Letters to the Editor
Critical Race Theory and the 21st-century Liberal
Somewhere near the center of the “classic liberal” conception is the idea that what one does ultimately defines who one is. One’s actions and convictions (for which a person is responsible), and not the accidents of life (for which he is not responsible), reveal his true face to the world. Identity, in other words, is forged, not implanted. A fragment from Heraclitus states, “A man’s character is his fate.” Otherwise put, “Circumstances do not make the man, they reveal him.” (James Allen)
In contrast, modern “liberals” adhere to the “woke” conception that race should be given preeminence in adjudicating the value of individual belief. “No man is an island,” says the millennial, and even if he were, that island’s sociopolitical history, and its roster of misdeeds and offenses, inescapably becomes part of him. No longer, as in the pompous days of class division, is one prejudiced by the cut of one’s cloth; however, like the onerous eras of division based on race, we are prejudged by the color of our skin. And nature holds to a strict No Refunds policy.
Lay aside the pseudo-historical justifications and obfuscatory post-modern interpretations, and what remains of woke-ness is this: a philosophy that considers skin pigmentation the supreme criteria for assessing a human being’s social worth. All justifications of such bigotry are either a way to extenuate, or obscure, this ineluctable fact.
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