Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick — yep, here he is again — appeared on a right-wing talk radio program last fall and suggested that Barack Obama somehow “set up” former President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance. Without offering any evidence, Patrick claimed Obama had been secretly running the Biden White House and sabotaged his former veep’s debate so he’d be forced to withdraw from the race. Patrick’s ultimate claim was that Obama engineered the fiasco so his wife Michelle would end up on the top of the Democratic ticket. Which, as we all know, is EXACTLY WHAT HAPPENED. Uh, yeah. Credit: Wikipedia Commons / Redwhiteandboujee

Bad Takes is a periodic column of opinion and analysis.

“There’s a lot of ugly things in this world, son. I wish I could keep ’em all away from you. That’s never possible.” — Atticus Finch in the film To Kill A Mockingbird, 1962

“It’s time that tenure comes to an end in Texas,” Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick declared a little over a week ago. He chose to commemorate Black History Month by making it a top priority to fire any university professor who dares teach the dreaded Satanic rites known as Critical Race Theory.

“You’re not going to teach a theory that says, ‘We’re going to judge you when you walk in the classroom by the color of your skin. And if you’re white, you were born a racist, that that’s normal, not an aberration, and you’re an oppressor. And if you’re a person of color, you’re a victim,'” Patrick elaborated. “You talk about tearing away a student — whether they’re white or of color — [from] their self-esteem, their dignity, their spirit, when they walk in a classroom, whether it’s in K-12 or in college.”

However, despite Patrick’s description, “CRT is not a racialist ideology that declares all whites to be privileged oppressors,” according to legal scholars such as Gary Peller, professor of constitutional law at Georgetown University, who have spent decades in the field.

“Like the invocation of Willie Horton in the 1980s and affirmative action after that,” Peller wrote last summer, “the point of those who seek to ban what they call ‘CRT’ is not to contest our vision of racial justice or to debate our social critique. It is instead to tap into a dependable reservoir of racial anxiety among whites. This is a political strategy that has worked for as long as any of us can remember, and CRT simply serves as the convenient face of the campaign today.”

The late Derrick Bell, the first Black professor awarded tenure at Harvard Law School; Patricia Williams, professor of law at Columbia and Northwestern; Cheryl Harris, professor of civil liberties at UCLA School of Law: if these critical race theorists — just to name three — were slyly trying to “tear away” minority students’ sense of self-worth, they sure had a funny way of going about it. After all, they became some of the most accomplished, well-respected members of their profession and serve as an inspiring example to which all young people should aspire and any parent ought to be proud. To forbid students from reading what they’ve written is more than wrong, it’s ugly.

When asked to explicitly define his bugbear, Patrick offered this: “Critical Race Theory is kind of an offshoot of Critical Legal Studies, which is an offshoot of a socialist program that everything that happened in life is based on racism, every court decision is based not on the law or what the jury says but on racism, that everything that happens in the workplace is based on racism, that everything that happens is based on racism. That’s what Critical Race Theory is.”

Ironically, one could immediately ban what Patrick thinks Critical Race Theory is without banning a single sentence of Critical Race Theory proper. That’s because CRT doesn’t claim that “everything that happens” is based on racism, only that supposedly race-neutral laws and institutions can often whitewash societal structures which disadvantage minorities. Also, CRT was a response to the absence of race-conscious analysis in the Critical Legal Studies movement. And neither is it explicitly socialist.

As Kimberlé Crenshaw, the legal scholar who coined the term Critical Race Theory in 1989, explained last year: “Critical Race Theory just says, let’s pay attention to how what has happened in this country is continuing to create differential outcomes, so we can become that country that we say we are. So, CRT is not anti-patriotic. In fact, it is more patriotic than those who are opposed to it, because we believe in the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, we believe in the promises of equality, and we know we can’t get there if we can’t confront and talk honestly about inequality.”

If most Americans are “colorblind,” as Dan Patrick maintains, why did an analysis of 100 million traffic stops reveal “persistent racial bias,” with Black motorists “less likely to be stopped after sunset, when a ‘veil of darkness’ masks one’s race?” Why do “Blacks experience such a high pollution burden that Black households with incomes between $50,000 and $60,000 live in neighborhoods that are, on average, more polluted than the average white neighborhood with incomes below $10,000?”

Why, 54 years after the Fair Housing Act, are creditworthy Black applicants still denied more often or charged higher rates on home, auto, and small-business loans than whites?

Regardless of how you answer those questions, you can probably agree they’re worth asking. The more relevant question is, should university professors get canned for merely suggesting that racism in America is not some aberrant accident but is instead foundational to the country’s history up to and including the present? Should that be within the realm of discussable thought on a college campus?

Patrick’s answer is as clear as it is shrill. He will push for, in his own words, “a law that teaching Critical Race Theory is prima facie evidence of good cause for tenure revocation.” And he added, “If the UT Faculty Council really wanted academic freedom, they should have taken note — these are all smart people — of what the legislature did this past session when we banned Critical Race Theory from K-12 schools.”

So, if university professors were smart and truly wanted academic freedom, they should have surrendered their academic freedom? In Patrick’s ideal world, all teachers would contact him before putting together their lesson plans and ask his advice and consent for acceptable ways to teach about racism.

The difference between education and indoctrination appears to turn on whether Patrick approves of what’s taught, as he presented no evidence for his accusation that professors are requiring their students to personally agree with them in order to pass or graduate.

“No one has any freedom to speak out [to question Critical Race Theory], including other professors,” he alleged. Doesn’t his own Feb. 18 press conference expose this as a pants-on-fire lie?

The American Association of University Professors, founded 107 years ago by John Dewey, is not some fringe cadre of “the woke Left.” Yet their answer to the above question differed markedly from our bad Lieutenant’s.

“Patrick’s proposal to statutorily define ‘teaching CRT’ as adequate cause for dismissal is an extremely dangerous authoritarian precedent,” they wrote. “In a democracy, politicians do not determine what people are allowed to learn or forbidden from learning. The attacks on CRT are outrageous on their own, but the idea that a government can censor entire fields of knowledge poses a real and present danger to the future of higher education in the United States.” The group called Patrick’s threats to academic freedom “perverse and duplicitous.”

In her review of To Kill A Mockingbird, Errin Haines — the founding journalist for nonprofit news site the The 19th* — pointed out that the mostly polite white residents of Maycomb County “could conceive of and perhaps even confront incidences of individual injustice but not systemic racism.” “Systemic racism was either too big of a problem or just ‘the way things were,'” she wrote.

Like the falsely convicted Tom Robinson, CRT is innocent of the crimes for which it’s been accused, and the real crime lies with those who pretend not to notice the race of those getting disproportionately shafted by the system as well as with those whose attacks on CRT are a coded ploy to maintain the way things were.

If you requested a Democratic ballot during early voting this month, you may be blissfully unaware of the nonbinding propositions the Texas GOP appended to the Republican version. It played all the hits: open borders, voter fraud, Marxism, vaccine mandates, taxes, abortion, God. This, along with Dan Patrick’s remarks, telegraphs the party’s strategy for the midterms.

Culture war grandstanding, however emotionally satisfying to the likes of Texas politicians or the Jan. 6 rioters, is a diversionary tactic that distracts us from the GOP’s underlying agenda: privatizing schools and cutting rich people’s taxes. If the Republicans can make upcoming elections center exclusively around scarecrows and cynically manufactured outrages such as Critical Race Theory, Defund The Police and trans kids, then we’ve already lost.

“The Critical Race people are trying to take us back to a divided country,” Patrick said. 

No, sir, you are. We are trying to build a multiracial coalition for economic and environmental justice to drag conservatives, kicking and screaming, into the 21st century, hopeful that in the end they’ll claim it was their idea all along, yet again.

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This article appears in Feb 23 – Mar 8, 2022.