On 26 August 2021 Chris Roper wrote an article in the Financial Mail entitled ‘Unmasking the IRR’s bogeyman’, arguing that ‘(the) Institute for Race Relations has latched onto a new bugbear: critical race theory — that punchbag so beloved of the conservative Right in the US’. This article is a response to Mr. Roper which we submitted to the Financial Mail for a right of reply. To date we have received no response to our request. Please read the original article; it sets the tone for our reply.
It’s important to answer Mr Roper’s allegations because our concerns about and criticisms of Critical Race Theory (CRT) arise exactly because they conflict with the classical liberal ideals upon which the IRR’s work is based.
Mr Roper refers to us as ‘the whimsically named Institute for Race Relations (IRR)’, accuses us of launching ‘another entry into the annals of SA silliness’.
The problem of CRT being introduced in schools was being brought our attention, so we decided to create a small, stand-alone website to help address a problem that was already causing great deal of anguish.
As my article on our Daily Friend opinion portal states, CRT holds that every society is divided into two absolute and unbridgeable, racially determined, groups. The first is black: its members are permanently disadvantaged victims of a society which is set up to enforce black poverty and underdevelopment. The second is white: its members are permanently privileged and perpetrate various crimes against the black group in order to secure their unearned privilege and maintain black poverty.
CRT originates in American academia and is based on America’s 200-year history of slavery and its consequences, both of which deserve serious study. CRT has evolved in a country where blacks represent about 13% of the population and whites a majority (although ever shrinking).
Mr Roper refers to our explanatory video, which is intended to help make a complex and obscure issue comprehensible, by saying: ‘As …, this one comes with its own little website, where its tiny ideas and big donate button can flourish freely. There’s even a handy video called Critical Race Theory: The New Apartheid Thinking, which is an object lesson both in misinformation and in reducing a crime against humanity to the status of a trite metaphor’.
Perhaps there is a measure of hyperbole, but the metaphor is apt and the principles similar. The essence of CRT is the separation of the races, the promotion of a heightened sense of victimhood and the promotion of eternal guilt for a terrible history that was not perpetrated by the person deemed, by the lights of CRT, to be guilty of ‘white supremacy’.
Given our dreadful history, the IRR believes that a desirable and successful country is one in which people of different races better know and understand one another. Racism will never disappear, but we must strive to reduce its occurrence. The more one knows about an individual, the more likely one is to treat that person with respect. People are far more complex than any crass categorisation by skin colour suggests.
CRT creates the “other”. It shares with apartheid and Nazism the attribution of negative and false assumptions about the ‘oppressor’ group, by the ‘victim’ group. The IRR believes unstintingly in the agency and uniqueness of the individual.
A tragic history cannot and should never be forgotten or disregarded; the impact on subsequent generations cannot be predicted or underestimated. Commemoration of history is natural and necessary. However, allowing the past to dictate the futures of South Africans is more likely to foster ongoing resentment, stymie understanding between groups, and hamper success. It is quite different, however, for one’s past to inform one’s future. The past teaches many lessons, not least of which is to make the future better and to imbue us with a desire to succeed.
The IRR has been in existence for 92 years; it is steadfast in its principles in fighting the battle of ideas, although its methodology has changed according to societal changes over time.
Social media play a much greater part in the dissemination of our ideas, and we do so with conviction. People support us financially if what we say resonates with their concerns. People are not ‘extractive agents’, as Mr Roper claims; they determine their own responses, and who and what they will support.
The African National Congress’s (ANC) economic policy is highly deleterious; supplanting private property ownership with state-ownership is a disaster for wealth generation; state-ownership of land does not ipso facto improve land reform; and corruption and incompetence are what pass for policies for the ANC.
Mr Roper accuses Helen Zille of getting ‘in early by importing the demon of wokeness™️ from the US’. This is completely untrue. ‘Wokeness’ has been part of our academic environment for years. What Zille did was to write a book in which she proposed fighting against it.
Our amusement turns to bemusement when he accuses ‘everyone and their politically connected uncle is pushing the “your government is your enemy and trying to take away your rights” message’. I doubt we’d be in the minority in believing that the ANC is removing our rights and freedoms.
It is difficult to challenge the distinct animus which Mr Roper has for the IRR. He clearly is antipathetic to our modus operandi but I cannot discern what the alternative message is.
Mr Roper refers to “woke” as a ‘catch-all insult’. “Wokeness” now connotes the denial of freedom of speech to opponents; the acceptability of insulting and hounding those with opposing views in order to silence critics, and if possible, ruin their livelihoods; and the idea of a subjective “truth” making verifiable truth redundant. If we don’t strive for truth, we have nothing around which different views can coalesce.
Mr Roper says it easier for South African think tanks to steal from the USA ‘than come up with your own slogan, so … welcome to CRT, SA — the menace to society you didn’t know you needed!’ If what we’re tackling isn’t CRT, then Mr Roper should tell us what CRT is and what we’re experiencing as CRT should properly be called. Nomenclature is not key; it’s the substance that matters. Whatever it’s called, we’ll call it out.
Mr Roper suggests that our explanation of CRT is ‘horrifying’, which it is. He sarcastically criticises our view and experience but fails to say in what respect it’s wrong. ‘The IRR doesn’t really know what CRT is, but loves its catchy soundbite quality.’
‘This is all made up, I would venture. The IRR doesn’t point out which schools are infected with the CRT bug, and that’s because, essentially, there is no such thing as the CRT the organisation defines.’
We don’t name the schools that we refer to in our article. Our website offers advice to anyone concerned about CRT in their children’s schools. We don’t believe it appropriate to name schools, because it’s terribly important that parents and teachers have the opportunity to see if their concerns can be resolved. It’s neither right nor proper to subject those involved to public scrutiny unless and until it is desirable and/or unavoidable.
Mr Roper expresses his real animus by saying that what it really is doesn’t matter; all that matters is that it be conjured up as a bogeyman ‘a vaguely defined Velcro term that you can stick any bit of bigotry onto’.
Mr Roper says that our submission that ‘schools will seldom admit that they are teaching CRT indoctrination to your children…rather handily absolves the IRR from having to prove that it’s there’. The IRR has proved that CRT is in schools, but we’re happy to call the concept whatever he likes.
Mr Roper ends by saying that ‘it’s just a further example of a shameless organisation culturally appropriating (kidding!) another country’s conservative propaganda’. On the contrary, the IRR is trying to deal with wholesale appropriation by school authorities of a concept that evolved elsewhere with particular circumstances in mind, and which is the subject of intense argument in the United States itself.
We submit that Mr Roper’s anger is because the IRR has proven its case.
[Photo: Markus Spiske on unsplash]
Sara Gon is head of strategic engagement at the Institute of Race Relations