The Double Binds of CRT and Anti-Racism — Abuse Tactics of the DEI and Anti-Bias Industry
Shannon B Douglas
Shannon B Douglas
October 12, 2021
CRT (Critical Race Theory) is the hysteria de-jour in the politically polarized United States that has analogues in Canadian schools; where political and neo-religious doctrines are being smuggled into the curriculums by activist teachers, and where children are surprising unsuspecting parents when they come home with highly questionable (certainly non-traditional) interpretations of things like race and gender. And it should receive a lot more attention and scrutiny in the public sphere.
The current mistake many democrats are making, which I believe could cost them the white house in 2024 and my well put Trump back in office, is to assume that because Trump made it a talking point, that the problems of CRT are simply hyperbole or rooted in lies. While it was clear to students of history that Trump embodied totalitarian tendencies, emboldened far right stooges in his quest to gain and to hold on to power, and represented an existential threat to American Democracy; a deeply toxic and destructive movement dressed in superficial altruism has been quietly entrenching itself in public institutions and corporations in our society.
Even a broken clock is right twice a day and as much as I loathe Trump, he got this one right. Examining the use of CRT in schools objectively on merits should be a sober and non-partisan public discussion. But what is CRT and is it connected to numerous other issues we are seeing in our lives? In spite of assertions by so many defenders of CRT in education… that it only exists as an obscure legal theory taught in law schools, it is clear that as a philosophical framework, it has been repackaged and rebranded from jargon of elite law where it was founded by a few well-heeled black lawyers.
Quite bluntly CRT is a method of training far leftwing political activists which is not something we want in public schools, nor in our workplace, nor in our public institutions. We need an urgent public examination of its principles in Canada as well as in the US.
One of the challenges is the difficulty presented by language itself. There is a pseudo-academic word-salad, sets of circular arguments, a constantly shifting definitional landscape that emerges when advocates are asked to describe CRT and its constellation of connected disciplines. Adherents and proponents often resist attempts to define it through the use of straw-men attacks, denialisms and redirects for the simple reason that it obscures it’s toxic nature. When one begins to examine the significant thinkers behind this philosophy it becomes quite obvious, quite quickly that cultural pathology is an explicit feature of the movement.
It shares features commonly found in highly toxic cultures of abuse and manipulation like destructive cults. It cannot be argued with. It’s adherents firmly believe, like religious fundamentalists, that they are right and everyone else is not only wrong, but morally flawed. Their tactics of psychic manipulation and coercion are exactly like those used by authoritarian cult leaders and narcissistic abusers: Mental manipulation, emotional blackmail, guilt, disorienting linguistic traps and forced confessions of guilt.
Yes, CRT was a movement that originated with a group of Black American legal scholars. No, there is no actual class in elementary schools on the legal theories of systemic injustice. In spite of that, the presuppositions of CRT have permeated institutions from universities to public schools and have a strong foothold in the corporate world, a beachhead established under the friendly-sounding, altruistic banner of Anti-Bias training and the compassionate-sounding holy trinity of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI).
In order to reduce the confusion of language moving forward I will use the vernacular term “Wokeness” to describe the ideology of CRT and its related schools of thought. You can identify the presence of Woke ideas through the buzzwords they have established around their own socially constructed reality which are all centered around the concept of Social Justice in the face of historic oppression. Wokesters believe that as a society we are prevented from our utopian potential of perfect equality and justice for all. They believe that it is their duty to convert and make other people work towards these values in the name of ending systemic oppression, through anti-bias, anti-bullying and anti-racism efforts. These are wonderful sounding words, and perhaps there was once a genuine concern for the realization of these values, but Wokism employs the same kind of destructive linguistic revisionism and double-speak that Orwell warned us about eighty years ago.
He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past — The Ministry of Truth — from 1984
The presentation of altruistic language by Wokesters is what makes it seem so attractive in a chaotic world. Who wouldn’t want to make sure that we have Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion in our society? But these words are like those of the old witch enticing Hansel and Gretel into her gingerbread house with temptations of candy; or a predator luring a child with a story about a lost puppy. They systematically exploit our goodness and compassion for destructive ends — and they are doing this to children in our schools.
The woke seek justice in a number of areas: The most prominent and influential manifestation of their praxis (which is a combined idea of Practice and Activism) is the quest for racial equity, but factions within this culture also include activists in pursuit of (Trans)Gender Equity, Equity for women and equity rights for the disabled and various other marginalized groups.
They tell us that the world is permeated by abstract evils which need to be rooted out of our institutions and our society. These evils are called “Systemic Oppression” and “Systemic Racism” where the words Oppression and Racism don’t mean what we think. Further, we do not deal with “Systemic Racism” the same way we deal with racism. One of the Gurus of this movement, Ibram X. Kendi, responsible for the spread of the idea of being Anti-Racist, says that because of systemic racism, it is no longer sufficient for good people to not be racist, but good people must be actively anti-racist in their efforts to root out this nebulous evil. His message is a command to activism for too many conscientious and well-intentioned but misguided people.
Kendi, who is a Phd, establishes a universe of childish simplicity, by asserting that our culture is founded and principally shaped by the struggle between groups for power: one group (whites) are guilty of the historic and systemic exploitation of minority groups (blacks ). This oppression is intentional and conscious and people today who participate in “whiteness” are illegitimate beneficiaries of this systemic oppression. He narrates that we exist in an existential struggle for power and justice against this universal force, (systemic racism) which he and the Racial Justice movement tell us is the principle animating force in society.
This establishes a binary universe of good and evil. Those who accept the premise that there is a binary relationship between race and power are the Virtuous In-Group, and those who do not are either ignorant racists who must be indoctrinated with Diversity, Equity and Inclusion training, or the white supremacists who actively push back, disagree with, or criticize with their model of the world. For those who accept the indoctrination of the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion trainings, the urgency of the current state of systemic racial oppression dictates that converts become active Anti-Racists to spread the good word.
All of this sounds like crazy-making, and it is. It is a well-worn tactic of abusers, cult leaders and authoritarian leaders to point to their target groups and claim that they’re being overly sensitive, misinterpreting, or being hysterical over nothing. The archetype of the whistleblower often overlaps with the scapegoat who gets blamed for committing the abuses he or she is trying to point out.
Their narrative opens doors in Charitable Organizations, Public Schools, Corporations and Government because it communicates virtuous intentions. If you have privilege and benefited from systemic racism, you need overlook your skepticism, lower your defenses, and open the gates of your organization to the missionaries of Woke.
It’s a bit like the friendly person who shows up at your door to tell you that you were born sinful, are destined for hell and must convert. We generally politely decline but the woke are making inroads with this trick.
If you’ve accepted some parts of this narrative, you may feel like you’re about to explode and there is a reason for that. The possibility of anyone disagreeing with you means that they’re a white supremacist who has rejected Diversity, Equity and Inclusion and therefore must be a bad person. I get that a lot. I invite you to read my personal disclaimer and position statement on racism and historic tragedies. I believe that human nature and human society is far more complex than can be explained by Wokism and Critical Theory. I reject the idea that the complexities of any human society can be reduced to a binary of good people vs a nebulous evil. I also believe that in a liberal democracy I am free to disagree with moral and pseudo-religious assertions made by anyone.
When human beings assemble around binary, black and white views of the world, which divide people into good and bad, where people who reject the principles of a narrative or tenets of a movement are treated like heretics and are categorically silenced and discredited, we are encountering an early form of mass dehumanization.
We can see this when we examine any atrocity and any exertion of power in history where one group oppresses another — it is not limited to historic relationships between races. The In-Groups seeking power always discredit and dehumanize their target Out-Groups.
“We are the Virtuous! Good People! The Pious and the Morally Superior beings, judges of all rights and wrong!”
“You! You! You! Are the despicable source of evil in the world!!!”
This is the same structural narrative found in the the Maoist Revolution; in the Stalinist Purges; in the Crusades; in the French Revolution; and in Nazi Germany. They do this by exploiting people’s sense of suffering or even just perceptions of injustice, and paint the enemy as the cause of all these problems.
This is what makes Wokism, and taxpayer-funded indoctrination into Wokism so dangerous. It is the institutionalization of an in-group/out-group narrative that teaches that whites are the embodiment of societies problems, and which dehumanizes anyone who disagrees with them.
Let’s look at a couple source documents and core ideas from the championed icons of Wokeness through the present day to see what actual Theorists have said. These thinkers are influencing and indoctrinating armies of activists who are woke wolves in sheep’s clothing unleashed upon the world.
CRT, reports Derrick Bell, one of the movement’s two founders, embraces “an experientially grounded, oppositionally expressed, and transformatively aspirational concern with race and other socially constructed hierarchies.”
“ Writes Richard Delgado, the other progenitor: “ “Virtually all of Critical Race thought is marked by deep discontent with liberalism, (with the sic.) system of civil rights litigation and activism, faith in the legal system, and hope for progress …. ,””
– From “Whats’ Wrong With Critical Race Theory?: Reopening the Case foe Middle Class Values” Daniel Subotnikt 1998 — Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy
“Definitions anchor us in principles. This is not a light point: If we don’t do the basic work of defining the kind of people we want to be in language that is stable and consistent, we can’t work toward stable, consistent goals. Some of my most consequential steps toward being an antiracist have been the moments when I arrived at basic definitions. To be an antiracist is to set lucid definitions of racism/antiracism, racist/antiracist policies, racist/anti-racist ideas, racist/antiracist people. To be a racist is to constantly redefine racist in a way that exonerates one’s changing policies, ideas, and personhood.”
- Ibram X. Kendi — Extract from 2019 book — “How to be an Anti-Racist”
“White people in North America live in a social environment that protects and insulates them from race-based stress. This insulated environment of racial protection builds white expectations for racial comfort while at the same time lowering the ability to tolerate racial stress, leading to what I refer to as White Fragility. White Fragility is a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves. These moves include the outward display of emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and behaviors such as argumentation, silence, and leaving the stress-inducing situation. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium.
Robin DiAngelo — Intro to essay “White Fragility” 2012 — International Journal of Critical Pedagogy
Each of these quotes can be examined at length and are worth contemplating because of what they imply. For example, when Kendi is speaking about his arrival at his definition of Anti-Racism and the importance of it, he is redefining our traditional understanding of racism and he is manipulating language. The classical definition of racism is tied to our understanding of prejudice where prejudice is understood as a held set of stereotypical, identity-based beliefs about someone based on their skin color, cultural origin, gender or sexual orientation. In the case of specific prejudice based on race we call it racism. In law, we prohibit discrimination against someone for their held beliefs, their race, their sexual orientation, and their gender identity.
Kendi redefines this traditional understanding of racism, and is often quoted as saying, that where he sees disparities in social outcomes (inequity), he sees racism — therefore inequality of outcomes ie admission test scores in New York Schools can only be understood as systemic racism. This means that there is only a binary possibility in the world for Kendi, of either equity or systemic racism.
He says: “To be an antiracist is to SET lucid definitions (emphasis added) of racism/antiracism, racist/antiracist policies, racist/anti-racist ideas, racist/antiracist people” It bears stating that he is explicitly saying that he and other anti-racists are setting NEW LUCID definitions of terms for their vision of the world based on the binaries he outlines of Racism vs. Anit-Racism — and he is defining a bounded and limited intellectual domain for discourse and analysis as the ONLY framework within which to discuss race.
He further says: To be a racist is to constantly redefine racist in a way that exonerates one’s changing policies, ideas, and personhood.”
People confronted with these assertions and manipulations absolutely deserve and have a right to question people who make them. I believe we are morally obligated to do so. In a liberal society, where we value free speech and the rights of individuals to form their own conclusions about the world we expect to be able at least to undertake dialogue.
Questioning an anti-racist however, and attempting point out the Orwellian revision of terms results in being further attacked. The person who is establishing SET and LUCID re-definitions of a term for which we have a consensus understanding of in society is saying that those who attempt to reject these Orwellian redefinitions, are the ones who are guilty of redefining terms and are therefore the racists.
This is an unwinnable situation if you accept Kendi as a legitimate authority on racism, which no-one should — and he does this with astounding arrogance and conceit, in the same short paragraph where he claims to have arrived at lucid (re)definitions of racism.
We see the same trap in the introduction to a famous essay by Human Resource and DEI Guru, Robin DiAngelo, that any type of non-compliant response to Anti-Racist training proves her assertion of racism in the form of White Fragility. It means you either agree and pledge yourself to Anti-Racism, or you are resistant, fragile or worse, an avowed racist.
This is called gaslighting and it is an abuse and manipulation tactic where the abuser creates a false reality and imposes it on their targets.
It is a predatory tactic and a form of mind-control.
Overlaying this stunning reality-revisionism, and structural to this ideology, is the implicit double-bind. A double-bind can only function if there are only two choices and so the presentation of a false binary choice is central to this manipulation tactic.
You either join us or you’re a bad person. You’re either an Anti-Racist or you’re an avowed racist. It’s a damned if you do; damned if you don’t scenario. Heads I win. Tails you lose.
I hear over-and-over again from people who have been sucked into these manipulations that systemic racism is real and urgent and that it is the cause of all inequity in the world. As an assertion, it is concept-adjacent to the idea that the devil, who is behind all human sinfulness, is responsible for all the problems of the world.
From a business perspective, as an owner, manager or member of a board of directors, it is deeply unethical to subject employees to purity tests and moral commands rooted in double-binds. It creates a psychologically traumatic situation for your employees and your leaders because it’s a form of emotional and psychological bullying with outcomes hinging upon our primal needs for security (ie employment and income).
In addition, these ideological adepts exploit the powerful forces of social proof and peer pressure to gain compliance. No-one wants to face a barrage of accusations or the implications of assumed racism and white supremacy in front of their peers, nor to be subjected to pressure to state agreement for ideas that create internal conflict and stress.
I once did a certification in clinical hypnotherapy. It followed a few hundred hours of training and study of how our attention and cognition works with a strong foundation in ethics. A double-bind is an extremely powerful hypnotic tool and trance-inducing technique that is used in therapy with the client’s informed consent to achieve a desired outcome. We learned how double binds are used both ethically and unethically and where the boundary is in order to to use the technique to help our clients achieve the healthiest outcomes possible; but double-binds are also used by all manner of unscrupulous people and institutions, from aggressive salespeople, to pick-up/hook-up artists to con artists to cultists.
Furthermore, people who have been subjected to a deeply manipulative double-bind like this, seek to quell the cognitive dissonance that these psychic traumas impose upon them and to reconcile the conflicts generated within them. To do so, they will unconsciously seek ways to alleviate their discomfort by building upon the false premise and sinking deeper into influence of the unethical dynamic, leader or cult. Even intelligent, thoughtful people may reconfigure their realities to support the belief installed through this kind high-stakes double bind. This is understood from studies conducted by various intelligence organizations around the world in their research into brainwashing, into techniques for recruiting informants and into understanding active measures aimed at compromising the integrity of the institutions and cultures of foreign adversaries.
The spread of Wokism represents a threat to our way of life. The threat is outlined in the philosophy of Robert Delgado:
Virtually all of Critical Race thought is marked by deep discontent with liberalism, a system (ie current approaches sic.) of civil rights litigation and activism, faith in the legal system, and hope for progress …. ,”
To begin with, not everyone is familiar with the philosophical definition of liberalism, and it’s helpful to understand that the root of liberalism is the concept of individual Liberty ie. Freedom. Classical liberalism is the set of principles that form the foundation of our social order. It is based upon the ideas of individual freedom and responsibility to society in balance, where we are free to the pursuit of our own happiness, wellbeing and economic prosperity. It holds the concept of meritocracy, where we have the rights to pursue achievement and where we are deserving of the fruits of our efforts. Competence, Competition and individual achievement is central to classical liberalism.
It recognizes that a government is necessary and that one of the necessary features of a functioning society is to be subject to the rule of law, which is principled in equal justice under the law for all citizens. Laws in a liberal democracy are made and iterated through democratic processes with the mandate of the majority of citizens — by election of a representative. In a liberal democracy we would rather err on the side of individual freedom rather than on the side of government control.
Since freedom, individual effort and liberty are central to the liberal order, a classical liberal does not accept the imposition of beliefs or strictures by others. We have freedom of religion, freedom of expression, and freedom of association. The method we use for arriving at a worldview and a map of reality is through participation in the marketplace of ideas — where ideas are evaluated on their merits and upon the value of their outcomes — where bad ideas are revealed to be bad through scrutiny and debate and good ideas are elevated (or naturally rise) towards adoption by society.
Delgado and other foundational characters of Wokism explicitly reject liberalism and seek to impose their model of the world on others. This explains the obvious front-end manipulation of the double bind and the use of psychological coercions like shame and guilt to trap people into their worldview. They center group identities and reject the individual — which is a dehumanization tactic, and so mistreatment and abuse of the individual is acceptable. For an idea founded in law schools, it is uniquely disrespectful of our laws.
This is explicitly authoritarian behavior, and we see from Delgado that adherents are fundamentally nihilistic, discontented with the rule of law, and even discontent with a faith in progress. So if the old way isn’t working, the obvious conclusion is revolution. This too is explicit in their writing and teaching.
I will absolutely say that in Delgado’s world, examining the justice system in the 80s from the perspective of black Americans engaged in with police and courts and the prison system, that it was obvious that the system was corrupt and was failing to meet its principles for the millions of Blacks, Hispanics and Americans in poverty. It still is. But the problems arising today are similar in epidemiology to a virus jumping the species barrier; or an invasive species taking over an environment where they have adaptive advantages and disrupt existing ecosystems. The concept of systemic racism, as a theory in law, has been applied to other institutions and social structures far beyond the legal system as if it were true, and whole fields of study have been corrupted because of it. It has corrupted Medicine, Education, Women’s Studies, Gender Studies and so on. It eventually led to the enormous and unprovable assertion that the society we live in is irredeemably corrupt with systemic racism, that it is entirely rooted in white supremacy dating back centuries, and that this injustice gave illegitimate benefit to whites while blacks were consistently and universally oppressed. Wokesters see racism in society like a metastasized cancer, requiring the complete rejection of the current order.
Finally, I will point to one last mechanism of manipulation emerging from CRT and Wokism and that is the idea that reality is socially constructed. We find this perhaps most clearly and centrally in the branch of Wokism that focuses on gender and transgenderism where you would encounter the common claim, even as presented to six-year-olds in Ontario schools, that gender is a social construction and therefore available to redefinition. This is an extremely dangerous belief for a couple reasons: first of all, especially for children passing through critical and difficult developmental milestones of identity formation (puberty is hard), it is deeply destabilizing to inculcate them with a presupposition that their identities are not their own, but imposed on us by stereotypical treatment, parental biases and external expectations of behavior and manner. It gives children a revolution to participate in, which naturally rebellious and oppositional teenagers will gravitate to, by constructing a new woke identity that may involve irreversible medicalization.
We can see in a very recent and shocking revelation from two leading transgender health specialist, one the president-elect of the World Professional Association of Transgender Health, that the unprecedented explosion in the prevalence of transgender and gender-non-conforming teens over the last decade is undeniable. Ten years ago about 1 of 2,000 college-aged girls identified as gender non-conforming in some way, today in universities, the prevalence is 1 in 20 — which is a hundred-fold increase.
Combine this with the work of other Woke activists and we have seen laws banning conversion therapy for gays and lesbians being interpreted through the woke gender ideology. This has resulted in a practice known as “Affirmative Therapy” which means that when a child presents as gender non-conforming to a teacher, a psychologist, or a doctor, none of the professionals can question them — or risk being prosecuted or losing their jobs for practicing conversion therapy. These kids are then being given puberty blocking hormones at ages as young as nine or ten, cross-sex hormones in their early teens to bypass their normal puberties, and surgeries like double mastectomies and bottom surgeries without even being able to legally vote or drink. This should not require the observation that all of these interventions are being performed off-label, and therefore can only be called medical experiments that are being performed on children
But the real abuse of “Social Constructionism,” if there is anything worse than the gleeful and self-congratulatory medical mutilation of teenage girls by woke doctors, is as a gaslighting tool. Telling someone their reality, identity and beliefs are social constructions is an insidious, abusive, and destabilizing attack. It universally invalidates all questions, reactions, objections, and responses to the manipulations of double-binds and language games and it argues that a person’s reality isn’t reality at all.
In the 1920s and 30’s we began to see a group of philosophers publish work in a field that is knows as General Semantics. Alfred Korzypski authored the seminal work in the field, called “Science and Sanity,” but he is most known for the idea that the “The Map is Not the Territory” meaning that the words we use to describe things are not the things they represent. Alan Watts used to joke that the menu is not the meal. People who we regard as leaders in the field of General Semantics include Japanese American S.I. Hayakawa, who wrote about propaganda c. WWII in a book called “Language and Thought in Action” and George Orwell was inspired by this examination of language in response to the pre-war zeitgeist of deep polarization and social mistrust. His work on totalitarian ideologies, as we know, is probably best remembered because of his commentary on the abuses of language by communists and fascists alike.
Conceptually, these Semanticists understood that we form an internal representation of the world as human beings. We do this to make sense of it so that we can function in the environment and society that we live in. We know from decades of study in the various sciences that our five senses only take in a fraction of the available sensory information in the material world. We take in information that is salient to us from our environment and we unconsciously ignore or generalize non-relevant sense data. This is how we follow a conversation in a crowded room. We create a map the world based on salience that will always be imperfect. The map is not the territory, and we have learned as a species over millennia that we require a shared reality to function as a coherent group, from family, to clan, to tribe, to nation. Our sense of reality is not socially constructed. It is an emergent property of our shared efforts to make sense of the world, communicated between people using words with meanings we can all count on, all of which is iterated through time as a function of adaptation, NOT social construction.
In spite of this, race and gender ideologues who have infiltrated public schools in the US and Canada and who are imposing woke curriculums upon children by fiat, are telling ten-year-old children that race is socially constructed. In one teacher-training/professional development video I watched, the teacher explicitly said that a group of rich white men in the US conspired to socially construct race and racism as a way to establish power and oppress blacks.
Much like Ibram Kendi redefining racism to suit his own agenda, and a sentence later saying anyone who would dare to redefine his redefinitions, are racists; social constructionists are creating a false reality framework and justifying it with the non-sensical and vapid argument that reality is socially constructed. This is a classic narcissistic projection of accusing others of doing what you yourself are actually doing.
The Ministry of Peace is responsible for war.
As painful and frightening as it is to consider, this movement must be confronted and exorcised from our institutions. It’s influence needs to be removed from our schools, from our workplaces and our institutions. This requires good and decent people, who believe in the golden rule, and in a liberal society where people left and right, black, white, yellow and red, work out their ideas and values in the marketplace of ideas and through participating in democracy and civil society.
I do not believe that we can eradicate bullying from human society. It will always exist because it is part of natural dynamics in human society, but we can call it out and condemn it where we see it. We need to stand up together and speak up or we may lose our chance. As this toxic and censorious movement spreads it can reach a critical mass after which we will have surrendered our society to people who believe that brainwashing and psychological manipulation are the means to their ends. We do not want to live in a world governed by such self-appointed arbiters of truth, morality and justice.
We need people willing to accept the accusations and bigotry in order to force the implied accusations into the open and to confront them for what they are: abusive ideologies being imposed in our institutions by the flying monkeys of an authoritarian cult. The double-binds and manipulations need to be revealed for the poison they are and forcefully and calmly rejected. These tools only work as long as people are divided in fear and guilt and shame thinking other people don’t feel the same way they do.
It’s time for the people who have been afraid to speak, to stand up together.
For All My Relations. I am You and You are Me!~