Dr Delgado's anti-White scholarship

Critical Race Theory has been hugely influential in American education. Few realise its potential for causing anti-White violence.

Written by James Weitz.

Richard Delgado is a Mexican-American legal scholar who co-founded critical race theory (CRT) in the 1970s as a legal-activist framework for achieving a cultural Marxist transformation of Western civilization. He and other CRT scholars cultivated an obsessive focus on racial grievances in order to reevaluate “the foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law”. In his highly influential career, he has become the eighth most cited legal scholar in US history and has authored 180 journal articles and dozens of books.

This essay gives a broad overview of the irrational anti-White ideas from Delgado’s book and related writings – which continue to gain currency despite their deceptive, contradictory and inept argumentation.

On p. 156 of his book Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, which is described as a “primer for non-lawyers,” he envisions an inevitable “power shift” in the United States:

The white establishment may resist an orderly progression towards sharing power, particularly in connection with upper-level and technical jobs, police agencies, and government. As happened in South Africa, the change may be convulsive and cataclysmic. If so, critical theorists and activists will need to provide criminal defense for resistance movements and activists and to articulate theories and strategies for that resistance.

This vaguely worded passage envisions White people resisting “an orderly progression towards sharing power”. Delgado cannot but know that for more than 50 years White people have been participating in an orderly sharing of power through racial preference programs that flout the plain meaning of the constitution.

What, then, would qualify as White resistance to this unlawful but orderly sharing of power? Perhaps a series of Supreme Court rulings banning racial preference programs? State laws banning DEI programs in public universities? Followed by whatever measures are required to safeguard these newfound freedoms? This would seem to be Delgado’s intended meaning. After all, he does not say that there would be anything criminal about the White resistance, reserving that term only for his own side.

Indeed, a close reading of the passage reveals that it is advocating two things: one, that CRT activists come up with strategies of unlawful counter-resistance; and two, that lawyers create legal theories and strategies to defend activists who carry out the resulting crimes. It goes without saying that all defendants are constitutionally entitled to legal representation. But when Delgado’s impressionable young readership in high schools, colleges and law schools see a scholar of his stature exhorting them to plan and commit crimes, it is foreseeable that they will indeed be emboldened to engage in criminal activism. As I explained here, when the revolution comes, the crime that Delgado himself will have committed by encouraging others to commit crimes in response to lawful White resistance to a decades-long unconstitutional power grab is called aiding and abetting.

But what sorts of crimes does he have mind? Would they include violence, for example? Delgado is holding this close to his chest – though the reference to South Africa, where CRT-inspired violence against White Boer farmers has been in the sixth stage of genocide since at least 2021, might be a hint. (In the land of Shaka Zulu, Genocide Watch blames the rampant lawlessness in the country on British colonial rule.)

To help understand what Delgado is thinking, we can look for clues elsewhere in his writing. On p. 27, he writes, “Racism is embedded in our thought processes and social structures and institutions of society. So only aggressive color conscious efforts to change the way things are, will do much to ameliorate misery.” Using this kind of language when every conceivable nonviolent means (including, again, flat-out unconstitutional anti-White discrimination) has already been attempted and failed to produce Delgado’s desired “power shift” indicates that Delgado probably has force in mind. And nowhere in his book does he say otherwise.

Most tellingly, CRT’s potential for causing anti-White violence can be found in Delgado’s earlier work (as well as that of other CRT co-founders like Harvard professor Derrick Bell), which shows that he has been contemplating this kind of crime for decades, specifically in "counterstories” published in prestigious law review journals.

Counterstories, a major element of CRT, are either fictional or nonfictional “deep dives” into a minority writer’s own thinking and/or background, which reveal some purported societal inequity that the biased dominant White narrative supposedly overlooks. But often enough, they avoid intellectually rigorous analysis that would not to support the author’s biases and preconceptions. In one of Delgado’s counterstories, Rodrigo’s Third Chronicle, Rodrigo, a fictional mixed-race Black-Italian-American law student who Delgado refers to as his “alter-ego”, has recently gotten back from a trip to his native Italy and is complaining to Delgado that civil rights laws are not working because Whites think of Blacks as “beyond love”. Delgado, as a man of color, sympathetically agrees, and Rodrigo proposes a frighteningly aggressive solution:

Rodrigo: “It’s easier to think of what the new form of coercion would be … It must come from us, not from them, at least initially. I think it would be some form of what your society calls terrorism or sabotage.” … “Surely the most perceptive among your White friends know that continued neglect can only cause more violence, more frustration, more uprisings like those in New York and Los Angeles.”

Delgado: “A few of us have dared to breach that suggestion. But unlike you we have tenure. …”

Giving consideration to such ideas and then citing them 30 years later is dangerous and irresponsible. Anti-white violence is a plausible result of Delgado’s advocacy of crime paired with his obsessive and irrational focus on White racism as a cause of unequal racial outcomes. And he flat-out rejects the obvious possibility that unequal racial outcomes substantially result from biological differences, stubbornly insisting on, “the continued deconstruction of race, so that biological theories of inferiority and hierarchy cannot ever rise again”. This of course a one-sided and oversimplified framing of the issue, which encourages his readers to ignore legitimate concerns about discrimination against Whites and other groups.

However, true to fashion, Delgado contradicts himself by presenting a classroom exercise in the very last paragraph of the book that poses the same question for student consideration: “Will the Human Genome Project show that the eugenicists and race-IQ researchers were at least partly right, and that real, nontrivial differences do mark the races?” Evidently, it is okay to discuss this idea in high schools and universities without being cancelled, as long as the Left holds a monopoly on the discussion. Elsewhere in Delgado’s fever dreams, as in his 1996 book The Coming Race War?, he expresses paranoid suspicions that Whites will try to end racial preference programs to deliberately provoke people of color to rise up, which will give Whites a pretext to set the headbangers on them and then take control of the country.

One of the most contentious points in the CRT debate concerns whether or not its extremist ideas are being taught in K-12 schools. On p. 6, Delgado observes that “critical race ideas in K-12 schools have come under sharp attack.” Without any clarification, this is an odd assertion for a writer who, as we shall see, later takes the inconsistent position that CRT is not taught in K-12 schools. But Delgado is using the word “ideas” here, not “theory”, without explaining why. (The phrase “critical race ideas” only appears three times in the book and all on the same page.)

Jumping ahead to pp. 104–105, Delgado writes, “Readers of this book … and anyone who has attended a K-12 school in recent years [know] that critical race theory is a law school or graduate-level class hardly ever taught in the early years.” In a limited sense, there is no inconsistency in this denial, as now he is using “theory” instead of “ideas”. 

Yet there are many academic subjects like mathematics whose basic foundations are taught in the K-12 years, and whose more advanced concepts are reserved for post-secondary education. Scholars and teachers normally feel no need to use deception to hide their curriculum development plans—except when obfuscating their true aims, i.e., radical ideological brainwashing. Regardless, in a sloppy admission on pp. 68-69, Delgado gives the game away. Right in the middle of a discussion of Black and Latino nationalism within the CRT movement, he explicitly states that his book was used in a K-12 curriculum.

At the high school level, a Latino studies program in at least one district in Tucson, Arizona drew the ire of state officials. … [S]chool officials removed a number of the program’s texts, which included … Paolo Freire’s The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and the very book you are reading, from the shelves of the classrooms, in front of crying students. … After a long struggle, the students and their backers prevailed. Gonzalez v. Douglas, 269 F. Supp. 3d 948 (D. Ariz., 2019).

After all, who can resist a good boast?¹

On p. 21, we find Delgado preaching the idea that White men rarely act out of any sense of good will: “Civil rights gains for communities of color coincide with the dictates of White self-interest. Little happens out of altruism alone.” While it has not always been smooth sailing, the fact that much of the White establishment has for generations willingly shared power is hardly mentioned. Ignoring the goodwill of White people denies an essential aspect of their humanity and raises the suspicion that they are malevolent self-dealers.

After noting on pp. 104–105 that several state legislatures have, “banned teaching that the United States is an inherently racist country [and] that White people enjoy privileged positions…” Delgado claims that, “readers of this book will realize that CRT does not teach these things.” This is a bizarre, almost delusional statement: One of CRT’s core ideas is that “whiteness” has been socially constructed to give privileges to White people. Indeed, the word ‘privilege’ appears 35 times in the book, and on p. 90, Delgado mentions a source that claims there are 46 ways White privilege benefits White people. (But even this he cannot get right, as the writer whom he cites, Peggy McIntosh, lists 50.) Delgado gives several examples, and then, just in case 46 wasn’t enough, he suggests one more that McIntosh missed: the idea that White people are opposed to racial preference programs is itself a form of White privilege because:

Part of the argument against [affirmative action] rests on an implicit assumption of innocence on the part of the white person being displaced by [affirmative action]. The narrative behind this assumption characterizes whites as innocent … and Black people as—what? Presumably the opposite of innocent, namely guilty … Many critical race theorists and social scientists hold that racism is pervasive, systemic, and deeply ingrained … If we take this perspective, then no white member of society seems quite so innocent.

Although Delgado denies advocating the idea, what exactly is the difference between collective White generational guilt and his imagined “pervasive, systemic, and deeply ingrained” racism that justifies racial preference programs in perpetuity? How will generational guilt factor into CRT’s “aggressive” transformation of societies?

Moving on to CRT’s deconstruction and reconceptualization of rights, Delgado writes on p. 29:

Crits are suspicious of another liberal mainstay, namely, rights. Particularly some of the older more radical CRT scholars with roots in racial realism and economic history believe that moral and legal rights are apt to do the right holder much less good than we’d like to think… Think of how our system applauds affording everybody equality of opportunity, but resists programs that ensure equality of results, such as affirmative action at an elite college or university or efforts to equalize public school funding among districts in a region.

Here he implies that equality of outcome is a “right” and that policies which deny the civil rights of White people by discriminating against them (as well as, presumably, Jews and “White-adjacent” Asians) are the appropriate tools to secure this right. Delgado continues:

Moreover, rights are almost always cut back when they conflict with the interests of the powerful. For example, hate speech which targets mainly minorities, gays, lesbians, and other outsiders, receives legal protection, while speech that offends the interests of empowered groups find a ready exception in First Amendment law. Think of, for example, speech that offends a judge or other authority figure, that defames a wealthy and well-regarded person, that divulges a government secret, or that deceptively advertises products, thus cheating a large class of middle-income consumers. Think of a speech that violates the copyright of a powerful publishing house, or famous author.

There are of course laws against false advertising. And some specific results of these arguments would disempower ordinary citizens, for instance, by allowing disorderly court proceedings to interfere with dispassionate justice for victims of crime. Most shocking of all, Delgado appears to fundamentally misunderstand the past development of defamation law, which the Supreme Court tweaked 60 years ago in a series of rulings beginning with New York Times v. Sullivan. These tweaks were designed to roll back protections for relatively powerful, and often wealthy and well-regarded, public figures, while maintaining strong protections for private citizens. At this point, one has to wonder whether CRT is born of racial envy for the wealthy, safe and well-governed societies that White people tend to create.

Returning to Rodrigo’s Third Chronicle again, Rodrigo floats the idea to Delgado of getting White people to give millions of dollars to fund social programs for the benefit of welfare mothers “and teenage hoodlums.” Rodrigo explains how Whites will earn a secret benefit, not to be revealed to them right away, from loving people of color.

Rodrigo: “They will learn it when they have relaxed the barriers, when they have decided, as a group, that Blacks and Mexicans and gays and lesbian are no longer Beyond Love.”

Delgado: “So, by saying ‘I love you’, Whites will receive this benefit, learn this secret? …”

Rodrigo: “Yes, something like that. And by it I mean learning to love those who are least like you, those who frighten and put you off. I mean the sixteen-year-old Black youths in jogging suits and gang paraphernalia, walking in groups of four and looking mean. I mean loving the unlovable, the ones you now think of as the enemy…”

Rodrigo explains that once Whites have “relaxed the barriers” for these people, and “brought them fully inside” as “equal members of society”, then Whites will learn the secret, which is that they have been “redeemed”. Since Delgado wrote these words in 1993, trillions have been invested in social programs and yet little redemptive love has been shown to Whites. In fact, they are currently 9.2 times more likely to be violently attacked by a Black person than a Black person is to be attacked by a White one.

On p. 51, Delgado quotes from another one of his roll-your-own counterstories—Rodrigo’s Eighth Chronicle:

White-collar and corporate/industrial crime—perpetrated mostly by whites—causes more personal injury, death, and property loss than does all the street crime combined … this may be so because whites suffer deprived childhoods.”

There is, of course, no mention of the wealth that corporate business creates. The counterstory goes on to contrast Italian families with American ones, and proposes the following hypothesis for causes of “crimes of stealth and theft”:

Many American families—upper class, white ones I mean—are also intensely private. Every child has his or her own bedroom. Children are urged to cover up. There is little nudity... I have a suspicion that this encourages a spirit in which crimes of silence, of secrecy, can flourish… Little wonder that children raised in such a warped atmosphere wind up committing one of the highest rates of white-collar crime in the world.

I can honestly say this never would have occurred to me, having worn clothes as a child myself.²

Finally, in Rodrigo’s Reappraisal, Delgado and Rodrigo discuss Trump’s order outlawing critical race theory and diversity training for federal agencies. Delgado suggests reforming legal caselaw databases that implicitly support capitalism by promoting a “desire based” theory of legal categorization instead of one based on “thought and cognition.” The idea is radically subjective. And it ignores the legitimate concerns that Whites, or anyone of goodwill, might have about the dangerous currents that Delgado and other academics have allowed to take root within his field – which are what led to Trump’s ban in the first place.

Since the 2016 election, various pundits have observed that we are caught in a whirlwind of escalating ideological rhetoric from both sides, increasing the potential for political violence. This is probably true. But the Left could help defuse tensions if it came to terms with the fact that for decades it has been mainstreaming deceitful academic scholarship by extremists like Delgado (who would have been completely sidelined if they had been expressing corresponding right-wing ideas), and that the resulting marginalization of middle-class White people plays a large role in today’s polarization.

James Weitz is a writer with a JD. He is author of The Pandemic Letters, interviews with foreigners trapped abroad during the pandemic. You can reach him by email: James.Weitz@proton.me

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1. A question for readers: would any educator(s) like to team with some legal nonprofit to write a K-12 White studies textbook highlighting themes sympathetic to a healthy and positive White identity, and then use the Gonzalez precedent to force schools in Tucson and elsewhere to either adopt it as an elective course, or drop existing ethnic studies programs? There is certainly no shortage of material. If a court refused to allow a White studies course to be taught in public schools, while ethnic studies courses are taught, this might create a division that would require a ruling from a higher court to resolve. The argument Delgado makes in defense of the Tucson ethnic studies program is that it increases Hispanic high school students’ self-esteem, graduation rates and college attendance. If this is true, it is difficult to imagine any legal argument could effectively prevent the introduction of a course that could do the same for demoralized White students.

2. As a countermeasure, why not pick up a pen and participate in the creation of a new genre by submitting an entry to this “counterrevolution story” competition? Counterrevolution stories are the Right’s answer to counterstories. They can be reflective standalone narratives or dialogues, or even satirical send-ups of CRT navel-gazing. (In general, the world of art and literature is none-too-friendly towards anti-woke themes in any genre. Here is a list of online journals that may be exceptions.)