What's Our Problem?: A Self-Help Book for Societies

by Tim Urban

CRT originated in law schools and explores how America’s history of slavery, segregation, and discrimination may be embedded in the nation’s laws in ways that continue to marginalize and oppress people of color. Whatever might be taught in K-12 classrooms wouldn’t be a perfect representation of CRT, but a simplified version of it or something that shares its principles—what John McWhorter has termed “C.R.T.-lite.” These organizations also typically talk about “applying” CRT’s lens to education, which isn’t necessarily the same as actually teaching CRT to students. Either way, what certainly has entered hundreds of schools is Social Justice Fundamentalism, and everything that comes along with it: the idea that disparities always imply injustice and equality of opportunity must lead to equality of outcome; the view that identity characteristics like race, gender, and sexual orientation are the primary axes of advantage and disadvantage, and identity diversity is the only meaningful form of diversity; the equating of basic liberal values and institutions like free speech, science, and meritocracy with “whiteness”; the belief that oppression pervades every institution, every interaction, and every norm; the notion that disagreeing with SJF is violence and punishing such behavior is nothing more than self-defense; the gloomy outlook that sees a world where racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia are forever present and barely improving.