Critical Race Theory: Can It Give Me Everything I Want?
Ask Tamyra!
By Bob Beanblossom
9 August 2021
The United States has been one of the most powerful nations on earth for over a century. It is the nation that immigrants are streaming into at a rate of over 6 thousand per day—legally and illegally—enduring conditions unimaginable to the man-on-the-street in their effort to corner their share of the American dream of freedom and prosperity far above what they left behind. Yet, most Americans are unaware of the fragility of the American dream that rides squarely upon the backs of We the People. John Adams, second President of the United States, wrote: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
Given that shift in our society, it seems to me that we are helping to destroy America from within, just as Nikita Khrushchev, leader of the Soviet Union predicted in the 1960s. We have left the moral and religious base of our Founding Fathers, as we elevate Self above both God and Country. Without biblical principles as our moral compass and a traditional application of Constitutional law, we are left with 332.6 million individual ideas of what is right and wrong—none better or worse than another.
We are willingly allowing ourselves to be divided over problems that our forefathers came together to solve. Rather than seeking solutions as a nation we are looking for differences to celebrate—not in a beneficial way, but in ways that are hurtful and divisive. Instead of celebrating our uniqueness, we rally around battle flags that represent those real and manufactured differences. All of us are most comfortable with others who seem to be most like us, and find it all too easy to assign fault to those who are different in some perceptible way, differences that are being ferreted out and promoted to intentionally divide us.
Former President Obama promised to “fundamentally change America.” His change is away from government “Of, by and for the People” to government as the entity being served. His promise is coming true as Americans become more subdivided into hyphenated-Americans, a concept foreign only a few years ago as a defining factor that overrides simply being an American. Over 10% of Americans are in mixed-race relationships. This exemplifies America as the great melting pot where differences gradually become similarities. Today the pot is cracked and leaking as always-present enclaves of strong ethnic identity are growing in population and militant defiance to assimilation. Martin Luther King, Jr., warned: “We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.”
We are allowing ourselves to be pitted neighbor against neighbor by those who grow rich and powerful by spreading discontent and enlarging divisions among us to the point of becoming rifts. Their agenda does not include peacemaking and problem-solving, but divisiveness orchestrated by highly effective marketing schemes. The growing We-Them mentality encouraged by those who profit by dividing us—all of us Americans—is working quite well. Any difference can be developed and exploited when one controls the media. Blocking dissenting voices from the social media without oversight is a highly visible example as freedom of speech is determined by corporate policy. Prohibiting a platform to a sitting President comes to mind. Religion, sexual preference, and gender are all hot buttons today, but race is one of those issues in which emotions easily override reason.
I really don’t understand the eternal underdog mentality. Critical Race Theory (CRT) is such an argument. It says that everyone with high melanin content in their skin is automatically “oppressed” because of slavery in America that ended some 156 years ago. How degrading. Why would any intelligent person allow others to tell them that their skin tone assures continual oppression and failure? It is Jim Crow in the guise of saviors where these would-be “saviors” are wolves in sheep’s clothing (Matthew 7:15). They are the profiteers riding on the backs of—enslaving—those they claim to be “liberating.” It is racism in its most blatant form; yet is not just tolerated, but is becoming a dominant theme in American culture, taught in the schools, promoted in the media, and touted by politicians whose promises of a reformed utopia to come are ambiguous at best. Consider CRT: what tangible benefits does it promise the “oppressed” class? How will it help improve their life in America? All of these “saviors” have one underlying thing in common: personal responsibility and equitable justice based upon facts and law are replaced by increased governmental intervention in personal lives. Under the new theory of law, an assumed bias, not a criminal act, is adequate for prosecution. Government as servant of the people (democracy) is becoming government as ruler of the people, an idea that the Constitution was written to prevent.
In a land where equal opportunity is the target—if not always realized—the history of these last 150 years shows the rise of individuals of all melanin levels to places of wealth, power, and respect in spite of their starting points. Never perfect, incremental improvements are sometimes celebrated while lesser-noted linear progress, though obvious in retrospect, is often overlooked. Today’s America is not that of the 1800s or even the 1900s. Again, progress is not perfection, but it is progress. That is not enough for the marketing-controlled Me-Now crowd that wants 332.6 million different Me-Now results.
One of America’s foundational principles is the equality of opportunity, not results. Our Declaration of Independence is clear:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
The Founding Fathers established our Constitution upon biblical principles to provide an orderly, stable, and adaptable government constrained by a set of laws enacted to assure the safety and equality of opportunity for each citizen. It has increasingly done that. In practice, the individual is subordinated to the greater interest of the group. Here is the rub: Who defines the group? Profiteering hate-mongers, well represented in government and the media as “protectors” of the “oppressed,” would have us believe that it is whatever minority group is currently in the limelight.
The Constitution defines this group as the electorate made up of voting citizens—the majority of those who willingly participate. Safeguards are embedded to assure an equitable (when properly exercised) distribution of power through separate executive and judicial branches and a bicameral legislature, each with different power bases.
We are not equal in every respect. Those who deny this inequality deny their personal experience in their own families. Turning again to Dr. King: “Unity has never meant uniformity.”
Major, sometimes personally crippling, obstructions exist for many individuals and families in our society. This is one of the issues we need to be addressing instead of how much melanin our skin displays, or how we feel driven (at the moment) to publicly display our sexual appetites. What a gross abdication of our moral and civic responsibilities to our nation—to our families and neighbors.
We are, however, equal under the law that is blind to melanin content, ethnicity, sex, gender, and so on. We are equal at birth in opportunity, not in resources. From that point on, we each progress at our own pace towards our own goals. We have opportunities to take advantage of free education (in some places through the vocational school or junior college level), freedom to choose our life path without governmental intervention, and freedom to work long and hard hours to secure and demonstrate the qualifications necessary for success in our chosen field. Success is personal achievement, not a group right. Personal success is not a function of the amount of melanin a person has or the success or failure of others, but is the result of personal achievement as each individual maximizes personal qualifications to meet society’s needs. There are certainly special challenges that exist for various individuals and demographic groups in specific areas of achievement (women vs. men, high melanin vs. low melanin, young vs. old), but outstanding success stories exist in all categories to show that these are challenges and not barriers. Failure is often a precursor to success and should be but a brief deterrent to continued progress.
Opportunities rejected are not the same as a lack of opportunities. Incremental improvements are the norm. Laziness is richly rewarded with mediocre achievement, but apparently does grant the underachiever a “right” to blame failure on the imagined status of underdog. Failure becomes the fault of others as all personal responsibility is transferred to a handy “oppressor” class: “It’s _____ fault!”
Opportunities foiled by bad choices in recreational activities that naturally result in dependent offspring add to the personal burden when seeking success. The responsibility of parenting is an obstacle, not a barrier, and is the price to pay for a Me-Now attitude. Continued behavior of this sort has high odds that additional offspring will result. Abuse of drugs and alcohol that dull ambition and cripple the reliable application of abilities ultimately lead to failure. Responsible behavior is a choice and comes at a cost.
Scripture, the foundation of our Constitution, is plain-spoken on this subject: “For even when we (the apostle Paul and his companions) were with you, this we commanded you, that if any would not work, neither should he eat” (2 Thessalonians 3:10). This is not for those unable to work, but for those who choose to “get by” with minimum effort, maximum complaining, and no self-discipline. Success does not come from self-pity. Success does come from filling a need and doing it well and consistently, whether for an employer or as an entrepreneur. All success has a starting point, and it is most often not as the CEO of a major corporation.
America, in its reasonable concern for those who cannot work, has inadvertently produced a welfare state among some who could work: a self-created but hardly oppressed welfare class. Critical Race Theory (CRT) holds that Americans with lower melanin, “white” Americans, oppress those with higher melanin, “black” Americans, and that white Americans are invariably rich and powerful. Census data shows that this is not true: While 39.8% of welfare recipients are black, 38.8% are white—an insignificant difference. The telling statistic is that almost 20% of all welfare recipients have received benefits for over five years—this is that self-created welfare class that is almost equally divided among black and white Americans.
A significant factor affecting individual career success is education. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that about one-fourth of jobs don’t require a high school diploma or equivalent. It also shows that these are low paying jobs with marginal career paths. But they are paying jobs and they are a place to start. The point is that entry-level jobs to exist even for those who have not finished high school. The overall high school graduation rate in America is 85%. Black Americans graduated 10% below this average (79%). White Americans graduated at 89%, just four points above the average. It is not melanin but effort and determination that determines educational success as a step toward occupational success: roughly 22% of black Americans hold a bachelor’s degree or higher, and another 33% have completed some college. The problem is clearly not intelligence or ability, but motivation and determination to overcome challenges. The overall bachelor’s graduation rate is 55.4% (allowing 6 years for a 4-year program), showing that starting the path does not guarantee success for any group. The program completion rate for black Americans was 38.9% and white Americans was 58.1% in 1966, changing to 39.8% for black Americans and 64.4% for white Americans in 2011.
The goal of education should be to produce qualified workers who are good citizens—individuals with skills needed in the workplace who know American history and exercise the duties of an American citizen. Cookie-cutter test-oriented “education” does not meet this criterion. Good moral values and a solid work ethic won’t be learned in the educational system—these come from the home environment and are individual attributes.
The increase in post-secondary certificates of qualification and associate degrees conferred—training and education most likely to develop a practical skillset needed for entry into and advancement within the workplace—is encouraging. Competition for better jobs is keen and requires personal preparation. For the period from 2000-2015 certificates awarded to black Americans increased 63% and to white Americans 49%. Associate degrees awarded increased 110% for black Americans, and 38% for white Americans.
Instead of showing increasing oppression of Americans with higher melanin content, the real data shows that these determined individuals are increasingly rising above the lies of Critical Race Theory as they join the ranks of successful Americans of all skin tones, family and environmental issues, and false allegations of oppression. These Americans are casting aside the chains of those who tell them that they are oppressed and proving that success is an individual achievement, not a group “right.” They are learning that the American Dream is full of pot holes and requires effort, ingenuity, and perseverance to achieve—and some setbacks along the way, but the results are worth the cost as the profit is in their pockets, not the evangelists of Critical Race Theory.
Parents who establish lasting supportive families help assure the success of their children. The United States has the “world’s highest rate of children living in single-parent households,” according to a 2019 Pew Research Center study. While this demographic is often aimed at black families, data shows that the overall rate of poverty for single-mother families was 24.69% while that of black mother-only families was 29.4%, not a great difference. While still devastating, the problem is not significantly more of a problem for black single-mother families than the American norm. Rather than race, the problem is more uniformly based upon divorce rates, teen pregnancy rates, and decreasing marriage rates, including “non-traditional” families. Although an obstruction to those involved, this is not a cause of individual failure in individuals with any specific melanin level.
The claims of the Critical Race Theory and publicly available data just don’t match. Although the American system does not assure equality of outcomes, it does allow each individual to strive for their own goal.
America has over 1.5 million black millionaires—far outnumbering all other nations in the world that record only 100-150 thousand total! CRT wants to take from the rich and give to the poor. One wonders how wealthy black billionaires, who largely earned their wealth, would respond to that idea; people such as Robert Smith ($5 billion), David Steward ($3.5 billion), Oprah Winfrey ($2.7 billion), Michael Jordan ($1.9 billion), and Jay-Z ($1billion), not to mention all the black millionaires, would respond to that suggestion.
If there is any doubt, ask Tamyra Mensah-Stock about American opportunity and the cost of success. On Tuesday, August 3, 2021, she took Olympic gold in wrestling. Tanya is a second-generation American (her father is from Ghana) who let nothing stop her in her journey to the top, not just in America, but in the world. It was costly. It took effort. She had to literally fight her way to the top. But she did it. She has joined the ranks of her fellow Americans of all melanin levels who lived the American dream rather than playing the eternal underdog. She could have done that—she is only the second American woman wrestler to win Olympic gold.
Not all who strive will reach the gold. But all who strive can join her as she praised her God and the United States of America from the platform.
I can’t leave the subject without a word of warning. Success is no more a guarantee of happiness than is failure. Ample proof of this is in the daily news as celebrities of all sorts demonstrate. The answer is simple, but not at all popular. Matthew reported Jesus’ solution this way: “But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and His righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you” (Matthew 6:33). Before you start your quest for fame and fortune, and throughout your life, it would be helpful to read all of Matthew 5, 6, and 7. It will help you keep life in perspective.