The culture of colonial colonial society, people from all over the world overwhelm the original inhabitants of a large or small territory to form a culture around their own garrison country, with enduring and insurmountable ills and world-weariness. This does not mean that people in Britain, France, Turkey, Iran, India or China do not have their own sedentary difficulties. They are like this. But these dilemmas belong to different pedigrees.

One thing the settler colonists did was to act as if they were native residents of the land they violently conquered, and label all those who followed them as “immigrants.” They are engaged in a strange and possessive work of historical compilation, trying to convince themselves and the world that they have legitimate demands on the land they stole.

These settler colonialists are fully aware of their recent origins, and every time they become more critical of who and what is on the land they claim to be their own, they feel threatened. Start to take strange actions.

This is exactly what is happening today in the settler colony that we call the United States of America.

You often wake up in this strange habitat and find that colonists who are born with racism are angry with a word, a spell, or something they consider to be magical spells, which can suddenly and irrevocably lose their origin myth. legality. Nowadays, it is the “critical race theory”, and given their strange obsession with abbreviations, they call it “CRT”.

Right now, in their eyes, “CRT” is swear word, a curse word. It represents the latest attack on their self-awareness, their “homeland”.

Now, what exactly is the critical racial theory?

It really doesn’t matter. This means what Donald Trump told them. This means a bad thing. This means that white people are in danger. This means that if Americans do not re-elect Trump or another Republican who is equally reactionary and racist, then blacks, Latinos, feminists, Marxists, Jews, Muslims, gays, transgenders and all those The ungodly communists will come to take over their country.

Critical racial theory-a school of thought that believes that the main institutions of the United States are essentially racist and that its essence is to continue the white supremacy-if it were not for Trump and his stubborn war with all his strength, it would still be a complete Vague academic concerns. Won a second term. Today, critical racial theory has become a topic of discussion in the United States only because Trump decided to attack it because it exposed racism that he and his supporters cannot cure.

From post-colonial theory to critical race theory

In September 2020, as Trump lags behind Joe Biden in most polls, the Office of Management and Budget issued a directive: “All agencies are instructed to begin identifying training related to any’key race theory’ All contract or other agency expenditures, ‘white privilege’, or any other training or promotional efforts, teach or imply that (1) the United States is essentially a racist or evil country, or (2) any race or ethnicity is essentially Is it racist or evil.”

So you have it: if you tell the truth and expose the structural roots of racism in this country, then you are in trouble, and the federal government will hunt you down.

Using the federal government and its immense power to limit any form of critical thinking did not start with Trump. About 20 years ago, American Zionists used the same strategy to try to silence American universities’ criticism of Israel. Their main goal is Edward Said and his critical scholarship.

In October 2003, as Michelle Goldberg explained in the Salon, the U.S. House of Representatives “unanimously passed a bill that may require universities’ international research departments to show greater performance in U.S. foreign policy. More support, otherwise you will risk federal funding. Its approval is after the hearing [that] In the summer, members of Congress heard testimony about the harmful effects of the late Edward Said’s Middle East research departments, which were described as degenerate anti-American enclaves. “

Attempts to ban the scholarship of Edward Said and any other forms of critical thinking that expose the roots of fundamental injustice that harm the United States and the world have now turned their attention to critical racial theory-the idea already exists For decades, it has tried to expose and eliminate the potential social forces that constitute racism, without allowing it to be reduced to Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu, Emmanuel Macron or Boris Johnson. Demonstrated personal racist behavior.

The deep roots of critical thinking

The proposition that law, politics and even the education system are one of the ideological forces that maintain the class structure of society is certainly much older than the critical theory of race, and can be traced at least to the concept of the famous Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci. “Hegemony” and appeared before him in Marx’s seminal text on German ideology.

We can go further back to Nietzsche, from there to the iconic encounter between Seras Marcus and Socrates in the first book of the Republic of Plato, in which he disrupted Socrates by defining “justice” as the will of the strong The argument about “justice”.

Therefore, scholars engaged in critical racial theory did not invent critical thinking, or even used it to analyze racism for the first time. The importance of critical racial theory at this particular moment in American history is that the continuing process of theoretical foundations now informs a large-scale social movement called “Black people’s fate is also fate.” This fruitful dialectic between academic theory and grassroots social uprising frightens those who maintain the status quo, who are doing their best to protect and maintain their racial and class privileges. This is a class struggle, pure and simple. Those who are identified as “whites” hope to protect their automatic privileges by simply becoming “whites,” and categorically oppose any critical awareness of the horror they systematically and consistently inflict on those under their power.

The way in which critical racial theory stands out is no different from the well-known and discussed ways in other academic movements and fields. In 2001, Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic published Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, which detailed the origins of the field, The key theme and the main voice, this is a milestone event widely accepted by critical racial theory. The author subsequently revised and updated the book to include more recent developments.

Just like the field of liberation theology, or the field of subordination or post-colonial research before it, the criticism of race theory is not the cause of the existing social reality, but a response to the existing social reality-reality requires detailed historical and theoretical elaboration. Abolishing funding, censorship, or demonizing an academic field will not eliminate the social conditions that gave birth to it in the first place. In fact, it proved its importance and legitimacy.

Consider the fact that Republicans in the U.S. Senate just voted to veto major legislation designed to ensure voting rights for non-white Americans. By doing so, they proved the potential authenticity of the critical racial theory. This is a class war in which the rich mobilize against the poor, with specific racial distortions.

For public schools

The cancellation of funding for racism research is now actively on the Republican agenda. Just last month, Rep. Dan Bishop of North Carolina introduced what he called the “Stop CRT Act and Combat Racism Training in the Military Act.” As he explained in a press release, “will Prohibit federal funds from being used to promote and teach Critical Race Theory (CRT) and prevent our soldiers from being controlled by it.”

“Critical racial theory is a poison to our nation’s soul,” Rep. Bishop claimed. “This destructive ideology has no place in American institutions. The bill I propose will help ensure that our government does not spend resources to promote it.” He argued that the Biden administration was affected by “radical leftists.” “Help and encouragement, and “committed to pushing this neo-Marxist propaganda into our classrooms, workplaces and even the military.”

These powerful Republican politicians have specifically targeted public schools because they are the most common places where the lower and middle classes and their children have direct contact with poorer communities. They don’t mind whether private schools and affluent communities will be exposed to any “radical ideas”-because their wealth and privileges will affect their learning. But in low- and middle-class communities and public schools, these ideas resonate with the real lives of students, their parents and teachers. This means the ultimate change in people’s critical consciousness.

Demonization, condemnation, censorship, cancellation of funding, and even criminalization of critical racial theories will not erase the roots of systemic racism, and will extend to the branches and bitter consequences of this country’s history and reality. If you don’t allow resistance to racism to reason and express itself, it will sing, dance, scream, protest and march on the streets and squares of this country and all other countries. Because facts always bravely cater to any real theory.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.