Tom Cotton’s slimy attack on a ‘critical race theory’ professor is full of holes

Tom Cotton’s slimy attack on a ‘critical race theory’ professor is full of holes

Opinion by 

Greg Sargent

Columnist

July 8, 2021|Updated today at 6:34 p.m. EDT

Sen. Tom Cotton is calling for the firing of a U.S. Air Force Academy professor after she admitted to discussing critical race theory with cadets. But even a cursory look at the Arkansas Republican’s slimy argument shows how full of holes it really is.

This episode sheds light on a larger absurdity about this whole debate. Republicans keep telling us the mere discussion of such topics risks weakening our country: If people are told the military is a “racist” institution, they won’t join, or they’ll be so overcome with shame about their country that they won’t defend it.

This is often simply asserted as fact, but it’s plainly absurd on its face, and Cotton’s broadside provides a particularly illuminating example.

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Cotton and other Republicans are unloading over this op-ed piece in The Post by Lynne Chandler García, an associate professor of political science at the Air Force Academy.

In it, García says she teaches critical race theory as an “academic framework” to analyze the fact that the founding and its documents harbored a “duality” between ideals of equality and realities of inequality and slavery. She also uses it to better understand “structural racism” that “has been endemic in American society,” and employs it for “deconstructing oppressive beliefs.”

This is all anodyne stuff. The idea that the founding harbored that “duality” doesn’t seem controversial. The op-ed does not describe the United States as fundamentally irredeemable. It treats prejudice as something that can be overcome and institutions as subject to improvement, through analysis and understanding.

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All this is of a piece with critical race theory’s basic idea that we need to better grasp how racial disparities are perpetuated in law and institutional structures. In truth, García’s expression of this is mild, even boilerplate-like.

Yet Cotton sees it as a firing offense. Cotton said this:

We should not be teaching and indoctrinating our cadets to believe that our military is a fundamentally racist institution. Who exactly is going to want to raise their hand and take an oath to defend our Constitution if you believe what Professor Garcia is teaching about it?

Similarly, Rep. Mark Green (R-Tenn.) also called for García’s firing, insisting that if we “denigrate the very principles” of the founding, it will make servicemembers “ashamed of their country.”

This is a strange argument. One assumes most people defending the Constitution today do so in the full understanding that it had to be amended a bunch of times to improve on some of its original defects, a capacity for rebirth and renewal that they see as a positive, one that makes it all the more worth defending.

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Do they really need to be shielded from any discussion of those original defects?

Indeed, García explicitly quotes Thurgood Marshall referring to both the Constitution’s “inherent defects” and its “promising evolution.” That argument risks inspiring shame? Really?

What’s more, García in no way says the military is a fundamentally racist institution. She cites the original segregation of the armed forces and the fact that George Washington may have initially opposed recruiting Black soldiers, and says:

Racism was ingrained in the system from the beginning, and the military still struggles with these issues. As a recent inspector general’s report on disparities in the Air Force and Space Force pointed out, Black service members lag behind their White peers in promotion rates but are overrepresented in disciplinary actions. Further, a recent Defense Department report documented the threat of white supremacy within the ranks.

In other words, racism was originally “ingrained.” These days there are still lingering racial disparities, which we know about because of internal examinations undertaken by the military itself. By Cotton’s standards, none of this self-examination should be discussed aloud, because it risks overcoming cadets with shame from which they’ll never recover.

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What makes this so ridiculous is that generally speaking, such self-scrutiny is something you want institutions to undertake. Why would this sort of effort at self-improvement discourage people from joining? The opposite is much more likely true.

Indeed, García herself notes that the ultimate desegregation of the armed forces was something to celebrate — again, pointing to a dramatic historical moment of institutional improvement. Talking about this will make people less inclined to serve in that institution?

Cotton also says this proves Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin lied when he declared the Defense Department doesn’t teach critical race theory. But the department points out that García’s raising of these topics doesn’t mean there’s a formal department policy of teaching critical race theory, which there isn’t.

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Yes, there are serious excesses associated with critical race theory. But while its critics pretend otherwise, its academic defenders do call out these excesses.

For instance, see Jeffrey Sachs on the pedagogic excesses it can produce in classrooms. And as Jason Stanley has noted, it’s a problem that it has been used to produce “diversity” workshops that communicate to participants that “their race is the single most important and determinative thing about them.”

But come on, this latest controversy is an utter joke. Cotton can’t possibly believe our cadets are such snowflakes that this op-ed will cause them and their morale to melt into puddles of shame. Can he?