Raising Victims: the Pernicious Rise of Critical Race Theory by Leonydus Johnson

Author:Leonydus Johnson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Salem Books
Published: 2023-02-07T00:00:00+00:00

If People Are Equal, They Are Not Free

Apart from the open racism of racial equity, it is vital to understand that equality of outcomes is not an achievable goal, at least not in the sense that CRT advocates believe in. Because equity only equalizes downward, the only place people can ever truly be equal is at the bottom. That is not just speculation. History shows us how socialism and communism, in attempts to create societies where everyone is equal, have collapsed into ruin and despair. In countries like the former Soviet Union, Mao’s China, Venezuela, Cuba, Cambodia, etc., attempts to establish equity have consistently ended in tyranny and atrocity. A quote often attributed to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn says, “Human beings are born with different capacities. If they are free, they are not equal. If they are equal, they are not free.”

In the Broadway musical Anastasia (based on the film of the same name), the character Dmitri makes a similar point about life in Communist Russia under Vladimir Lenin following the assassination of the Romanov family. In the first verse of the song, “A Rumor in St. Petersburg,” he sings that “everyone is equal—professors push the brooms. Two dozen total strangers live in two small rooms.”5

This song is a wonderful expression of the idea of equity. Equity in Soviet Russia meant everyone was equally impoverished and oppressed. I find it fascinating that Hollywood and Broadway, which are extremely left-leaning, accept this open rebuke of communism and the concept of equity without much resistance to speak of. Both Hollywood and Broadway regularly push ideas of equity, but Anastasia is still popular in the theatrical community, and those in the theatre who promote the idea of equity seem not to recognize that this song directly criticizes them. Though, to be fair, it is not uncommon to see people fail to connect the dots between the horrific historical outcomes of socialism and communism and the idealistic fantasy that people support. They believe the failures in those other countries throughout history were due to something different than the ideals they embrace. “That wasn’t real socialism” or “That wasn’t real communism” are common retorts to any criticism. “Real communism has never been tried!” They believe those other people in those other societies just did it wrong. It will work this time!

The gap between what sounds good and what actually works has been the source of all manner of catastrophes throughout history. If we wish to correct disparities, we should focus on correcting the disparities between good intentions and disastrous results. This pursuit of racial equity is supposed to correct racial disparities with the assumption being, of course, that the disparities exist because there is some sort of systemic bias which can and should be corrected. We will explore that fallacy in the next chapter. But it isn’t enough to simply say you want to correct racial disparities and then do whatever you want, ignoring the detrimental effects of your actions. Having the intention of helping is not the same as actually helping.

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