How Critical Race Theory Molded Obama

That intellectual thugs now rule the hallways of academe and threaten our civil liberties was perhaps nowhere more dramatically illustrated than in the Duke lacrosse rape case two years ago. The humanities professors who persecuted Duke lacrosse players had acquired their jobs through force — through protests and demands that began in the 1960s. By the 1980s, Duke University had succeeded in filling its ranks with professors of dubious credentials, but who fit the new gender, race, and left-wing ideological categories. These professors began their work in indoctrinating their charges towards a Marxist view by castigating such foundational notions as truth, universal rights, rule of law, and due process into a category of “patriarchal white hegemony.” As on campuses across the country, anyone who disagrees is kept out of the club of the tenured.

“Critical race theory” is one label for such an anti-Western notion of justice; its ideas seep into the humanities, including my field, English. Its promulgators, like Derrick Bell, insist that long-held beliefs that underpin our legal system be replaced by a “justice” that takes into account past and current racial discrimination — however subjectively determined it may be. In short, critical race theorists believe that standards of justice should vary from group to group and situation to situation.

The lacrosse players’ presumed guilt, based on their white race, their male gender, and their class, followed lock-step. It was this view that rationalized the persecution of the innocent lacrosse players inside the classroom and spurred on violent mobs who threatened their safety.

As an example of how accepted such a view is in the insular academy, none of the group of 88 faculty members that signed a published statement condemning the lacrosse players within days after the false accusation was made has been punished. Nor have they been punished for clearly violating university policies regarding faculty conduct toward students. In fact, many of them, like Houston Baker, have been invited to endowed chairs at other universities. Duke President Richard Brodhead, who presided over the travesty of justice and suggested that the players needed to be “proven innocent,” recently received a 15% raise.

Indicating a receptive attitude to such a view of justice, at least by his teaching and academic background, is presidential candidate Barack Obama. While at Harvard, Obama joined his professor, critical race theorist Derrick Bell, in mob pressures to hire a black female. Obama, during his richly remunerated stint as a part-time professor at the University of Chicago Law School, relied on his former professor’s writings, as his syllabus shows. (Issues of race seem to have been a specialty during Obama’s tenure, as I’ve described in previous columns.) The media points to his inclusion of a reading by conservative jurist Robert Bork, but the preponderance of far-left readings, as well as other evidence, like Obama’s contribution of a chapter to a volume devoted to the writings of radical socialist Saul Alinsky and his close ties to the New Party, strongly suggest that Obama as professor used the tactic of most left-wing professors: throw in one token conservative as a whipping boy. Obama’s academic associations and writings show him favoring theories of justice based on race, class, and gender. These have their roots in a socialist doctrine — and not in Western notions of equal and universal rights.

It takes a regular Joe (the Plumber) asking an innocent question to reveal the Democratic candidate’s ideology, which, in faith to Marxism, is to “spread the wealth.” Joe the Plumber has likely been alienated by his schooling and the double talk reigning in the classroom. He, instead, relies on his God-given reason, just the way the Founding Fathers intended. Professor Obama on the campaign trail, however, mocked John McCain’s reference to him during the third debate.

Obama has garnered the support of Christopher Buckley, who seems to have forgotten his late father’s prescient words in his book about his college years, God and Man at Yale:

Marx himself … envisaged two broad lines of action that could be adopted to destroy the bourgeoisie: one was violent revolution; the other, a slow increase of state power, to a point where a smooth transition could be effected from an individualist to a collectivist society.

Our founding principles are based on the idea of natural law, clearly expressed in such language that “all men are created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights.” The Marxist and critical race theory notions espoused by Obama and by those in positions as intellectual opinion-makers are diametrically opposed to our democratic foundations.

Joe rightly feels threatened by a double standard of justice. He knows that he is endowed with reason by his Creator — and not the professors.

The only response that the professors have left to give to Joe, the aspiring small business owner, is ultimately the one Chairman Mao espoused in his 1949 speech, “On the People’s Democratic Dictatorship”: “Communists the world over are wiser than the bourgeoisie.” Indeed, the professors, like Mao, have simply declared themselves smarter and excluded those who disagree with them. Unchallenged by the public or administrators, they have promulgated their ideology in the classrooms.

It is a plumber and not a Ph.D., though, who recognizes what Obama’s ideas mean for him, a small business owner, a member of the bourgeoisie: famine as a result of an ideology of “spreading the wealth” and guilt until proven innocent as a result of class-based justice.