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This excerpt is from James Lindsey writing on his blog New Discourses.

Lindsey is very critical of one of the methods used to analyze our culture.  Apparently correctly identifying systemic racism, and how it flows through society is a bad thing.  Rather, we just need to do better and try harder with the current system and hope that one day we can reach a better place – cue unicorns and gleeful music – where society is just better.  (???)

Some of the criticisms Lindsey has can be directly applied to his own prescriptions which are vague and lacking in detail as to how to proceed to the state of having a better society:

“We need to listen; we need to investigate; and we need to use the best methods available to understand and fix the problem.” 

Yeah.  Okay.  So using the best methods available we can probably ascertain that having a police officer kneel on a person’s neck for several minutes isn’t conducive to that person continuing to live.  It would seem that this sort of treatment is disproportionately handed out to people that are not white.

So, using the best investigative tools at hand and all of our listening skills we should be able to parse out a reasonable solution to the problem in our liberal society? No?

Is telling minority populations, who are still being incarcerated and extra-judicially murdered at an alarming rate “just be patient, we’re working on it” a viable solution?  How many incidents of police discriminate police violence and the corresponding race riots do we need to get a ‘good data set’  to start fixing the disadvantages of being a colour other than white in society?

Go read the entire article – For me, the overall feeling came down to this – Okay, so critical race theory is pessimistic… buuuuut what do you offer to replace the way it exposes the very real and very deep fractures in our society?  Like we had Rodney King in 1992 and yet, here we be in 2020 with George Floyd; I’m not seeing anything close to the epoch changing liberal progress Lindsey so tepidly puts forward.   Rather, the status quo has been maintained and the system continues as it did before – systemic racism intact and going strong.

“We can do better than Critical Race Theory. We can do better than a sloppy “theoretical” approach that’s really about pushing divisive grievance politics into our society, one that treats people as props for the narrow politics that primarily, if not solely, benefit the elite grifters who know the Theory. Critical Race Theory advances them at everyone else’s expense. And we already know a lot of how to tackle these problems better than Critical Race Theory can. We already know how to be liberals, apply liberalism, judge by the content of character rather than anything to do with identity or color of skin. And we already know that liberal approaches are open to reform and improvement of the societies that employ them.

Sure, we need to listen better. When a black man, or anyone else, says “I can’t breathe,” people need to listen. When people say there are problems, we need to listen. We need to listen; we need to investigate; and we need to use the best methods available to understand and fix the problem. But we also need to see past race, not focus on it. We need to work together, talk together, adopt shared goals, hold shared vision, find shared identities. For those of us in a hurting America, we are all American. We all have a stake in this system and what it can provide, and we’ll all lose if we let these Critical Race Theory wannabe dictators tear it down or take over.

These approaches work. Working together, talking together, sharing goals together, sharing a common vision, finding common ground and common identities. We know they work. So, we should throw out the little tyrants who, with their academic theories, educational influence, and journalistic and political bully-pulpits, are going to tell our country that white people are the cause of everything bad and that black people they have to stay on script if they want to be black. We’re going to reject these race-baiting jerks and reject them just like they reject any honest attempt to help or understand. They are the problem, and their Theory is the problem. We can and will do better.”

Not convinced Mr.Lindsay.