Let me state from the outset that I fully acknowledge the existence of racism and understand full well that melanated people are placed at a social disadvantage for committing the sin of being born with a browner complexion. I am not about to echo Candace Owens and other black conservatives by denying the structural nature of racial prejudice that has seeped into the fabric of not only America but most countries throughout the world. In that sense, there is some merit to the positions staked out by Critical Race Theory and Black Lives Matter proponents.
Where I part with CRT and BLM is when they take these evident truths about our country and weaponize them to collectively judge “others”, monopolize pains, arrogantly lecture people and silence anyone who disagrees with them. Forgetting the lessons of Martin Luther King—who wisely noted that hate cannot be driven out with hate—advocates of CRT and BLM insist on being divisive instead of forging common grounds with other marginalized communities the way Fred Hampton did in the 1960s
This critique is not aimed at everyday people who support Critical Race Theory or Black Lives Matter, my harsh rebuke is reserved only for those who enjoy mass followings and being paid and promoted by the establishment to incite emotions, antagonize “white” people and fracture society into the ghettoes of manufactured labels and meaningless dogmas. Far from leading conversations that are meant to heal the festering wounds of racism, black opinion leaders are funded and propagated to rip old scars open and keep America marooned in the wasteland of identity politics.
We have to understand the vendors of CRT and BLM like Ibram X. Kendi, Ta-Nehisi Coates and Jemele Hill for who and what they are. They are not revolutionary thinkers who are determined to help their people, they are opportunists who leverage the suffering of African-Americans to line their pockets with the money of the very same “white” supremacists they pretend to rail against. The government-media-corporate complex rewards demagogues who filter social ills through the prism of identity and ideologies in order to prevent a grass-roots movement that is determined in transcending America’s caste system of race that was constructed by malicious racists.
