The National Trust has been attracting negative headlines, resulting in the formation of a body, Restore Trust, that aims to return it to its origins. This is unsurprising as underlying its current direction is the divisive ideology of Critical Race Theory (CRT).
Its language and tenets are widespread amongst the chattering classes, and the long march through the institutions has spread it.
According to Delgado and Stefanic: “Unlike traditional civil rights, which embraces incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.”
A critical theory is Marxist and this revolutionary rejection of the modern, western world recasts his oppressors and oppressed from the bourgeoisie and proletariat to whites and blacks; race not class conflict.
It’s a worldview which reverses Dr Martin Luther King Jr’s “colourblind” philosophy:
“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character.”
by assigning characteristics on the basis of skin colour, i.e., racism.
It contends that the “system” was designed by racist whites to preserve their supremacy. From this comes things like systemic racism, white privilege and collective guilt. All whites are racist, but no blacks are, and, whatever the question, the answer is always racism. This is brilliant speculation but pointing that out demonstrates white fragility, one of many Kafkatraps.
Systemic racism means that an organisation, although not necessarily intentionally, inherently discriminates. In recent years the Metropolitan Police and Labour Party have fallen foul of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, but this doesn’t mean they’re full of racists.
The Sewell Report concluded that disparities between various groups weren’t primarily due to discrimination. Why, for example, do white working-class boys do poorly, why are there differences between sub-Saharan Africans and Afro-Caribbeans, and why do Asians excel? It’s mostly class, whether both parents are present, work ethic, etc.
A colourblind approach means that, although there’s more to do, race relations are going in the right direction – unless you use dodgy data, but there’s now a Grievance Industrial Complex; an incestuous, get-rich-quick, self-perpetuating, snake oil peddling scam.
Orwell would recognise modern EDI. Equality (of opportunity) is now Equity (Equivalence of outcomes, i.e., Communism), Diversity is now Conformity (of views) and Inclusion is now Exclusion (of the wrong views).
Seeking something that may not exist results in a witch-hunt with Kafkatraps supplemented by pseudoscience from Marxist false consciousness such as micro-aggressions (best illustrated by Roger Moore’s eyebrow) and unconscious bias.
The Government is phasing out unconscious bias training as “there is currently no evidence that this training changes behaviour in the long term or improves workplace equality in terms of representation of women, ethnic minorities or other minority groups”…there is emerging evidence of unintended negative consequences.
CRT is “packaged” as anti-racism, so there are now two; the traditional, Martin Luther King, colourblind, anti-racist anti-racism and CRT, racist “anti-racism.”
Let’s play CRT buzzword Bingo with the Trust’s ”commitment to inclusion and diversity.” Equality is absent, but there’s Equity and “anti-racism action planning.”
That’s CRT writ large, justified by a report, using “the experiences and expertise of over 500 BAME people who either responded to our online survey or took part in in-depth interviews.” That’s a meaningless, self-selecting sample.
Media reports of unconscious/unintended bias training and Equity help confirm CRT.
If the modern, western world was created by racist whites then so was the past. Decolonisation is a tenet of CRT, although it’s better described as dewesternisation or dewhitification.
UCL seek to limit the number of “dead white men”, whilst Salford University is removing sonnets as ”products of white Western culture.” It’s racist Lysenkoism.
The tawdry “Colonial Countryside” report is CRT, it’s seek and ye shall find with guilt by association and the sins of the father. Taking historical figures out of their time and judging them by twenty-first century standards is meaningless. They should be understood in the context of their era and the prevailing societal norms.
Those who profited from slavery were the robber barons of their time, precursors of today’s tech giants. They became rich through legal, but morally questionable, methods, what Heath called “the unacceptable face of capitalism”, and triggered legislative changes.
It’s concerning that an organisation established to care for our history and heritage has adopted an ideology that hates it. There is no question to which CRT is the answer and Restore Trust should seek to excise it from the National Trust.
