Don Pesci: Critical Race Theory is intellectual tripe

The Indian Harbor Yacht Club in rich Greenwich, Conn., a town where admission is all about money, not race.

VERNON, Conn.

Mike Winkler, a progressive – very progressive -- Connecticut state representative from Vernon, tumbled into a postmodern mare’s nest when he attempted, poorly, to discriminate between different kinds of discrimination.

During a public hearing on bills before the state General Assembly Planning and Development Committee, Winkler said that Greenwich Housing Authority member Sam Romeo had counted Asian-Americans among minorities suffering from invidious discrimination. Winkler had just suggested that Greenwich officials had deployed zoning regulations to deny access to African-Americans, and here was a Housing Authority member claiming that 37 percent of the population of Greenwich were members of minority groups.

Well, yes, Winkler grudgingly conceded. However, “You count Asians and other minorities that have never been discriminated against,” Winkler said during the hearing, at which point the frigid waters of Critical Race Theory closed over Winkler’s head. Critical Race Theory holds that the law and legal institutions are inherently racist, and that race itself, instead of being biologically grounded, is a social construct used by white people to advance their own political and economic interests at the expense of people of color.

As a matter of history and common sense, one must admit that Winkler may have had a point: There are different kinds and degrees of discrimination.  But, flourishing the wrong end of the point, he ended up stabbing himself.

Surely all participants in the conference shown on YouTube would agree there are differences in degrees and kinds of discrimination. The discrimination that Martin Luther King Jr. bravely faced during three protest marches from Selma, Ala., to the state capital of Montgomery surely was different in kind and ferocity than that faced by some black and white Americans attempting to move into Greenwich. In the matter of discrimination, things have improved remarkably since dogs were set on Selma protestors in 1965.

If Greenwich had ever relied on redlining to maintain what Critical Race Theorists may regard as the purity of the towns’ racial stock, those provisions have long since been swept from zoning regulations throughout all of Connecticut’s municipalities. Times change, sometimes for the better.

No, no, nearly everyone from butcher to baker to candlestick maker cried, more or less in unison. The price of admission to Greenwich is dollar-related. Not everyone can afford to live in Greenwich. If state Senate President Martin Looney has his way, soon progressive Democrats may impose a tax on Connecticut’s “Gold Coast” mansions, which would have the unfortunate effect of making access to wealthy towns throughout the state even less attractive to people of color who might be able to afford the price of the mansions. Zoning provisions in Greenwich do not exclude potential admission to the town for reasons of race, religion or color -- provided that the potential applicants have sufficient greenbacks in their bank accounts.

Howitzers were fired at Winkler from every direction. Republican state Sen. Tony Hwang, an Asian-American, stepped forward to turn against Winkler a point often advanced by Critical Race Theory-soddened Democrats. According to an account in a Hartford paper, “Winkler, a white man, simply cannot grasp the pervasiveness of Asian-American bias, ‘‘ Hwang said. ‘You believe they have been discriminated less. You have never been in their shoes.''' Democratic Atty. Gen. William Tong, the state’s highest-ranking Asian-American elected official, joined in. Tong “recalled being asked during a debate in the House whether Asian- Americans count as people of color. ‘Let me assure you that Asian-Americans count and the hate and discrimination against us is real,’ Tong said Tuesday.’’

The public scourging followed its usual course, and the sinner eventually showed repentance, apologizing for his ill-considered statement. “My comments are inexcusable, especially with the recent rise in violence against Asian-Americans,” Winkler said, according to a piece in CTMirror. “There is a long, painful history of Asian-Americans experiencing racism in this country, and I sincerely regret that I ignored that history and those experiences in my comments.”

No one knows at this point whether Winkler will receive an absolution from the new priests of Critical Race Theory. And no Republican office holder has yet emerged to claim that Republicans generally were not willing to surrender to Democrats pride of place in the matter of resisting aggressions against blacks. In past times, the Democrat Party had supported slavery, Jim Crow, the Klu Klux Klan, and the loosing of dogs on courageous protesters such as Martin Luther King Jr. who fought for freedom.

So it goes. No one seems willing to close on the chief point – that, while traces of both racism and discrimination may still exist somewhere in America’s dark cultural backwaters, the beast has largely been caged. Times really have changed. King actually won his battle for freedom, one of the reasons the nation celebrates Martin Luther King Day.

If we are determined to proceed along lines indicated by Critical Race Theory, Democrats, historically associated with the raw racism of the post-Civil War period – Woodrow Wilson, an early progressive, approvingly showed in the White House in 1915 the film Birth of a Nation, a celebration of KluKluxery – should change the name of their party, so warmly have Democrats in the past embraced racism and discrimination.  This is worse than nonsense. It is reckless and silly nonsense.

The view that the sins of the father should fall like an executioner’s axe on the necks of their distant grandsons and granddaughters is, combined with cancel culture, a petard that may be used to destroy the foundational principles that King referred to in his “I have a dream Speech.”

Zoning regulations in Greenwich are not “inherently racist” because they are not racist at all. The Greenwich zoning board is not motivated by racism. And Critical Race Theory is intellectual tripe. You cannot denounce a racist past by bleaching it out of history books, and racial McCarthyism -- according to which any member of a presentday political party is deemed racist because the political party with which they associate had in the past promoted racism – is every bit as destructive as political McCarthyism, when the imputations are wrong and unjust.

It’s long past time for everyone to grow up.

Don Pesci is a Vernon-based columnist.