The War on Critical Race Theory: Or, The Remaking of Racism

by David Theo Goldberg

“Critical Race Theory” is consuming conservative America. The mounting attacks on a once-obscure legal theory are upending public schooling, legislating censorship, driving elections, and cleaving communities.

In this much-needed response, renowned scholar David Theo Goldberg cuts to the heart of the claims expressed in these attacks. He punctures the demonization of Critical Race Theory, uncovering who is orchestrating it, funding the assault, and eagerly distributing the message. The book richly illustrates the enduring nature of structural racism, even as a conservative insistence on colorblindness serves to silence the possibility of doing anything about it. Crucially, Goldberg exposes the political aims and effects of the vitriolic attacks. The upshot of CRT’s targeting, he argues, has been to unleash racisms anew and to stymie any attempt to fight them, all with the aim of protecting white minority rule.

Genres: Nonfiction, Politics, Anti Racist

174 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2023

About the author

*Director of the University of California Humanities Research Institute, the University of California system-wide research facility for the human sciences and theoretical research in the arts.
*Professor of Comparative Literature and of Criminology, Law, and Society at the University of California, Irvine, where he is a Fellow of the UCI Critical Theory Institute

Reviews

[Kellen McLean · Rating 3 out of 5]

Startling lack of Satanic Panic mentions.

[Jackson Ford · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is spectacular. Goldberg is a world class scholar on politics and race. The fact that he has to address the perverted propagandist minds of Christopher Rufo, James Lindsay, Mark Levin, Donald Trump and the rest of the bullshit fabrication brigade is an obnoxious fact on our state of reality. This cluster of imbeciles backed by big conservative money from Hillsdale, Heritage, and the Manhattan Institute are responsible for catalyzing a fear based reemergence of institutionalized racism. Goldberg is thorough, clear, practical and constructive in his assessment of this era of cultural birdshit stuck on our collective windshield. That sentence almost makes me sound more optimistic than I am, to me these clowns understand something more fundamental about America than the rest of us: it’s genocidally racist and deceptive about it. Nevetheless, Goldberg is excellent and he wrote the book we needed to wrap our minds around this insanity.

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a great book for those only superficially aware of Critical Race Theory. For those of us who have studied Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Patricia Williams, and for those of us who have read newspapers over the last eight years and are familiar with the far right's war on CRT, or some strange apparition thereof, there's nothing particularly new or groundbreaking in this book. However, that doesn't negate the importance of this work, even for the sake of posterity. I like the length, and I like what Goldberg has done with this book. In my circles, I have argued exactly the kinds of arguments presented in this work.