That is too good of a definition for conservative whites to handle. It just occurred to me that part of critical race theory, the main part, are facts and not theory at all. Reading the actual laws passed by white legislatures under the Autocratic King during British colonialism reveals the King was evil, worse than Hitler. I know that’s a charge comparison and you might be ready to dismiss it, but give me a second to explain.
The King has to approve all laws made by legislature or governors (to this day). So if the ultimate authority rest with the King to accept or reject a law, then such a law like the Negro Act of 1740, makes the King look evil. It states that a white man can whip or kill his negro slaves if they look “rebellious.” That law is a fact, it was written and passed, not a theory. It gives the power of the state—in this case South Carolina—to kill. Normally only the government retains this power, but in this case the King officially approved the certain whites and their white employees could kill black enslaved people they owned based on their judgement of a person’s action. The state officially under law gave the power of judge, jury and executioner to the white man to kill, on the spot, with no appeal process. The ultimate power a government has, to take man’s or woman’s life, was now embedded within white slave owners and their white employees, by the King’s authority and approval. He essentially gave them a “license to kill.” It’s kind of like James Bond, but not to be cool and sexy but murderous and depraved (at least from the point of view of black enslaved people, the white may have felt emboldened and cool).
Hitler never gave power to murder Jews that were enslaved by the state in labor camps to town people or the average German and retained that right to his party soldiers. It allowed him to turn off the violence directly Iike a light switch. Which is how the Kristalnacht (the night of broken glass) happened in November 9-10, 1938. He carefully built up the power of the state to conduct violence on his command. The King, however, created a worse reign of terror under the Negro Act in South Carolina, allowing the power invested in that law to kill not be unleashed suddenly like on that night in 1938. In a sense, (this is when I cross over into my theory part), it makes it look like, from the white male owner perspective, that the negro who looked rebellious “deserved” the punishment for whipping, or even death, because he or she acted rebellious, not obeying commands. The white man who whipped or killed felt empowered, rightly so under the law, but his judgement of “rebellious” or “uppity” was based on the action of the negro.
But wait, it gets worse. America created a democracy on July 4th, and the British capitulated in 1783. By then several states had adopted the principles of democracy explicitly in their state constitutions, like Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Vermont. But not so South Carolina. It keep it’s laws, which had spread to neighboring slave states, and that law was not cancelled until 1865 when they were defeated. But wait again, as South
Carolina was a hold out and did not agree to install the principles of the US Constitution in a new constitution like the other states agreed to do like Texas and Alabama. They in effect would not surrender to the principles of democracy and the laws that extend from those principles. Congress forced them (the white supremacists, not the freed black Americans now forming politically under the Republican Party) to and pass a constitution for them.
But then it got worse The white conservatives started murdering and cheating in elections, by their own admission, to overthrow democracy and they succeeded. They started passing laws, the same laws constructed under British imperialism that they kept until 1865. These new laws, same as the old ones, prevent black Americans from inter racial marriages, prevented their freedom of movement and assembly, prevented education and literacy, prevented forming unions to negotiate fair wages. In 1895 the Governor, Ben Tillman, assembled the white conservatives to pass a new state constitution “with the sole intent” he stated of disenfranchising the negro voters. It passed! He was joyous as overthrowing the key action of democracy and over a hundred thousand black American voters from the registration rolls, who had been on the rolls just threatening white supremacist single Party rule. Senator Tillman was joyous and bragged how his political party had been the only one winning since the 1880s, but now it was safe and could win (and did win) until 1964, allowing for a reign of white supremacy not seen since before the Civil War. That was law and the law was on his side.
You see whites don’t want the law to be studied. The facts of the law not only show a greater legal depravity than Hitler even allowed, but then showed how whites in states like South Carolina passed a new constitution to explicitly by their own admission disenfranchise black Americans, thus overthrowing the core act of democracy, because those white leaders and legislatures felt emboldened from new segregationist laws the passed restricting the rights of black American passed by their state legislatures. Their success ushered in decades of anti-democracy single party rule lasting until May 1964. That doesn’t make white conservatives in South Carolina look bad, but it makes all white ‘leaders’ look until 1964 look bad. They just stood around and watched it happen—the “it” being the overthrowing of American democracy and the inalienable civil rights of black Americans to participated in it. The white outside the southeast just stood by and watched law and law get passed, mounting to state constitutions that overthrew democracy through deliberately state intent to strip black Americans with the ability to vote.
And we can’t brag about being the world’s leading democracy when we have a state like South Carolina entrenched in it, where the whites deliberately overthrew it decade by decade after the Civil War to create a one party autocracy. That just looks like at the heart of American Democracy is the opposite on the map of our country, a cold black stone of a state consolidating autocracy under the illusion of freedom.