The Daily Signal - Black Professor: Blacks Who Reject Critical Race Theory Being 'Erased'

Episode Date: October 13, 2021

Blacks who don’t adopt the doctrines of victimhood or critical social justice erode the narrative promoted by woke activists, Erec Smith, a professor of rhetoric at York College of Pennsylvania and co-founder of Free Black Thought, says.  “The illogic that is inherent in a lot of anti-racist activism ... is absurd," Smith says. Smith doesn't like how The New York Times' 1619 Project, authored by Nikole Hannah-Jones, only has furthered division within the nation. As a professor of rhetoric, Smith, who is black and the author of “A Critique of Anti-Racism in Rhetoric and Composition: the Semblance of Empowerment,” says he is concerned that anti-racist dogma contains “no sincere attempt to persuade” but is instead “an attempt to intimidate."  Smith joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” from the Parents Unite conference in Boston on Oct. 1 to discuss why blacks who oppose critical race theory are being “erased.” Smith also explains what he would talk about discuss Ibram X Kendi, author of “How to Be an Antiracist,” if he were given the opportunity.  We also cover these stories: Democrats move to slash their $3.5 trillion social spending bill to $2 trillion.  Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas announces that Immigration and Customs Enforcement, also known as ICE, no longer will conduct worksite raids. Eleven state-level school board groups put distance between themselves and a National School Boards Association letter to President Joe Biden asking for federal authorities to investigate parents.  Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Wednesday, October 13th. I'm Doug Blair. And I'm Virginia Allen. Anti-racist rhetoric is not really rhetoric at all and, in fact, relies most heavily upon intimidation to achieve its goal. Eric Smith says, Smith is a professor of rhetoric at your college of Pennsylvania and the co-founder of free black thought. He joins the show today to discuss why critical social justice anti-racism is. is not true anti-racism and why the message of victimhood is so dangerous to the African-American community. And don't forget, if you're enjoying this podcast, please be sure to leave a review or a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts and encourage others to subscribe.

And now on to today's top news. Democrats appear to be slashing their $3.5 trillion spending bill down to $2 trillion. Reduction of the bill's cost comes only a few days after West. Virginia Democrat Senator Joe Manchin said he would not support a spending bill over $1.5 trillion. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Tuesday that Democrats are working to reduce the bill's cost down to $2 trillion per the Hill. We have some important decisions to make in the next few days so that we can proceed. I'm very disappointed that we're not going with the original $3.5 trillion, which was very transformative. Pelosi added that the reduced bill will still be transformative and largely have the same focus as the previous spending package.

The bill back better is three baskets. It's climate, which we spent some time talking about already. Health, job, security, and moral responsibility. It's health care, the issues that relate to the Affordable Care Act, Medicare and Medicaid, and family care, I mentioned. I mentioned some of those issues already. And so whatever we do, it will be transformative. It will produce results. And we are very grateful to our president for saying, I want to pass the bipartisan legislation.

Pelosi did not say when the new reduced social spending bill will be ready for review or a vote. On Tuesday, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas announced that immigration and immigration, customs enforcement, also known as ICE, would no longer be conducting work site raids. In a memo to acting ICE director Tay Johnson, Majorcas said, the deployment of mass worksite operations, sometimes resulting in the simultaneous arrest of hundreds of workers, was not focused on the most pernicious aspect of our country's

unauthorized employment challenge, exploitative employers. Worksite raids were a common part of the Trump administration's immigration enforcement policy, but were sharply cut back under President Joe Biden. The move reflects President Biden's more lax policies regarding illegal immigration. Two weeks ago, Secretary Majorcas announced that illegal immigrants would no longer be deported based on immigration status alone. 11 state-level school board groups are trying to put distance between themselves and a National School Board Association letter to President Joe Biden. Earlier this month, the National School Board's Association asked Biden in a letter for help to identify and assess threats of violence made by parents against school board members. Several days later, Attorney General Merrick Garland ordered the FBI and federal prosecutors to meet with federal, state, and local leaders to look into what Garland says is a disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence being made against school administrators.

board members, teachers, and staff. Now, state-level school boards in Arkansas, Florida, Missouri, Montana, North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and Louisiana have criticized the letter and say they were not consulted before it was sent. The state school boards in Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, and Texas also say the National School Boards Association did not consult them before sending the letter. The Florida School Board told the National School Board Association, leadership on Monday that the letter they sent to Biden has caused serious concerns, conflict, and consternation for many of our members. Now stay tuned for my conversation with Eric Smith, co-founder of Free Black Thought,

as we discuss the danger of the victim narrative within critical social justice on college campuses and within society. Our interview was recorded at the Parents' Unite Conference in Boston, Massachusetts earlier this month. So please do excuse any background noise. Hi, I'm Virginia Allen. I want to tell you all about an awesome Heritage Foundation resource called the Index of Economic Freedom. The Heritage Foundation Index of Economic Freedom ranks nearly every nation in the world according to its level of economic freedom. Whether for personal, professional use, or for school research, the index is a wealth of

information. You can learn why it's easier to start a business in Switzerland, than it is in France and where America falls on the ranking. So go ahead and visit heritage.org slash index to explore the newly released 2021 Index of Economic Freedom, which features interactive maps, country rankings, graphs of data, and much, much more. I am so pleased to be joined by Eric Smith. He's an associate professor of rhetoric

at York College of Pennsylvania and the co-founder of Free Black Thought. Eric, thank you so much for being. being here. Thanks for having me. So Eric, you are also a senior fellow for the foundation against intolerance and racism. You're also an author. Your latest book, A Critique of Anti-Racism and Rhetoric and Composition. And you co-founded an organization, as I mentioned, called Free Black Thought. That really interests me. Explain a little bit about free black thought. What do you all do? What's your mission? Well, I can start by talking about my

background regarding this. Well, not my background, my recent background. In my field, there are a handful of people who are insisting that they're speaking for an entire race. And this is a multicultural group of people. It's not just black people saying we know everything about black people. And when I try to push back on that, you know, I get, you know, a significant vitriol. And I was a little annoyed by that, and not just because of their behavior, but because of the, I'll be frank, idiocy of thinking they can speak for 50 million individuals. So I found some like-minded souls. We put together Free Black Thought, which is basically a showcase of viewpoint diversity within the black intelligentsia. And we have scholars, we have a compendium in which we list various topics,

having to do with race from a variety of scholars who are not parroting the quote-unquote woke ideology that we get most prominently in the media. Scholarly writers, op-eds, artists, poets, fiction writers, it runs the gamut. We also have a journal of Free Black Thought in which we take submissions, vet them, work with authors, and finally publish it on our website. same principle you know it's about viewpoint diversity letting people realize that people of color

specifically black people are not a monolith and they have different things to say and here's a place where they can say it so we're pretty dedicated to that the future may hold something like a podcast or you know

a panel discussion you know we've co-sponsored those already so I mean that's already the ball's already rolling on that. But right now we have the compendium, we have the journal, and we have opportunities like this to talk about it. That's excellent. I'd be a little bit biased on the podcast front, but I would say, do it if you can. It's a great resource for individuals. Well, as I read some of your work, Eric, I found myself realizing, you know, you really have a theme that I feel like runs throughout a lot of your thinking, and that's

encouraging people to think for themselves to actually use their mind to maybe question some of the narratives that we're hearing about, you know, things like racism or wokeism or justice and what those things mean. Do you think that that's a pretty fair assessment of something you're trying to do? Definitely. I just recently taught Emerson's self-reliance. And, of course, I teach called American philosophical thought. It's called philosophical thought and not philosophy. because, you know, there are some people we have in that class, some authors we're reading that aren't technically philosophers, but they have thoughtful pieces, and I have my students read them.

We just went over self-reliance, which is all about thinking for yourself, you know, not feeling like you need to conform, right? Embracing non-conformity, and, you know, everything that is the opposite of, what seems to be happening among anti-racist circles. Right. So I

think, and there's a poet named, well, he was here, I don't think he's alive anymore. Joseph Brodke, who basically said that, you know, the cure to evil is individualism. Right. Group think is, you know, evil's best friend.

Right? But individuality and somebody who is originally themselves, authentically, their idiosyncratic self. That person's harder to incorporate into your strategy, right? So I really, I felt that, you know, and I feel that. And I recall reading Emerson when I was 18 and carrying that book around like the Bible, you know, because it really spoke to me.

It said what I had been feeling but couldn't articulate at the time. So I am not surprised at all that you gleaned, you know, that thread throughout all my writing. We don't appreciate individuality the way we should. Communal thinking is a good thing. We have to do it, you know, right? And many would say we're hardwired to do it. But if we're not individually sound, we're not going to be the best members of a particular group, especially if that group is a nation. Yeah. Right? So, yes, I want to make individuality cool again. I love that. Well, you're taking me back to my college days here. I read a lot of Alexis de Tocqueville, and that's, I know something he talked about, that individualism is actually kind of a safeguard for democracy, which is very, very fascinating. So you are a professor of rhetoric at York College of Pennsylvania. Do you find that the young people you're teaching in your classes are open to these other perspectives? Are they coming in eager to use their brains and to think or reason? or are you really having to challenge them to do that?

Well, to be fair, in the time of COVID, you know, they're a little distracted by other things. What's more, there are students who are sophomores right now, but it's their first year in a classroom. Wow. Right? So they're supposed to be farther along than they are socially on a college campus, as well as, you know, understanding the dynamics of a college classroom. So, you know, that has a lot to do with it. But regarding open-mindedness and resistance to anything I'm talking about, I haven't really encountered that. I did do a talk two days ago on the detriments of critical social justice in the classroom and got some significant pushback, including from a dean who told me I was lying.

my dean didn't believe that a conference like parents you know like this right could exist because there aren't people who are up and armed because this isn't happening right so I want to send him this recording right send him a recording of the whole conference no message just the link yeah yes I can't wait to do that but yes I mean there is some pushback

But in general, it's not that bad. That's good. That's encouraging to hear because I think there's a lot of talk about, you know, college students and the next generation coming up. How do we empower students to think for themselves? What do you think as a professor are some of the greatest challenges that students are facing right now? And then for you as a professor, what are some of those challenges that you're facing and trying to help your students navigate through? Last semester, spring semester, I taught a course in which the primary text was Benjamin Boyce's docus series on Evergreen State College. That was a deep dive into what was going on regarding race-based activism on a college campus.

I'm not scared that that will happen on my campus, not to that extent anyway. But I'm concerned because some students said to me, and I got this from the writings of other students so I could glean that. And they thought they were missing something. You know, the illogic that is inherent in a lot of anti-racist activism, you know, is illogical and it is absurd. But when they looked at this and made that interpretation, they insisted, I must be missing something. It must be my positionality or something like that. This can't be this absurd, right? And, you know, trying to tell them, it is.

You know, it's hard because you want them to come to their own conclusions. You know, so biting my tongue and not saying, no, it's absurd, you're right, was difficult for me. And looking at this, you know, illogical way of doing things is difficult for them. They don't know how to process it immediately. We are talking with Eric Smith, the associate professor of rhetoric at York College of Pennsylvania and the co-founder of Free Black Thought. Eric, you have also written a book, a critique of anti-racism and rhetoric and composition, The Semlance of Empowerment.

So in the book, you address some of the detriments of anti-racist rhetoric. Just explain this a little bit further. Why do you see anti-racist rhetoric as detrimental? Because it's not rhetoric in a lot of ways. Rhetoric takes into consideration, audience, rhetorical context, or what is called chiros, the confluence of time, place, subject matter, people. It doesn't do that. Instead of gauging an audience and speaking accordingly, it's more like, I am, fill in the blank, hear me roar, right?

there's no sincere attempt to persuade you know it's an attempt to intimidate it's an attempt to just show people you're here or you're not going anywhere

it's an attempt to acquire a sense of dignity right and you can acquire dignity without ruining the concept of rhetoric and I'm seeing that happening within the field rhetoric is being usurped for

a specific purpose. The teaching of rhetoric has to do with audience consideration. I mean, if you want to boil it down, well, I won't boil it down. I'll use Aristotle's definition. Rhetoric is the ability in any given situation to discern the available means of persuasion, meaning that you're going to say the same message differently to one group

than you are to another group. Anti-racist just say, forget about the group. I'm just going to say what I'm going to say because it's the right thing to say and you know That's not quite what rhetorical education is Well, and here at the the parents unite conference where where we are We've heard a lot about the importance of defining terms So even even saying something like anti-racist people have a lot of different ideas and different definitions of Of what that is how how can we broadly think

think about that term? Maybe how should we think about that term? Yeah, we do need operational definitions, right, agreeing upon certain terms before we even start talking about them. I just said anti-racism without qualifying it, you know, assuming that you knew what I was talking about, your listeners know what I'm talking about, but I probably shouldn't assume that. Anti-racism on the surface is a good thing. Anti-racism through the filter. of what many call critical social justice is not. That form of anti-racism is what you get with Evergreen State College and other small liberal arts colleges that are following suit.

So anti-racism itself, good thing. Anti-racism in contemporary CSJ terms, not so good. So that's how I'm using the term. Excellent. No, thank you for defining that. Excuse me. Eber McS. Kendi, he's the author. of the book, How to Be an Anti-Racist. And Kendi has really been driving much of America's

conversation on that modern definition, like you say, of anti-racism. Have you ever spoken with Kendi before? No. You haven't? No. What would you want to say? If you could sit down and have lunch with him, what would you like to talk with him about? And do you think that you all could actually have a productive conversation? I think he, is, you know, civil enough to have a productive conversation if he finds himself inadvertently in the room with me. I don't think he'd go into the room. But if somehow, by some accident, he ended up in a room and I was there, I think he would be civil. That being said, I would want to talk to him about this department of anti-racism that he seems to be pushing. And it's implications. In order to have

a, he's talking about a branch of government. In order to have that, a branch of government, and justify an anti-racist branch of government, you need racism. You need a reason for it. So if you're going to have a branch of government, that implies

that you want this thing to last for a while, which is to say that you need racism to last for a while. So I would want him to explain his rationale behind, you know, this anti-racist department of government. So in the same way that we have a department of labor, essentially,

Kendi is advocating that we have a department of anti-racism within the government. Yes. Okay. Yes. And I find that very interesting. That is very, very fascinating. Yeah, I think that would be a great question. I would also love to hear a conversation between the two of you talking about that.

So would I. you know, it's difficult to find people, you know, who may call themselves critical social justice activist or, you know, may abide by what people are calling critical race theory in practice, right? It's hard to get them to talk. They refuse to do that. And they mainly refuse to do that because to talk to me is to dignify me, right? They're dignifying my opinion by having the conversation, so they need to squelch the conversation altogether.

I mean, that's a tactic. That's not just individuals being afraid to talk to people who disagree with them. That's a tactic. That's in the playbook. Don't talk to them. Just ignore them. And any kind of critical inquiry from them is defined as a violence. That's what we've got to do.

That's in the playbook. So, I mean, I don't think I'll be able to talk to them anytime soon. I mean, if I do end up talking to them, then that would be a turning point in this fight. Yeah, absolutely. Well, and that may in part answer my next question about a piece that you recently wrote for Newsweek titled Black people who oppose critical race theory are being erased. Yes. Explain this a little bit further. How are those individuals, black individuals who oppose critical race theory being erased in your opinion?

Well, black people who don't abide by the victim narrative or critical social justice ideology or things like that, they're bad for the narrative, right? They're bad for the movement because they kind of weaken the movement a little bit, especially since the movement tends to essentialize black people, right? Nicole Haddon Jones has gone as far as to split black people into politically black and, I guess, non-politically black or something like that. but, you know, even that doesn't hold water enough, right? So they have to get rid of people like me. So they have to erase what I represent and what I'm saying and replace it with something so absurd that they can say, look at this idiot, right?

It's a combination of straw man and ad hominem if you're going to talk about fallacies. The biggest difference between erased and replaced and a straw man is that you're not just misrepresenting a person's words, you're misrepresenting a person's character, right? So you're doing both those things. I have to totally erase who this person is so that what he or she says is not taken seriously. And I saw that happen to Angel Eduardo, who is a part of the quote-unquote anti-woke movement

or, you know, whatever you want to call this. And I didn't like it. Nicole Hannah Jones and some of her followers tried to erase and replace it via Twitter thread. I saw that, got upset, I wrote the article. So what I was trying to do is have people say to themselves when they're reading, is this an erase and replace situation? I should look into this myself, and I should make sure to the best of my ability that this person is being represented fairly.

Absolutely. Well, and when we think about, you know, the culture that young people are being raised in right now, that we do have this moment in history where we're, you know, critical race theory, all of these things are so present, especially in the field of education, where you work. What needs to happen in order to really empower the next generation to be able to think critically,

to understand that they can be victors, that they don't have to be victims. I know that's something you talk about, that need to really embrace that attitude of I Am a Victor. What do we need to do in order to empower young people? Empowerment theory. That's what I've been using. It's a book I'm working on. It's what I and Jason Littlefield will be talking about at the Parenthood United Conference on Saturday. empowerment theory

it incorporates three different components of empowerment the interpersonal the interactional and the behavioral the interpersonal is aligns with emotional intelligence especially the components of self-awareness and self-management so that you can enter into situations

without being defensive right so that you can enter into situations with what Otto Schormer calls it open, heart, mind, and will. The interactional is just that, interacting with other people in healthy ways, right? Understanding the concept of rhetorical context, understanding the detriments of projecting personalities on the people before you get to know them, right? And the interpersonal and interactional align in that if you are individually

sound, you know, socially aware, self-aware, self-managing, and things like that, you're better able to not project under other people and receive them as they are. The behavioral component, the third one, is basically the ability to work with others to get things done, you know, to do some generative work, some productive work, right, to make the world a better place, to improve. In fact, improvement science is a concept that goes well with the behavioral component of empowerment. You need all three of those to be truly empowered according to the theory. So what true empowerment does is also it brings back the original conception of social emotional learning. Social emotional learning, or SEL, has gone woke.

as of December 2020, officially, Castle, which is an organization that is, you know, dedicated to SEL, has put on their website that, well, go see it yourself, but the point is, you know, it's everything I just said insofar

as it supports critical social justice ideas, right? We just heard at Parents United the use of mindfulness to soften kids' minds so that they can be indoctrinated. That's bad SEL. Good SEL is softened the mind so that you can receive people as they are and not as projections of some evil, you know, a concept that you have, right? So that got twisted. And empowerment theory is a way we can untwist that.

And if I can, you know, Jason and I can get, more people aware of that, then that'll be a victory. Thank you so much for sharing that. How can our listeners follow your work, get your book, keep up with your research? Well, I'm on Twitter at Redders of York. There is also free black thought, free blackthought.com, that's simple. And I don't know, I guess there's Google. I'm all over the place, you know.

It's a lot on Google. I can attest to Googling you and a lot coming up. Yes, yes, yes. I, um, okay, fine, I've Googled myself. We're all guilty in that. Just to see what, you know, popping up and things like that. I'm like, for what it's worth, the last time I did it was like two months ago. But even then, I'm scrolling.

I'm like, wow, I'm busy. You aren't busy. So, I mean, all you got to do is Google Eric Smith. Make sure you spell the Eric right, though. It's E.R. EC. Great. Eric, thank you so much to your time. We really appreciate you joining the show today.

Thanks for having. And that'll do it for today's episode. Thanks for listening to The Daily Signal Podcast. You can find the Daily Signal podcast on Google Play, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and IHeart Radio. Please be sure to leave us a review and a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts and encourage others to subscribe. Thanks again for listening and we'll see you all tomorrow. The Daily Signal podcast is brought to you by more than half a million members of the Heritage Foundation. It is executive produced by Virginia Allen and Kate Trinko.

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