The Up Your Dialogue episode on Critical Race Theory was the most listened to in the history of the podcast. It is also the episode that got us blocked on Twitter by Ibram X. Kendi (or, more probably, by his social media handlers). Perhaps a word on philosophy will help to clarify how simple it is to debunk the latest and greatest trend in American schools, culture, business, military and media.

*        *        *

Immanuel Kant’s ‘noumenon‘, the thing-in-itself, is forever unknowable because one cannot experience it directly.

The so-called lived experience is only a recent adaptation of a concept he described over two hundred years ago. Like most Critical Theory, the idea is hardly original. What is revealing is the stupid and easily avoidable presumption that the philosopher provides something useful or non-useful to us because of his skin color.

A reduction of Kant to race discourages us from examining his ideas, let alone weighing them on the merits. His skin color was human and also not the point. Those who suppose it was actually mean the ‘phenomenon‘, the interaction someone has with the thing-in-itself.

And what is a phenomenon if not a popular trend, a passing cultural fad or a superficial activism that will disappear once it has been sufficiently monetized like any other carnival gimmick? CRT is an act that will move on to other unsuspecting marks in other unsuspecting towns, remembered tenderly by the few and cause of embarrassment to the many duped.

*        *        *

_______________________

Readers are invited to visit jscotthardin.com. Thank you for your support of the Up Your Dialogue podcast, a place where two lenses combine with respect and encouragement to learn and explore our world and beyond.