither of his books promote CRT, and one of them complicates several beliefs and claims by certain people who apply CRT, but is quite compatible with beliefs, claims, and processes used by many others. (The notion that a person is not a ‘race,’ BUT rather, a number of different components influence identity — gender, sexual orientation, economic class, personal history, etc. — fits with ‘intersectionality,’ BUT then Kendi goes and adds notions like the personal experience of mortality to the story…which is more psychological than sociological, as is the imperative for SELF interrogation…)
Disingenuous opportunists claim Asian Americans “oppose CRT” — without even referring to prominent Asian Americans who helped create CRT.
Raleigh could have done better by referring to Mari Matsuda (and other Asian American contributors to CRT — there are many!). But that would make her opinion a little more problematic.
Then again, Raleigh also wanted to claim that a Chinese organization in Greater New York created in 2016 is connected to a venerable Chinese group that initially was formed as the fraternal order of the Native Sons of the Golden State, but which evolved over the years, taking the form of a newspaper in one era, an insurance company in another, and probably other roles in turn.
The ‘insurance company’ is more interesting and important than meets the eye…many Black organizations also played the role of ‘mutual benevolent societies’ — and there are stories within stories there…Fraternal orders were a big deal in 19th century America, and some remain important today. But in the 19th century, Chinese Americans were threatened by legal deprivation of rights as citizens (and often, the people threatening them would have done so using their own fraternal orders to organize hostilities). This new wing appears primarily concerned about getting its members into the right schools.
And that’s the big picture here — why this opinion was published in Newsweek, and how this struggle manifests.
Allied groups are challenging consideration of race in college and university admissions, singling out Harvard this time as part of a multi-decade effort to end affirmative action. In the 1970s, these same players alleged affirmative action discriminated against white men. In the early 2000s, they claimed to be defending ‘white women.’ Now they allege discrimination against Asian Americans.
Did Jim Crow Magically Fly Away?
Let’s backtrack. Every decent U.S. history textbook used today in America probably discusses the ‘Jim Crow’ laws. But what exactly do they say?
There’s a way to describe ‘Jim Crow’ as “a bad thing that happened once upon a time” — to convert it into something list of dates and people students have to memorize for a test. But it’s also possible to present it as a set of phenomena that affect the world long after ‘Jim Crow’ officially ended.
‘Creditworthiness’ seems like a racially-neutral concept. If you have collateral, you may have credit. Assume Congress creates a ‘racially-neutral’ fund to bail out ALL farmers, so long as they prove their creditworthiness. However, what if Jim Crow influenced how Black farmers recorded the deeds on their farms? Instead of having a clear title that they could present to the bank and use for collateral, what if they’d just worked the land for decades, but never been able to record ownership? If that occurred, then a white farmer and a Black farmer seeking relief under the same law would experience entirely different outcomes: white farmers would get relief, black farmers would not. One paper, the outcome is perfectly ‘color-blind.’ In reality, one wouldn’t even know that the parents and grandparents who ‘owned’ the land simply could not ‘work harder’ and record deeds to the property back in the day…
If you’re unfamiliar with it, check out the case, Pigford v. Glickman — the largest civil rights settlement ever entered into with the federal government. This stuff is real. (And yes, you can find some extremely good coverage of that case in the 1619 Project’s podcast — the last two episodes, “The Land of Our Fathers, Part 1 and 2” review this story in a way that would terrify every banker who ever profited from the system and was concerned about getting caught.
(And again, even after winning the largest settlement of all time, the people who were hurt STILL were unable to get much until Barack Obama came around, because a statute of limitations in Louisiana limited claims to people who filed their claims within a certain time period — and most of the victims of Jim Crow laws who didn’t qualify for a bailout had no idea why…some of them might have even believed their lack of credit was somehow THEIR failure, dropped it, and moved on — rather than just another facet of Jim Crow.)
Stories like that aren’t so unusual — or rather, stories like that tend not to get told. Unless someone ‘critically’ investigates the story. CRT is about initiating precisely that sort of investigation. Exactly how did your local bank grow? Did it finance mortgages? For whom? When? Is there a freeway anywhere near your home? How was that built? Do you have power and running water? With or without lead? Hmmm…
Ms. Raleigh thinks exploring simple things like ‘creditworthiness’ with a critical eye is somehow comparable to claiming that ‘hard work’ is a ‘white’ value. That’s either a ridiculous statement, or simply another instance of bad faith opportunism. Newsweek should never have published her self serving oped.
CRT works by criticizing the values, institutions, laws — things everyone SAYS they agree to, but many times, reality does not fit with what people say. Particularly when one group of people saying something looks different from another group.
Matsuda has a better response to Ms. Raleigh:
“It is my practice to ignore critics who have not read the work and who are not interested in honest exchange.” -Mari Matsuda
Shrewd.
Professor Matsuda perceives CRT as connecting a “through line from the Middle Passage to My Lai.” CRT practitioners argued that American immigration policy STILL discriminates on racial grounds. CRT practitioners care about racial discrimination affecting Asian Americans. CRT practitioners care about discrimination affecting just about every other group of Americans too. Including white Americans (who can be victims of discrimination as well — Trump got admitted into Ivy League universities as a product of the old-fashioned ‘affirmative action’ — for rich white men).
Ms. Raleigh claims that Asian Americans ‘value hard work.’ That may be true. Yet in 2018, ‘hard working’ Asian Americans have to wait 8 years (for Indians and Filipinos) or 6 years (for Chinese and ‘other’ Asians) to get a green card to work in America if they qualify as a ‘high preference’ category (that is, they are sponsored by a family member, they have specialized training in a field for which there is a labor shortage in America, they prove that they have no criminal record, etc.).
For “all other categories” it’s less than 5 years. On average. (Which means, for some countries, it must be significantly less than 5 years to balance out the ‘averages’ here…) Why do hard working Asians have to wait in line longer than other people from other countries?
Raleigh doesn’t care. CRT does. Any Asians who care about reuniting with their family members would find CRT far more conscious of their position than bad faith opportunists like Raleigh.
Twenty years ago, while speaking at the Derrick Bell lecture series on educational policy and CRT, Matsuda gave a lecture entitled, “Somebody Else’s Child.” Her lecture is riveting, fascinating, and focused on Head Start schools, on what it’s like for children receiving subsidized lunches when cardboard pizza runs out and they settle for cold cereal if they came in at the end of the line.
Many details in her lecture are painful to read (a fair bit about rodents…). Others are frustrating (a fair bit about Thomas Jefferson’s hopes for universal public education…except…). But then, buried about 75% of the way through her lecture after focusing extensively on problems in public schools she observed firsthand, Matsuda offers this story:
I went to a doctor who went to my public high school. Like many of my classmates, he sends his children to a private school. Public school was good enough for us, I prodded. Look, you’re a doctor. I’m a lawyer. We did okay. “It’s not the same today, you don’t understand,” he said. “Look,” he said, “My nephew is in public school. There are thirty kids in his class. The teacher spends most of her time on three kids who have behavior problems. How is my nephew going to learn anything? The good kids get shortchanged. I’m not going to let that happen to my kids.”
I didn’t say the next line, which would be a terrible breach of etiquette: “But you will let it happen to someone else’s child.”-Mari Matsuda, “Somebody Else’s Child,” as printed in Carving Out a Humanity: Race, Rights, and Redemption, p. 85–86
She never identifies the race of the doctor who went to her public high school. To even speculate about the race of the doctor who went to her public high school would be improper. She never says “this is how White people forsake Black people!” Perhaps because that isn’t what happened here at all?
And yet…no matter how entirely improper it would be to speculate about the race of a doctor who would say and think this way without even realizing the implications of leaving so many other children behind in order to get further ahead — no matter how racist such a line of thinking might be…someone reading that excerpt MIGHT choose to go there in their own mind or experience, because they know someone JUST like that doctor, and…
And yet Matsuda doesn’t go there. The words “white doctor” are not in her lecture. To hear her critiquing a “white” doctor, one must replace what she said with what one wants to hear. (The doctor might also have been Asian, Black, Latino/x — many, many people have a similar view of public education.)
That, unfortunately, is how CRT ‘becomes racist.’ People who never read or listen to what the proponents actually say tweak the words, insert a word like “white Doctor” where it was never spoken — and then follow something that makes their gut turn . Someone opportunistic wants to distort the field, ignore the basic point Matsuda made: we cannot leave “other people’s children” behind (and we cannot try to help ‘every child’ with platitudes and slogans…we gotta do something about those schools with rodent droppings mixed in with the food stores, and burning the schools down to start over — or creating new ‘voucher’ schools for kids to try to get out of the ‘bad schools’ is not a cure…).
During her 2002 lecture, Matsuda asserted that “nobody thinks they want public schools to fail…” In 2002, that may have seemed to be the case. In 2022, after a global pandemic and multiple rounds of school closures in much of America, it may be that we are suddenly aware of purposes for schools that may indeed explain why some have always wanted public schools to fail.
For urban elites, public schools were not meant to educate, but to warehouse the kids of their tenants and keep them from making a mess. Ideally, the parents were to work to help make someone wealthy even wealthier, but if not, at least they were not supposed to cost more than the wealthy were making from their urban investments.
For most of human history, public education was not just unnecessary, it would have deprived families of the laborers they needed to grow crops or handle chores on a farm. Worse, widespread literacy might cause people to learn something about the owners of the property they worked upon that they weren’t supposed to learn — they might be able to sell their crops somewhere else and not just take the offer given to them by the local buyer — they might be harder to control. They might pray differently. They might think differently. Historically, public education was a luxury at best, a threat at worst.
Children interfere with bottom line productivity in a modern, service economy. Educating them effectively requires extreme investments into a process — adjusting how cities are built, how families work, how people eat. It is no accident that each Asian country that saw a massive fall in fertility rates and population growth witnessed a massive surge in economic attainment within a couple generations. As have most European countries.
This is not a tragedy, or a triumph. Fewer children make it easier for families to work more, or for parents to invest more into advancing those fewer children to become more competitive. But it also means a community with fewer children playing, laughing, singing. It avoids many headaches that irritate people who lack the patience to be around and grapple with the messiness linked to children. But it also deprives of us the wonder of discovery through their eyes.
Matsuda sees public education as a place to learn, and expects teachers doing their best regularly work millions of miracles, year after year. Sure.
But those who profited the most from the last several decades do the math differently: for them, most children are a cost, not a benefit (unless they can carefully screen to keep out all the ‘bad kids’). Whenever there is such a cost, they will take action to force someone else to pay for it. Property taxes? Make young couples buying new homes pay; let the elders off the hook so they can enjoy the world that “they” built (or which was built for them).
Design housing markets so that only a handful of elites can afford housing — then educate a tiny handful of children of ‘elites.’ Let ‘other people’s children’ figure it out elsewhere.
Design housing markets so that any non-elites who sneak in can only stay if a household maintains dual incomes. If either parent gets sick, divorced, or unemployed, that family will be forced out. Suddenly, a large number of ‘problem children’ get moved elsewhere, simply by the structure of the housing market. (Add in a bit of racism, and that problem compounds.)
Mari Matsuda sees the ‘hip’ couple, that wants to live in an ‘edgy’ (mixed racial) urban environment — then moves out to the suburbs once children come along to try to keep them ‘safe.’ Maybe that picture would have fit in 2002. In 2022, I suspect the picture is more like people struggling as best they can to find housing they can afford wherever they can, without a crippling commute, and then, once they’ve landed somewhere, trying to buck up and pretend that they love it as they try to figure out next steps.
Matsuda sees people like that as ‘players in the game.’ I do not.
To me, the parents — including the doctor in her anecdote — are just trying their best. The hand that they’ve been dealt was stacked by someone else who is playing a game. We shouldn’t praise or punish the doctor: we should look at who stacked the deck, or how best to respond to a stacked deck.
Where to look for the person stacking the deck? Backwards is as good a place as any.
A feudal lord would be reluctant to spend a penny on promoting literacy for ‘his’ serfs/slaves/peasants — why bother? The religious and cultural institutions supporting that feudal lord might also be skeptical of public education, unless they have complete control over exactly what gets taught (and even if they do have complete control of the curriculum, there’s always the risk that some student starts criticizing THEM). Some people, seeing how the feudal lord and the religious/cultural institutions operate, might step in, offering to ‘educate the little people’ — by offering various public entertainments or stained glass windows or similar means…
America does not exactly have ‘feudal lords’ — but a corporation may last longer than a family dynasty, and operate in ways not all that different from a feudal family. Except for one thing: corporations that actually produce SOME THING need people to do that production (at least for now…). An educated workforce is helpful to some but not all corporations.
Most corporations in the real estate sector are not producing any more land. The few practicing that line of business are desperately claiming that climate change is a lie, so what land they produce (say along the Miami coastline) will be worth something — people won’t buy a condo if they expect it to be inundated in a few years). A corporation that handles real estate can operate with all of the incentives and imperatives one would find in any feudal lord — including ‘hostility to education.’
Mind you, they’ll probably offer scholarships and endow fellowships and make other token gestures to universities and schools to show their support. But amassing wealth means growing the value of their holdings without growing the costs. An elite school with 2000 students in a community that should have accommodated 10,000 students means that they can spend twice as much money per student and still save themselves 60% of the costs of teaching the students they should have been teaching. And if anyone questions them, they can point to those ‘elite’ students they’ve educated as ‘proof.’
The real estate interests at work will buy and sell city councils, because again, children cost money. Parks and recreation can be a wonderful way to increase property values for some housing (so long as it doesn’t get overrun with homeless or criminal activities) — but sewage, trash collection, cleanup, public safety, sidewalks, transit…children cost a fortune. Better to task the police with protecting a thousand empty ‘investor condos’ that sit vacant, while the poor people pack themselves densely into cramped apartments.
In 2002, Professor Matsuda suggested “the deliberate choice to let the urban schools fail, and the offering up of the bogus solution of shuffling voucher-bearing students around like peas in a shell game” was child abuse. To her, the practice was a form of evil.
Perhaps it is abusive.
But just as I’d criticize a decision to charge social workers with a crime for failing to stop abuse, I’d criticize a decision to call parents, local government, and local school leaders ‘evil.’ We should be very reluctant to reach that conclusion, until after completing an extensive investigation (Professor Matsuda has investigated a great deal, but I’d still want to know a great deal more about the stories in each place where this is being tested). Everyone who jumps on a bandwagon and skips to judgment is not going to help a single child, so even if Matsuda is perfectly correct, to truly grasp her premises, one must perform the same personal inquiry into the structure and prospects of local schools.
Way I see it, the powers that orchestrate these sorts of things have a vast array of opportunistic schemes and plans afoot. They have the power to hire and fire city council, senators, congressional representatives, state government, mayors, police chiefs, school administrators, church pastors, and most others. They have the power to push people out of an urban environment (“white flight”…or maybe not) — and the power to ‘guide’ them into another environment (a suburb, or…) — and the power to convince the people who they moved this way that it was actually their own choice. The powers behind the scenes might even repeat the cycle — wreck the urban core in order to develop a new suburb, and once that’s tapped out, wreck a suburb and gentrify the urban core — buy/sell, repeat the cycle. Profit each time.
Business processes recycle the same ideas more often than they invent new ones. Evil can be banal.
Wall Street traders are about as comfortable selling stock as they are buying it: there’s money to be made either way. But in a universe in which AI/algorithms conduct thousands of trades before a human can read a single sentence, the extremely wealthy must experiment with new means of amassing/defending their wealth. That means building — and wrecking — and rebuilding communities, which AI isn’t very good at doing (yet).
Yet whatever tools get used, the same CRT methods used to zero in on how a race-neutral ‘colorblind’ creditworthiness test actually reinforced and extended the harms of Jim Crow years after Jim Crow laws themselves had been struck down. But only if someone can detect the fundamental game.
CRT is one of several methods of trying to tease out how those structures might work. Assume people do not always speak the truth. Assume things are not always what they seem. Assume certain people are more likely to be omitted from a narrative than others. Start an investigation by looking where the evidence is likely to have been missed.
CRT is not “the truth” — and it is properly subject to any number of lines of criticism — but the cardinal rule of a real critic is ONE MUST KNOW WHAT THE FUCK ONE IS CRITICIZING.
A person who judges a thing before knowing anything about it is prejudiced. If they do that on racial grounds, they’re a racist. CRT is not the only theory interrogating prejudices. But it has yielded some very interesting insights so far.
The people opposing CRT don’t care. They never will. There’s money to be made or power or gratification to be gained by jumping on bandwagons (which means that the pro-CRT crowd that is leaping to defend a concept only because it’s getting attacked by people ‘on the other side’ are actually misleading and impeding the critical approach they pretend to support).
Critics can indeed detect their games, and with enough time, perhaps identify the players. But only communities can actually do something about it.
And that brings back to the question posed in the title: is CRT ‘anti-Asian American’? That depends. It’s a way of detecting opportunists who are selling bad policies that will hurt communities. Some Asian Americans who plan to exploit such bad policies for their own benefit will definitely be threatened by CRT. Some Asian Americans might have been comfortable raising prices in certain urban areas on certain customers when certain public benefits checks arrived, and then dropping them again for all the other customers: white businesses were routinely criticized for doing so.
Matsuda’s premise is that Asian Americans CAN and should work with other Americans (of all backgrounds) to try to improve our public school systems. The only way that can be ‘anti-Asian’ is if cooperation with other communities and groups somehow violates the core values of a group. Once one understands what it is, a claim that CRT is somehow “anti-Asian” means attributing to Asians or Asian Americans some sort of racist, ‘anti-collaborative’ value system that refuses to collaborate with other groups to improve community goods: claiming that Asian Americans don’t care about ‘other people’s children.’ That’s racist, reductive, and ridiculous. Therefore, CRT cannot possibly be anti-Asian.
CRT is a threat to scam artists and opportunists. It is an even bigger threat to the ones who profit the most by exploiting discrimination, by stirring up racism and then using that to achieve some advantage. There are some Asian Americans willing to do that. There are others who can see through their bad faith spew, and offer a better perspective.
