The CRT Paper That Gives The Perfect Microcosm For All That Is Wrong With CRT

Since George Floyd died, I have begun to read leftist books and academic papers in an attempt to take them at their own word and not at the words of anyone uncharitably misconstruing their arguments, to understand how we got to where we are.

To ‘do the work,’ you might say.

I am, by and large, aghast at what I’m seeing. Somehow I thought that maybe the phenomenon we’re experience was, as I have been told so often, just a small cadre of people who had gone too extreme, or over-passionate college students who would mellow out eventually. What I have found instead is a long-standing academic tradition, a web of poor reasoning, incestuous citation, exaggerated claims, and a myriad of other academic chicaneries, whose entire existence is to create, promulgate, and justify the over-passionate and extreme.

Most of the reading I have done comes from the course syllabus of a (very woke) acquaintance from one of his Masters in Education courses (but remember… it’s not in schools). I was surprised by a 2015 paper titled “Visualizing Everyday Racism: Critical Race Theory, Visual Microaggressions, and the Historical Image of Mexican Banditry” by Huber and Solorzano, in that the authors essentially confess to engaging in the kind of activities those critical of the critical theories have accused their practitioners of doing.

The paper opens with a personal anecdote, written by Huber, a latina, about a time she and her eight-year-old daughter were reading the children’s book, “Don’t Tell Lies Lucy.” On one page, the protagonist — that lying little bitch Lucy — claims her bike had been taken by ‘a bandit.’ The lie came with the illustration below:

The horror!

Those who are or who know ‘The Woke’ may already see ‘The Problem.’ But someone, crucially, did not: Huber’s daughter. By both mother’s and daughter’s admission, the little girl had no problem with the picture, but the image “stunned” the adult, and the child noticed her mother’s countenance and asked “What’s wrong, mommy?”

At that point, Huber “decided to attempt to engage [her] daughter in a discussion about what we were seeing.”

“Who wears a sombrero?”
“Folkórico people.”
“And who are folklórico people?”
“Latinos”
“So what is this picture telling us?”
“It’s telling us that Latinos are bandits?!”

When my daughter made the connection that the bandit represented Latinos, she was shocked. She began to ask questions about why the author would do such a thing, and whether it was done intentionally. I tried to respond in a way that would alleviate some of her concerns, but found myself confused about what to do next, now that I had given her the tools to recognize the visual microaggressions before us. I continued reading the book and looked up at her after a few moments. She was crying. I asked her what was wrong and she replied, “But I’m Latino, so they’re saying I’m a bandit.” I didn’t know what to say. I attempted to console her and explain the automatic and unconscious ways people engage in microaggressions.”

This was, frankly, stunning.

What we have here is a story in which a child reading a book had no emotional reaction — none. She did not identify the image as *herself*. She had no notion that a latino looking bandit could mean ‘all latinos are bandits,’ could imply that she herself was being called a bandit. She had no idea anything was wrong — very possibly because *nothing was*.

But Huber, you see, Knows Better, and will ensure that her eight-year-old daughter will, too. By her mother’s influence, this young girl came to believe that the author of this book was calling *her* a bandit, that “the bandit represented Latinos,” a statement so stupid it should be a sin.

The leap in reasoning is staggering and obvious: that a picture depicts one latino as a bandit does not imply that all latinos are bandits. This is the kind of childish logical fallacy that any good parent (or good teacher) points out and corrects. Huber, instead, affirmed it. Notice, really notice this: her daughter went from thinking absolutely nothing was wrong, to thinking the picture depicted the idea that ‘all Latinos are bandits.’

Huber acknowledges that she was somewhat responsible — “I felt terrible that I had led her to this pain. For weeks, I asked myself if I had made a mistake by having that conversation about the visual microaggression in the book we read together that night.” — but note, the responsibility she takes is that she taught her daughter. That she ‘awoke’ her. Not that she *formed the very mechanism* by which her daughter would start to take offense at the innocuous. Because it’s clear that had the mother not taught the child, the child would have no sense of being wronged, and there would be no real evidence that she was — save that Huber thinks she was.

That her mother used the Socratic method is no protection, and does not make this ‘discovery’ any more organic. One could easily imagine this version of the conversation:

“Do you notice the bandit is wearing a sombrero?”
“Yes.”
“Who else wears a sombrero?”
“Folklórico people.”
“And who are they?”
“Latinos.”
“We’re Latino, aren’t we?”
“Yes.”
“Are we bandits?”
“No.”
“So is this image of a Latino bandit a picture of us?”
“No.”
“Do you think the author would look at us and associate us with bandits?”
“Probably not.”
“I don’t think so either.”

The paper has many other outlandish points, but I could not imagine a more perfect microcosm for several of the flaws of wokethought than this opening narrative. It is also a prime example of what has lately been disparagingly labeled ‘grooming’ in the twitterverse by anti-woke activists. The label has been used mostly in terms of things like drag-queen story hour and queer theory in elementary school, but Huber’s story is the perfect example of a young person being ‘groomed’ into a critical theorist’s mindset by a person in authority, whom they should trust. Instead of letting her child remain innocent and unharmed, Huber decided to *create the harm*, all while passing the blame to someone else — the illustrator of a cute picture in a kid’s book.

Huber might say I’m arguing that ‘ignorance is bliss’ — that not teaching her daughter might keep her temporarily happy, but ignorant of the realities of the world. But that’s not what would have happened if she had just stayed silent! Her daughter would have just… lived. If no one says ‘you should be offended by this drawing,’ virtually no one *would* be offended by the drawing.

The ‘Woke’ chose that word to mean they were ‘awake’ to the racist realities around them. This story shows precisely how they are awakened. And it begs the question — are they really? Or are they brainwashed? And what happens, when you couple the mindset to seek out offense in the innocuous, while preaching that “intent doesn’t matter?”

This story with Huber and her daughter make the mechanisms of the game obvious: if someone offends you, they should apologize regardless of their intent, for they are in the wrong — and also, all the while, we’re going to teach you (…‘groom’ you) to be offended as often as possible.

Had Huber decided not to ‘engage her daughter in a discussion,’ her daughter would not be ignorant of the realities of the world, she simply would not have developed a mindset that superimposes a hyper-reality on top of the world, one that causes her to find pain in a depiction that had nothing to do with her, which is how she recognized it until explicitly taught otherwise. If Huber had remained silent, her daughter would be ignorant of nothing except her mother’s bizarrely warped mindset, in which silly little illustrations of what are meant to be fantastic lies in a children’s book cause great harm.

Her daughter would be the better for it.