“Hey, this guy’s a Commie!” In the Seinfeld episode “The Race,” a child shouts the accusation at Cosmo Kramer, who has been working as a shopping mall Santa. “Commie, Commie! Traitor to our country!” All because Kramer tells the child not to buy toys manufactured in child sweatshops—that’s all it takes for the boy to label him “a Commie.”
During the Cold War, it didn’t take much.
You might be called a “Commie” if you supported the unionization of migrant farmworkers, or if you protested against the US invasion of Vietnam. Christian groups like the Quakers were labeled Communists and Marxists, despite their glaring theism. Anyone who questioned the status quo might be lumped into this category: anarchists, folk singers, feminists, and civil rights activists. Well into the 21st century, a relative of mine swore that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had been a closet Communist all along.
Of course, Communism is a real thing: a socioeconomic theory developed by Marx and Engels. Communists are real, too, and very easy to identify. If someone is a member of a Communist party, they’re a Communist. It’s just that simple. Throughout the Cold War, however, right-wingers set about redefining the term.
They expanded it far beyond its dictionary definition, using it as a nebulous catch-all for anyone who questioned the hegemony of power. It became a slur for any and all dissidents, a way to lump them together as an increasingly nebulous bogeyman, an immaterial threat far larger than the Soviet Union and its allies. Through an Orwellian reconfiguration of the English language, the label could be slapped on anyone, no matter how contrary their religious or political beliefs were to actual Marxism.
Fast forward to our present age, and not much has changed. The American right has a new blanket insult these days: the term “critical race theory.”
Much like Communism, critical race theory has a concrete, real-world definition. Developed at Harvard Law School in the 1970s by Derrick Bell and other legal scholars, it is a critical examination of how race and the law intersect. Let us compare that definition of CRT to the way that many conservatives describe it.
Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis accused CRT of “teaching kids to hate their country and to hate each other.” Arkansas legislators claimed that it promotes “division between, resentment of, or social justice for” racial groups. New Hampshire Republican Keith Ammon blamed it for teaching that “‘one race is inherently superior to another race or sex’… only exacerbat[ing] our differences.”
Televangelist Pat Robertson gave his own hyperbolic description of CRT’s tenets: “That the people of color have been oppressed by the white people, and that white people begin to be racist by the time they’re 2 or 3 months old, and that therefore the people of color have to rise up and overtake their oppressors.”
The conservative activist behind the outrage, Christopher Rufo, understood the utility of demonizing a particular term. “‘Critical race theory’ is the perfect villain,” he wrote. Just as dissenting voices were labeled “Communist” during the Cold War, modern-day conservatives use “CRT” as a slur for any discussion of racial injustice whatsoever.
And therein lies the strategy: it’s an easy way to shut down conversations on race. As George Orwell wrote of Newspeak in his addendum to “1984”: “The intention was to make speech, and especially speech on any subject not ideologically neutral, as nearly as possible independent of consciousness.” The mere mention of the term elicits a visceral, knee-jerk reaction, bypassing rational thought and silencing debate.
History seems to have come full circle, in fact, with increasing numbers of right-wingers invoking the “Communist threat” once again. The word has been recently used to smear various progressive causes, from migrants’ rights to the Black Lives Matter movement and antifascist protesters. Pat Robertson overtly conflated the two bogeymen: “This is the way the Communists take over; they try to destroy the children. It is a monstrous evil. And you hear, ‘Oh, critical race theory, that’s OK.’ No, it’s not.”
Such anachronistic paranoia isn’t even limited to the United States. Recently, the far-right Vox party of Spain met with Mexico’s conservative PAN party, with the aim of “stopping the spread of Communism in Latin America.” By “Communism,” they are referring to the administration of Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a market-friendly moderate. Not exactly a Marxist firebrand.
For these folks, it doesn’t matter that the Cold War has been over for 32 years, that the Soviet Union no longer exists and true Communism is currently limited to four small, impoverished nations. (China excluded.) When a word is expanded into a nebulous bogeyman, it becomes larger than life, taking on mythological dimensions. It no longer has any concrete meaning, beyond “anyone who challenges the status quo.”
Why does all this matter? Because they will keep on doing it. The current “CRT” outrage sheds light on the right’s tendency to rehash jargon and reuse scare tactics. (Let us recall that many of today’s arguments against LGBTQ marriage equality are simply recycled arguments against interracial marriage.) While the name of the perceived “enemy” may change, the practice remains constant: redefining a word beyond its true and specific meaning.
We must call them out on such mental gymnastics, and stand in defense of linguistic clarity. We must hold back the encroaching Newspeak that, as Orwell described, had the aim of making alternate forms of thought impossible. “a heretical thought ... should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words.” That would be a dark day indeed: a society rendered incapable of even thinking about injustice.
David J. Schmidt is an author, podcaster, multilingual translator and homebrewer who splits his time between Mexico City and San Diego, Calif. He is co-host of the podcast To Russia with Love. See holyghoststories.com and Twitter @SchmidtTales
From The Progressive Populist, October 1, 2021
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