The most prevalent political chasm in our 21st-century society is between people who apply plain commonsense principles to a situation and those who apply a race, gender or religious filter over any given issue.
Though real filters are meant to sift out rubbish, these filters that were first fashioned by academics are more like a faulty funhouse mirror. They distort reality and occasionally provide a laugh.
So it was when some people of influence tried to tell us Sam Kerr could not have made a racist comment because only white people can do that. In the real world, normal people know any attempt to judge a person by the colour of their skin is racist.
This commonsense application of racism is why Martin Luther King’s dream still resonates. We will have a more cohesive and fair society if we strive to judge every single person not by their skin colour, gender or religion but by the content of their character.
If a cop or a cab driver or a co-worker does something dumb, by all means tell them so. You may be right or you may be wrong. But once you make a dig about their skin colour too, then you’ve done the dumb – and the wrong – thing.
Kerr denies calling the police officer who arrived on the scene to deal with a fracas following her vomit in a London cab a “stupid white bastard”. Kerr reportedly is planning to argue she didn’t use the word bastard.
That misses the point. If Kerr referenced the London bobby’s skin colour, that’s where she went wrong. And, after a public admonition, it should have ended there. Everyone has a bad day (or a vomitous night) and even the remarkable Matildas captain is human. On to the next issue, thanks very much.
But then some people from the worlds of sport, media and politics applied critical race theory to earnestly assure us a woman of colour (Kerr’s father was born in India) cannot be racist.
Racism, we were told, can be a trait only of white people because of the power differential. For some, King’s statement has become controversial.
An even more excruciating example of what happens when this theory runs amok in society came when former Socceroo Craig Foster explained that he had been re-educated with a good dose of critical race theory.
That took Foster on a wild ride from one dopey extreme to another. First he urged Football Australia to strip Kerr of the Matildas captaincy. Days later he explained that he had been newly schooled in Diversity Council Australia’s definition of racism. Apologising to Kerr, he said he now understood “racism can only be perpetrated against a marginalised person or group”.
If only critical race theory had remained percolating on the fringes of university campus cafes where, as John McWhorter from Columbia University has explained, it originated many decades ago.
McWhorter, who teaches languages, music and American studies, told a Manhattan Institute event on critical race theory in 2020 that “at the heart of critical race theory is an idea that all intellectual and moral endeavour must be filtered through a commitment to overturning power differentials”.
This theory gets thorny, he says, because where facts and efficacy and pragmatism conflict with the idea of overturning a power differential, “then the facts have to lose”.
McWhorter, who also writes for The New York Times, hosts Slate’s Lexicon Valley podcast and is contributing editor at The Atlantic, says espousing critical race theory has now become how some people tell their friends, fellow workers and the world that they are smart, moral and caring.
All of McWhorter’s observations so far sum up why some people twisted themselves in illogical knots to avoid labelling Kerr’s alleged comment racist.
Still, what else explains why many people have fallen for critical race theory?
McWhorter says tenets of critical race theory “sit very easily in the brain”. People can mention power differentials, discrimination, racism – not to mention “white privilege” as original sin – without really understanding what they mean. Just saying the words becomes an end in itself.
None of this is to say that discrimination and racism don’t exist but they rarely explain everything about Indigenous disadvantage or a large part of the dysfunction. But other factors such as cultural differences or the dire effects of grievance activism are too challenging for critical race theory. It wasn’t called a theory for nothing.
Its simplicity suited the arrival of social media. A tired and old theory soon became new and shiny in the virtue signaller’s paradise. It meant new proponents of critical race theory still rarely have to think about, let alone explain, what they mean.
McWhorter adds that the theory has stuck because if you do challenge it, you’re called a racist, especially on social media sewers, and no one wants to be called that. So, it’s easier to stay quiet, explaining why debate within the left has dried up.
Sound familiar? The debate about Kerr’s alleged late-night slur should have been a window into something deeper. It necessarily raises the question of how deeply critical race theory has saturated Indigenous politics in this country.
So, when on the weekend emeritus professor Greg Craven applied his obvious intellectual talents to point out the “great racial theory” behind recent claims that only white people can be racist, I was not alone in wondering why Craven didn’t apply those same intellectual talents when we were having a far more momentous debate about race last year.
After all, the voice was critical race theory writ large. Granting special race-based constitutional rights to a group of Australians on their race was publicly pitched as the necessary first step for reparations, treaties and sovereignty. If you couldn’t see critical race theory as a driver of the voice, you were not looking very hard. You need only have read academics such as Gabrielle Appleby and listened to legal wizards from the Albanese government’s constitutional expert group.
If you couldn’t see critical race theory in the reactions by some voice proponents to those who questioned the voice, then your head must have been buried somewhere in the sands between Bondi and Cottesloe beaches. I lost count of the times that white opponents were labelled racist for having a different view.
Years before the referendum, the voice and its associated demands had thrived inside law schools and within government-appointed working groups because the idea was not tested against commonsense legal and pragmatic objections. It thrived inside boardrooms, too, where normally savvy people were not game to ask to see the actual words before saying yes.
Ordinary Australians asked the pertinent questions. Wouldn’t it be divisive to entrench racial privileges in the Constitution? Wasn’t this an attempted power grab by the same group of Indigenous players who have dominated Indigenous politics for decades, with little to show for it? Would the voice turn around decades of grievance culture or entrench it in perpetuity? How would it make one iota of difference to the people who most needed to be heard?
The voice, and critical race theory, crashed head on into common sense.
Though the federal voice referendum is done and dusted, the canons of critical race theory remain embedded in myriad demands made just about every week by Indigenous activists and their supporters in politics, the media, the legal fraternity and corporate Australia.
That means the need to administer ever larger doses of common sense remains both constant and vital.