Canceling Critical Race Theory

 I am not a politically correct animal. Out of the good of my bleeding heart, I've tried, but my species of genderfuck extraterrestrial just doesn't swing that way. When the good lord Kali made this mess, she made her with a big fucking mouth and no filter. I swear like a sailor, I crack awful jokes at funerals, and I still think January 6 was the best Monty Python sketch in decades. Beyond my more juvenile instincts though, I also happen to be something of a free speech purist. I grew up on punk rock and John Water flicks, and I still worship the ground Lenny Bruce, Mario Savio, and Abbie Hoffman spat on. Cancel culture is a real thing and it fucking sucks. I despise censorship whether it's practiced by Facebook or the Federal Government, and I don't believe anyone should be banned from any platform, ever.

I feel like the left has lost its way with this bullshit. We've become so concerned with not hurting anyone's feelings that we've forgotten how to kick some fucking ass. A revolution isn't a pride parade. We have to break things and own our slurs. We have to become faggots with attitude. We've seen first hand over the last few decades what political correctness achieves and it's absolutely nothing. Americans have never been more culturally sensitive or polite and racial inequality is still at an all time high and Donald Trump could still be a two term president. Political correctness doesn't solve any of this nation's underlying issues with hate, it just makes it easier for bigots to camouflage their cultural indiscretions with good manors until the next election. I'm as appalled by racism as any other leftist, I just don't think we're doing dick to correct it by becoming a bunch of censorious church ladies.  

With all that junk in mind, when I first heard about the hottest thing in identity politics, Critical Race Theory, my natural primordial instinct was to roll my eyes and say "Here we go again." On the surface, CRT appeared to be another tool of corporate diversity training. Some set of culturally sensitive rituals Fortune 500 companies can perform to throw sensitive lefties off the trail of all the Black people they poison in the Niger Delta just to make their stock price move up half a point. But once I actually dug into the meat and potatoes of this school of a thought I discovered there was nothing particularly politically correct about it and that, if anything, its opponents were the real champions of cancel culture.

Critical Race Theory is the basic recognition that racism in America is an institution that didn't just come to a screeching halt because a few lily white liberal do-gooders passed a few civil rights acts. It's the study of how racism continues to impact the legal system and other power structures long after we learned to be polite and use the right pronouns. You have to be a fucking moron living on a cul-de-sac six miles up your own asshole to deny that this is a racist country. And yet that is essentially what many of the opponents of CRT are attempting to force all of us to do. They would much rather our children be raised on fairy tales about the Founding Fathers curing cancer and Native Americans just handing over their land for a horn of plenty. It's goddamn infantile and it's precisely what I despise about political correctness. It's a bunch of assholes putting feelings before facts and dealing with them in an adult fashion.

This doesn't mean that some progressive morons don't take this thing too far and turn it into self-flagellating guilt porn. Every political philosophy gets misinterpreted by a few errant imbeciles. But at its heart, CRT isn't just an exercise in blaming whitey. It's about getting the record straight, and a lot of Caucasian Americans could benefit a great deal by following CRT's lead and learning about their own complicated relationship with racial oppression. Arguably the most important thing CRT teaches us is that race is a manufactured concept predicated largely on class, and in no place is that more evident than the creation of whiteness. You see, honkies weren't always honkies. A lot of us use to be marginalized people too.

There were no white people in early colonial America. No Black people either for that matter. There were nobleman and peasants and indentured servants. The last category included both Europeans and Africans sold into temporary servitude. Provided that they converted to Christianity, any indentured servant could eventually earn their freedom and even rise up the social ladder to own servants themselves. At one time it wasn't altogether unheard of for an African landowner to own European servants. But for the most part this was a social status reserved for an elite hierarchy of well connected Englishmen. The rest of us peasants were penniless mongrels. For better or worse, we lived together, we fucked together, we got drunk together, but most alarming of all, we rebelled together.

The concept of whiteness didn't become prevalent until the late 1600's, after a series of multiracial uprisings threatened to overthrow the landed gentry and tare the New World and beyond apart at the seams. Both Africans and European peasants participated in these rebellions, the most infamous of which, Bacon's Rebellion, succeeded in burning Jamestown to the fucking ground. The elites back in Europe freaked out. They sought a way to divide the peasant class that greatly outnumbered them. So they invented the white race. All those of European bloodline were granted a payola of petty privileges to keep them docile while Africans became Black and designated as a permanent slave class.

Black folks clearly received the violent end of the stick on this and it haunts them to this day, but poor whites had sold themselves out too. United in fury with their darker brethren, they had a real chance at real equality. It was an opportunity to annihilate the one percent in their infancy, and we gave it up for what? Forty trailers and a mule? We also forfeited our own cultures to be assimilated into this globalist brand called whiteness. Black people managed to forge a new tribal identity built on anti-colonial resistance. But white people remain shackled to an identity defined by oppression. This is why so many white wokesters are so lost. They've rightfully come to reject whiteness but they have nothing but guilt to take its place. 

This is why I think it's important for any discussion on Critical Race Theory to include a discussion on decolonizing whiteness by encouraging people of European descent to reclaim pre-white identities like Irish, Italian, French, or German, as well as identities built on resistance to aristocracy like Rednecks, Queers, and Hillbillies. For too long, poor whites in this country have been convinced to identify with their masters in the one percent against our Black brothers and sisters for an allowance of petty privileges. But it is those very privileges that keep us divided from other poor people and the equality we all deserve. When we stop seeing ourselves as white people, we start to see ourselves as poor people first, and united, the poor people of this country, be they Black hood rats or Scotch-Irish trailer trash, are unstoppable.

These are the kind of politically incorrect conversations that Critical Race Theory can spark if we're all bold enough to take part in the conversation and not give in to the censorious temptations of cancel culture. Let's fucking learn some shit, dearest motherfuckers. And lets pass it on.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post

*  Scenario by A Tribe Called Quest

*  (What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love & Understanding by Elvis Costello

*  I Against I by Bad Brains

*  Rock N Roll N*gger by Patti Smith

*  Express Yourself by NWA

*  My Way by Sid Vicious

*  Young Americans by David Bowie