4 - Let’s Get Critical: Thinking with and beyond the ‘Dead White Men’ of Social Theory

Summary

Introduction

I write this reflection as an early career academic and lecturer in sociology, and as an Ashkenazi Jewish Israeli settler scholar who immigrated to this land in her twenties and has been an uninvited settler colonizer ever since. My lived experience and academic training underpin my commitment to anti- racism in the classroom and teaching practice. Racism is a lived reality for many, and discussions about race and racism permeate sociological scholarship. As I write, a neo- Nazi mob crowds Parliament House in Melbourne, Victoria. Over the last few years, the alt- right has become more mainstream, galvanized by political success. In the United States, anti- critical race theory (CRT) measures have been introduced in 49 states at either state level or municipality, or by a local school board (Alexander, 2023). Australia's conservative class keenly imported the latest US moral panic, with commentators, think tanks and politicians cautioning that teaching race in schools is ‘divisive indoctrination’ (Murray, 2022).

While CRT critically analyses systems of racial oppression and power to understand and dismantle them, conservatives dismiss CRT as ‘indoctrination’ and claim that simply speaking to young people about race and privilege can have negative consequences, such as making young people feel ashamed or guilty. On Sky News, educator and commentator Kevin Donnelly is quoted as saying, ‘You should not have to go to school to be told that you’re racist, that you’re a white supremacist, that somehow you’re guilty of oppressing others’ (Sky News, 2021a). The underlying assumption is that conversations about race and privilege are actually about assigning individual blame rather than engaging in critical debate about structures of power, oppression and domination, how they impact people and how we can challenge, critique and dismantle them. Right- wing commentator Andrew Bolt referred to CRT as ‘racial vengeance’ (Sky News, 2021b), and others have used the term ‘anti- white racism’ (in Pearson, 2021) and referred to CRT as ‘ideology’ (Sky News, 2020) and ‘indoctrination’ (Murray, 2022).

It requires critical racial and decolonial literacies to unpack Bolt's claim that CRT is ‘racial vengeance’ as it operates on two levels: first, it audaciously subverts (ignorantly or wilfully) power structures to position racialized people as having the political and social capital to enforce violence towards white people.