Conservatives Escalate Attacks On CNN’s Soledad O’Brien Over Critical Race Theory

Hell hath no fury like a conservative pwned, or something like that. On the heels of her tough interview with Breitbart.com Editor-in-Chief Joel Pollak, the Big sites published a furious series of posts accusing Soledad O’Brien of everything from mourning the loss of a historic black figure to using Wikipedia. On Monday, O’Brien featured a guest who debunked Pollak’s twisted vision of Critical Race Theory, and at the end of the segment, jokingly asked for the “crazy tweets” on the subject to stop. That request unleashed a blizzard of conservative Twitter attacks on O’Brien, accusing her of “lying” or worse.

I’m sure there’s a fascinating social media angle here, one that I’ll leave to others. Leveraging Twitter to flatten the divide between “ordinary people” and the “elites” is one of the platform’s key selling points, but it’s a tricky business. At a certain point, depending on the content of such a barrage, you can easily cross over from amplifying a legitimate message to simply becoming so much noise, or even to something akin to cyber-bullying. We get it, conservatives. You’re sure showing her, but good!

Instead, I prefer to settle this argument for good and all, and get people to stop tweeting me about it. (That’s a joke; I have a perfectly good “block” button.) But seriously, there’s only so much time anyone can be expected to devote to debunking a narrow set of smears, the object of which is to draw the media into amplifying other smears. It ends here.

To catch you up, the Breitbart.com family of sites tried to discredit President Obama by showing a “bombshell” video of then-Harvard Law Review President Barack Obama introducing a professor at a 1991 pro-diversity protest, a video that the Bigs say was “covered up” by the media in 2008, despite the fact that it was available online, and accumulated over a million hits on YouTube before Election Day. Along the way, they smeared the late Professor Derrick Bell, who was the first black tenured professor at Harvard Law School, as a radical racist whose Critical Race Theory held that “the civil rights movement was a sham and that white supremacy is the order and it must be overthrown.”

Enter Soledad O’Brien, who had the nerve to point and laugh at their “bombshell,” and to challenge Pollak’s mischaracterization of Prof. Bell’s theory, prompting an all-out blog assault. On Monday, O’Brien interviewed Professor Dorothy Brown, author of Critical Race Theory: Cases, Materials and Problems, to explain Critical Race Theory, and to specifically respond to Pollak’s charge. Now, O’Brien and Brown stand accused of “lying.”

At issue is the use of the phrase “white supremacy” in conjunction with CRT. Pollak’s description carries the strong implication that Prof. Bell thought that America is guided by white supremacist ideology, and that he sought to overthrow it. That’s not just my interpretation of what he said, it’s conservative website The Blaze‘s, too. If Pollak meant something else, he could have used less-loaded phrases, but he and the proponents of this smear know exactly what they’re doing, and who their audience is. Turning Prof. Bell into a radical who sees Klansmen holding the levers of power in America, who wants to “overthrow” that system is simply an end to the means of launching a (failed) attack on President Obama.

When asked to respond to that, here’s what Ms. Brown said:

It’s nothing about white supremacy. When I hear ‘white supremacy’ I think of the Ku Klux Klan. Critical Race Theory is the opposite of that. So honestly, I have no idea what he was talking about.

Conservatives jumped on part of her answer, “It’s nothing about white supremacy,” to call her a liar. The proof? That she once used the words “White supremacy” when describing Critical Race Theory:

Although CRT does not employ a single methodology, it seeks to highlight the ways in which the law is not neutral and objective, but designed to support White supremacy and the subordination of people of color.

A similar description was excised from, and later added back into, the Wikipedia entry for CRT in a Battle Royale to define the theory. The problem is that “white supremacy” in this context isn’t the same as ideological “white supremacy.” It is a description of a series of legal outcomes, and of outcomes that the theory predicts. Simply put, it’s like the difference between a fire hose and a steady rain. It is a distinction that Brown clearly drew in the very next sentence. Not a “lie,” but a valid response to a very specific smear. Given more than a single cable news segment, perhaps Ms. Brown could have delved deeper into the theory that was a significant part of Prof. Bell’s life’s work, but that wasn’t in the cards.

It’s also true that Soledad O’Brien and Prof. Brown could have described CRT in any number of ways, and discussed its conclusions, but again, it was a cable news segment, and it was a response to a narrow accusation. Dissecting the nuance between “White Supremacy” and “White supremacy” would have been a tall order.

In addition to attacking O’Brien, the Bigs also accused Mediaite of “Spinning For Soledad O’Brien,” (for the record, I am just one of many voices on this site; there is no “Mediaite position” on CRT, Prof. Bell, or Soledad O’Brien, although I think we all pretty much like her) and in doing so, employed the time-honored practice of arguing with shit that I did not say:(emphasis mine)

Christopher attempts the same failed attack O’Brien (and her guest) used against Joel Pollak last week: strip Derrick Bell’s Critical Race Theory of all specifics, and then claim there was nothing objectionable or “racialist” about it.

Let’s excuse the loaded term “racialist” for the moment; nothing I’ve written has been under the premise that Prof. Bell’s theory wasn’t “objectionable,” or that it didn’t posit an inherent pro-white bias in our legal system. Quite to the contrary, I’m sure CRT is objectionable to lots of people, from the white people who don’t want to hear it, to the minorities who feel its apparent effects. It is controversial, especially to white people who don’t want to look at Prof. Bell’s central belief, that black people can only make progress in America if their interests align with white peoples’, and try to refute it.

But I defy the conservative outrage machine to identify one theory about race that isn’t controversial. Furthermore, I’d like to hear an example of any academic theory that isn’t controversial. Maybe Kittens Are Cute Theory, but not much else. What Professor Bell’s theory is not is “radical,” and the case that his posthumous critics have failed to make is that he and his theory were “racist.”

Is there anyone out there arguing that black people have gotten a fair shake in this country? There may be controversy about the degree, but most people (including libertarian-leaning conservatives) acknowledge that our criminal justice system is stacked against black people, most glaringly with regard to drug sentencing and the death penalty. What causes this, and what to do about it, is the arena in which CRT competes. Such an exploration could only be considered “radical” by someone invested in maintaining the status quo, or indifferent to it.

In fact, in all the criticism I’ve read of CRT, I’ve seen adjectives like “dangerous” and “divisive” (that one is really funny; it’s like accusing a jigsaw puzzle of being a saw), but I have only seen one person who said he disagreed with it. That was Professor Charles Ogletree, who was a friend and colleague of Prof. Bell’s, and was President Obama’s law professor.

The frustrating thing is that this is all beside the point. I don’t believe, for a second, that the people originating this smear are dumb and sheltered enough to believe it. This is all an attempt to redeem their failed attack on President Obama, and the sick fact is that the late Prof. Bell is just so much collateral to them.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.