Critical Race Theory (CRT) is the belief that America’s economic and legal institutions perpetuate white supremacy. It was developed by legal scholars as an extension of neo-Marxist criticism into Law. Sarah Jeong, the newly-minted editorial writer at the New York times, is a graduate of Harvard Law.
When Miss Jeong wrote her hundreds of anti-White tweets from 2013 to 2017, she likely did so from the perspective of CRT. So, when she wrote her viciously racist tweets (“Oh man it’s kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men”), she did so in the belief her expression was justified. In her mind she was advancing justice.
Critical Race Theory states that white people, especially white men, keep benefiting from past injustices. A cousin theory, old-fashioned Colonialism, advances the thesis that white people have been especially bad in history. To illustrate this view, here’s Professor Nolan Cabrera defending Sarah Jeong in the pages of the Washington Post:
“Part of the reason it was so easy for the outrage to be manufactured in the first place was it was completely decontextualized and ahistorified,” said Nolan L. Cabrera, an associate professor at the University of Arizona who will publish a book in the fall about racial attitudes held by white college students. “Then it was easy to drum up anger and say it looks like she hates white people. That only makes sense if you are willfully ignorant of 400 to 500 years’ history and contemporary social context and also the context from which the tweets were sent.”
Speaking of decontextualizing, I’m curious as to why the (selective) look at history only goes back ‘400 to 500 years’. I want to go back a bit farther, to the Black Sea port of Caffa in 1347, right on the eve of the Plague.
Caffa was the Genoese outpost in the Black Sea, mostly a trading port. It had once been a flourishing trading outpost, trading with the Orient through the Silk Road. But by the middle of the 14th century, the Mongol leadership in the Middle East had converted to Islam and now Caffa survived on smuggling. The Muslim Mongols decided to end that by taking the city. In the summer of 1347 Caffa was under siege, and things looked grim for the Port.
I want to look at the map of Europe at that point in part, and see how ‘white people’ are doing. In the East/West border, half of Russia is under the direct control of the Mongol Golden Horde, while the northern part avoided conquest by declaring themselves vassals of the Horde. Hungary had almost fallen to the Mongols a century earlier, but survived on a stroke of luck, and later the largest deposits of gold in the World were found there, allowing Hungary to field a strong army. Lithuania and Galicia (no, not that Galicia) are in constant danger. In the north, Sweden and Norway are weak and small, while Finland does not exist. All of North Africa is Muslim, while a Muslim enclave survives in Southern Spain.
White people were far more likely to be enslaved than to enslave others. Muslim pirates roamed the Mediterranean, and sometimes ventured into England and Ireland, raiding coastal towns. In the East Slavs were the slaves—where do you think the name comes from? Europe was bottled in and under constant Islamic siege. Trade with the East was cut off. Catholicism had nowhere to expand.
Then a bunch of things happened over the next few centuries. The plague hit the besieging army at Caffa, then Caffa itself, and from there it expanded to Europe. The Black Death devastated Eurasia, Muslim and Christian alike, but the Christians recovered faster. The development of firearms benefited Christian Europe more than the Muslim East, for complex societal reasons I won’t get into now. The next century was the first century of discovery, spearheaded by Spain and Portugal. Soon after that, Professor Cabrera’s biased historical clock starts.
Neo-Marxist theories are much like good old Marxism—vicious and wrong. Sarah Jeong and Nolan Cabrera may talk about historical context all they want, but that’s opportunistic rationalization. When it comes to their selective reading of history and their pretensions of virtue, all I hear is bigotry.
