Critical Race Theory (CRT) Cannot Be Genocided by President Trump and Conservative Republicans, Trust Me

It did not take me more than a minute to explain the meaning of Critical Race Theory (CRT) to my very smart non-college-educated wife of some 20 years, although it is morbidly and pathetically clear to all that the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, educated President Donald John Trump has absolutely no clue precisely what this most basic intellectual framework for analyzing the African American Experience in the United States of America, over the course of some 500 years or a half-millennium, means in the geopolitical scheme and the history of the vast empire of a conglomeration of semi-sovereign polities that is the United States of America. And President Trump’s crass and self-cultivated ignorance has absolutely no moral superiority over the lives of the millions of Continental Africans and their African American descendants who, more than any other species of global humanity, made America the great nation that it is today.

You see, Critical Race Theory has everything to do with the flat but inescapable refusal of both the American Whiteman and the Whitewoman, as well, of course, but to a relatively lesser degree, to accept the globally perceived and accepted standard and measure of wanton exploitation and abject disdain and unspeakable inhumanity in which Continental African-Descended Americans have been judged and treated in this country from the Post-Columbian Era of the late 1490s and the early 1500s onwards into the present. Such second- and third-class treatment or mistreatment has expanded to include other Non-Aryan or Non-European Peoples, over the course of time, such as American Indians or, properly speaking Native ir Indigenous Americans, the overwhelming majority of whose original populations were literally wiped out through unprovoked Wars of the Settler European Invaders and Terrorists who swarmed their lands at the beginning of the 15th Century, by the deadly use of a combination of weapons of mass destruction, rape and sexually transmitted diseases.

Today, we have deliberately and conveniently ignorant politicians and entrepreneurial robber-barons like the Trump-led tax-dodging Conservative Branch of the United States’ Republican Party self-righteously and cavalierly projecting the horrific crimes of their forefathers, for the most part, on recent migrants and immigrants from Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa and Asia, among several other parts of the world. Almost absolutely no mention is made of European migrants and immigrants into the United States of America, although European Americans are generally known to constitute to the overwhelming majority of the perpetrators of the most sophisticated and vicious acts of heinous criminality in the country, as well as constituting the majority of the drug dealers and users in this country, especially the drug Fentanyl, which is why a Neo-Fascist President Trump made the prevention of this most deadly drug into the United States from China, Mexico and Canada his topmost trade policy and tariff war obsession.

In other words, if Fentanyl were to be decimating the “overpopulated” African American and Latin American communities, trust me, the Trump Administration would be calling for no tariffs to be imposed on these most precious commodities. This is where Critical Race Theory comes in handy, and this precisely why CRT is so unspeakably resented by the so-called Republican Right-Wingers. Some ardent and inveterate critics of the Trump Government have highlighted this fact as what unarguably constitutes the fascist edge of the second, nonconsecutively elected Trumpian Crusade against much of the rest of the Non-Aryan World, with the stalwart likes of Messrs. Elon Musk, of Tesla and Space-X fame, and Steve Bannon, the Trumpian political megaphone and Orwellian propagandist, being accused of virulently propagating Chancellor Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Salute.

In a telephone conversation with a friend recently, my wife cited the case of our 19-year-old, currently a Chemical Engineering Student at the City University of New York (CUNY), who had been named as the Valedictorian of his graduating class in a charter middle school but flatly refused to intellectually exert himself to what most of his high school teachers perceived to be the maximum capacity of his practically demonstrated intellectual capacity, because my son, who was also the captain of one of the two divisions of his high school’s rugby team, also perceived himself to have become the target of hatred and enmity among some of his Non-Black and African American classmates as an “Uppity Nigger.” In middle school, he had also been perceived to be a “Mister Know-It-All.” So, in high school, he decided to be laid back and either look on passively or barely participate in class discussions. He also flatly refused to be appointed a tutor for his classmates and his juniors. My wife and I had to be called in by the high school principal, but Kwame, III, would not budge.

In the case of the son of a recently deceased relative whose son attended a predominantly white suburban high school in Hellertown, Pennsylvania, the son who was both the youngest and the brightest pupil in his class, had a platoon of some of his classmates gang up and spring up on him at a water fountain in one of the hallways of the school where these self-entitled white boys slammed his bespectacled head into a wall. The elder of twin boys had gone to get a quaff or two of water to drink. He recently graduated with a Bachelor of Business Degree from New York University’s Stern School of Business, having turned down Harvard University’s School of Business, and works with a Fortune 500 firm in Boston. The case was promptly brought to the attention of the Principal or Headmaster of the School and made the headlines of the local newspaper.

In short, the abolition of Critical Race Theory (CRT), as President Trump smugly claimed in his 5th State of the Union Address just this past Tuesday, March 4, was tantamount to declaring the end of racism and racial discrimination right here in the United States of America. No such declaration could be at once more farcical and criminally mendacious. Mr. Trump also needs to read Justice Higginbotham’s historical and legal classic titled “In the Matter of Color,” if he really wants to know the true architects of the America that he so sophomorically claims to be hellbent on making great again. You see, you cannot make something great, unless you also know the true nature of its make or architectural, ideological and cultural material foundations. Ignorance does not greatness make!

The good news here is that Justice Higginbotham attended the University of Pennsylvania Law School in 1934, as an off-campus student, when Mr. Trump had not even been born. And it was not because the future President of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court was either a DEI student or was, somehow, marginally qualified, at least in the opinion of the former Fordham University Transfer Student. Rather, it was simply because Justice Higginbotham who, together with his wife, would also teach law courses at Harvard University, was African American!

As one character in “Things Fall Apart” (1958), the classic novel authored by Nigeria’s globally renowned Prof. Chinua Achebe says to the protagonist of the required reading textbook in many World Literature Courses right here in the United States of America, and I am just paraphrasing here: “Those who had their yams cooked for them must exercise some level of modesty and humility in berating those who have been far less fortunate than themselves.”

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr. PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
E-mail: [email protected]