Racists criticizing theory

Critical race theory is a chimera. It's been banned in various states by Republican politicians responding to their voters, but Democrats respond that those schools weren't even teaching critical race theory, and their opponents don't even know what it is.

So, nobody can agree on what it even means, yet the conservative working class is utterly enraged by it and that's all the proof the middle class and bourgeois radlibs need to dismiss them all as irredeemable Klansmen.

What the hell is going on? What should we as communists uphold in this situation?

Let's start with a personal example. As a teenager, I was a libertarian. Member of the Libertarian Party and everything. I wasn't greedy, I wasn't rich. I had a hard childhood where I felt unfree, and this was the party that seemed to believe in human freedom the most. So I joined. Having still been brainwashed by the false consciousness of capitalism, I also incorrectly figured their economic platform of extreme free market capitalism would liberate the workers if ever truly implemented (as opposed to the "crony capitalism" that libertarians blame capitalist problems on).

I was a reactionary on a theoretical level when it came to economics, but my heart was in the right place. On just about every other issue, I upheld the correct line as I understand it now: I was anti-imperialist, anti-fascist, anti-cop. And even economically, I had similar praxis to today: I wanted to start businesses to employ people at good wages. I just hadn't realized all of communist theory yet, and those businesses were going to be capitalist ones run by a really nice boss instead of the collective enterprise I'm starting now, where we're all equal and vote on everything.

The good intentions were there, but the theory wasn't.

Then I went to college.

College is full of middle class grifters in training. Not everyone that goes to college is a shitty person, but any comrade going to college now had better be prepared for most of your college friends to sell out and eventually cut you out of their lives if you too don't live for the grift.

I was a history major, geography minor. My four professors in those fields at that college (it's a small college lol) loved me; one was a Trot, one a more orthodox Marxist-Leninist, the other two just some kind of progressive. But in this dumbfuck libertarian, they saw something that my classmates didn't. I think they knew I'd grow out of the libertarianism once I had to pay rent, which incidentally is exactly what happened. And when I did, I think I held some promise to them as a potential leftist thinker of some kind. The ML and the Trot, especially, were close to me, even when I disagreed with them. They all left me their professional libraries when they retired.

But the other students? The college was a blue dot in a red sea, and this was during the reign of Dubya. So my anti-imperialist views pissed off the Republican majority there. But then all the good Democrats and lefties there used me as a piñata because they knew lefty theory better than I did. One particular twit ruthlessly mocked me for wanting to abolish the income tax. Much later, this same shitlib assclown would insult his advisor in personal terms for being antivaxx (not that I'm antivaxx, get your shots y'all, but damn this clown loved telling off people for being wrong, and his advisor was a good dude). And the same guy, who was once in the Socialist Party USA when we were in college, because he's just a better person, you see, mocked me ruthlessly as Bernie conceded to his "personal inspiration" Hillary Clinton.

But that wasn't the worst of it.

Before going to college, I'd known one whole Native family, and even sorta dated their daughter. (I myself am like a fourth Native if you add it all up, but I don't look like it and I was raised in white culture.) But this college was next to a Lakota reservation. None of my heritage is Lakota; my Native blood comes from out east, so I knew almost nothing going in other than that Custer was a little bitch. And I was in the smart kids' dorm with two Lakota.

This is when I first encountered the "privilege" discourse in the wild. And let me tell you a little about the people doing the discoursing: the Oglala Lakota offer free tuition to every enrolled member to go to Oglala Lakota College, which from all reports provides a rigorous and useful education. If you're Lakota and you don't go to OLC but instead go to a college out of state, it often means you have money or connections. In this case, the Lakota girl I knew was the daughter of a tribal supreme court judge. I don't know the Lakota dude's deal, but I saw him partying in the biggest houses on the rez and he went on to grad school in Santa Fe, so he's clearly got money going on somewhere.

I don't want to pretend that I wasn't middle class, because I was and am. But even when I didn't know what "class traitor" meant, that's basically what I was trying to be. That shitty childhood had created a furious hatred of oppression in me. My as-yet-undiagnosed schizoid personality disorder had made me radically honest, and able to turn on my class, who then subtly discriminated against me to keep me from ever enjoying any view from the top.

None of this mattered. As a white looking person, I had to renounce my privilege. When I asked about class privilege, that unbearable judgeborn slag told me it didn't exist, or if it did, it didn't matter compared to race privilege. I then asked if she had privilege compared to any Crow (traditional enemies of the Lakota) on the Lakota reservation, at which point her friend told me that the Crow deserve everything they get. Totally not racist tho.

Things really came to a head with this bunch after the dude (who, I should add, has a French last name, and is probably as European as I am Native) said that Europeans were all filthy and disgusting, which is why the Black Death happened. After I called him a racist, all of petty bourgeois Pine Ridge hopped on the ol' bookfacin' contraption to tell me that it's only racism when white people do it, because structural power blah blah blah yeah because this woke rich kid mob has no structural power whatsoever. So I called him a bigot instead and their cute little "well ackshyually" argument collapsed so they just called me a wasicu.

"Wasicu" is an anti-white slur meaning "fat stealer." I never stole anything from them, or called them names, other than the bigot talking shit about my and his own ancestors. I pointed out some anti-Lakota slurs I won't reprint here because I don't believe in slurring anyone, and pointed out that their behavior was as if I said that to them. At which point I was accused of trying to suppress the Lakota language by these shitlib rich kids, which is when I called them the moral equivalent of neo-Confederates and checked out of the conversation.

I didn't get to ignore them, apparently. That wasn't allowed. First I was tagged back in, so I removed the tag. Then, a while later, they all visited me en masse IRL basically to ask why I was such a flaming racist. I was polite, but saw to it they wouldn't visit again.

My last interaction with this bunch was in grad school, when I had to make a video about a local fire. I saw the girl (I'd say woman, but emotionally she's a total child) and, trying to make amends and knowing her family land wasn't too terribly far from the fire, I offered to interview her for the video. I also know that this same girl constantly bitches about representation, so I figured that going out of my way to increase Lakota representation in this video would be a positive thing to her.

She gave a flat interview, and then messaged me later that day saying she felt ambushed and how dare I do that to her and she rescinds permission to use that footage. So I replied to her that I had deleted all footage as per her concerns, and since she was offended by literally everything, I would stop offending her by blocking her and never talking to her again. I heard through the grapevine that she absolutely RAGED about this. Apparently the only thing worse than offending this narcissist is ignoring her ass.

But, I have to add, because of my radical honesty, this shit fucked me up for YEARS. I kept wondering "am I really a racist like they say?" I mean, there were many of them, only one of me, and I looked white and they looked Lakota, so they'd be the ones to know, right? It wasn't until I learned about class analysis that I was able to make sense of what happened. No, I wasn't racist, but they were classist. In this case, class was expressed by the proxy of education in critical race theory.

Is critical race theory what they were advocating? Critical race theory does speak of privilege, does ignore class for race (and eventually all other intersections), but I have no idea if that's what they called it among themselves.

But I know a few things.

One, I'm academically smarter than most people, because of the schizoid personality disorder.

Two, even I was fucked up by the disingenuous accusations made against me, and it took me years to figure out what they did and how.

Three, if that's what happened to me, how much worse is it for Joe Worker who never went to college?

Four, if Joe Worker didn't go to college, how is he even going to know how to label his disingenuous oppression by the bourgeoisie (and that's exactly what this is)? Joe Worker will call it by whatever name he hears, and if he hears his oppression termed "critical race theory," that's what he's going to call it.

Five, critical race theory as defined in the shitlibs' perfect ivory tower may not line up with working class conservatives' lived definition of critical race theory. But when the shitlibs write articles denouncing conservatives for not even knowing the definition of critical race theory, they are completely full of shit. Because critical race theory has a built-in incentive to wield it not against racists and bigots, but against good people uneducated and unassuming enough to be misrepresented as racists and bigots in order to bully them guilt-free. I don't know a single shitlib believer in critical race theory that does not regularly use it this way in practice. So they offer a definition of critical race theory, deliberately use it as a disingenuous weapon against the working class, and then troll the workers for defining critical race theory as oppressive, bigoted bullshit.

Six: critical race theory is not antiracism. You can be antiracist and anti-critical race theory; in fact it's the default position of the working class. I find it both interesting and heartening that as the Republicans pass these critical race theory bans, that they often do so explicitly in the name of antiracism. At least in this case, the Grand Old Party's all right. Because it is the job of all communists to organize every good-hearted person, it's bad praxis to nitpick and bully them for an imperfect education or for disagreeing on a couple minor points. If that douchebag SPUSA Hillary voter had been a real comrade, he would have seen my good heart, not my desire to repeal the income tax. Which, BTW, libertarian utopia Real Korea has already done, because unlike him, they understand the workers and can make communist theory fit into all kinds of economic arrangements based on the needs of the mass line.

Seven: the critical race theory bans will not criminalize antiracism, but are an attempt by the workers to reclaim their dignity from college-educated shitbag bullies. Don't be surprised to see working class oppressed nationalities coming out against critical race theory in the near future; we already know that they hate political correctness, which is kinda the same unethical bourgeois ethical position.

Eight: even though I despise both fronts of the culture war, I completely and totally agree with and support the critical race theory bans. I think the culture war may possibly be moving fronts, from stupid Black Ariel shit to cultural issues that are much more direct proxies of class. If this happens, communists should jump off the sidelines of the culture war, and gleefully steer it towards a class war. As the purpose of the culture war is to distract the workers from the class war, and as the ruling bourgeoisie gradually get more idealistic, decadent and incompetent as their rule progresses, it's quite possible that the class war could emerge not from the end of the culture war, but from bourgeois incompetence accidentally letting it drift off the rails, or failing to do enough if communists deliberately derail it.

So to sum it up, the rich college assholes that denigrated me for no reason, and all of their ilk, don't deserve the attention society has given them. They need to learn respect for the workers of all nations. If the culture war is now about making these petty bourgeois pinkhair posers know their role and shut their mouths, count me in.