Vice President-elect JD Vance raised eyebrows recently by hosting Daniel Penny at the Army-Navy football game. Penny, a White man and former Marine, was acquitted this month for fatally restraining Jordan Neely, a Black man who threatened the lives of passengers on a New York subway. Social media dubbed the killing “George Floyd 2.0.” and protests erupted after Penny’s acquittal, but public reaction pales in comparison to the tidal wave of outrage sparked by Floyd’s death in 2020. Back then, the nation was engulfed in mass protests, rallies to defund the police, and the high-profile prosecution of Derek Chauvin. In my hometown of Portland, Oregon, months of rioting left the city permanently altered.
So what gives? The death of one unarmed Black man ignites a revolution, while the death of another sparks only a temporary outcry, and just a few years later at that. Has the nation lost its fervor for racial justice? To the contrary. I think Americans have finally wised up, leaving behind their short-lived obsession with Critical Race Theory (CRT) in favor of colorblindness, an old friend, which is making a powerful comeback. I, for one, think this is a good thing. CRT, a legal theory from the 1970s, found mainstream expression in the works of Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo in recent years, but as someone who teaches CRT at the college level, I can tell you: it depends a couple, rather significant logical fallacies.
The first is the “disparity fallacy,” or the naïve assumption that discrimination is the sole cause of racial disparities. As Kendi writes in Stamped from the Beginning, “racial discrimination is the sole cause of racial disparities in this country and in the world at large.” But if discrimination is the sole cause of racial disparities, the U.S. would be properly described as “Asian supremacist,” not White supremacist, as CRT maintains, because Indian Americans lead the nation in economic and educational achievement. Moreover, if discrimination is the sole of cause of racial disparities, then West Indians and Black Americans would perform at similar rates, as the two groups are visually indistinguishable and have faced the same historical challenges of slavery and segregation. The truth, however, is that West Indians have consistently outperformed Black Americans in both education and income since the early 1900s; since the 1980s, in fact, they’ve even outpaced the national average. As Thomas Sowell and others have shown, this is because racial disparities are caused by many things—family structure, cultural values, and personal choices included. To claim that a disparity is caused only by discrimination, one must first rule out the other possible causes, as any multivariate analysis will demonstrate. And yet, CRT teaches the very opposite, presenting racism as the sole cause of racial disparities.
Defending this flawed perspective, critical race theorists turn to something called “standpoint epistemology,” another logical fallacy. According to this view, what would typically be considered anecdotal evidence—the personal testimonies of racial minorities—is regarded as undeniable proof that racial disparities are caused by racism, making the more accurate, multivariate studies unnecessary. The problem with this perspective—which almost seems too obvious to state—is that not all Black people claim to be oppressed. Many, in fact, believe they have the same opportunities as other Americans and are even offended by the idea that they might need extra assistance; some insist that they’ve never experienced racism at all. These inconvenient truths are brushed under the rug, of course, and when the lived experiences of Black individuals fail to reinforce the claims of CRT, they’re subjected to smear campaigns and dismissed, fulfilling what Professor Eric Smith calls the “erase and replace” method of CRT.
The bigger problem, however, is that these fallacies lead critical race theorists to the unsubstantiated conclusion that American institutions are designed to benefit White people and harm Black people. Reducing a complex interaction to a shallow political narrative, CRT paints society in the broadest possible strokes, presenting Penny as the enforcer of White privilege and Neely as its victim. Seen through this lens, I understand the NAACP’s assertion that Neely’s death was racially motivated, but this view depends on the logical fallacies discussed in this piece. A colorblind approach, by contrast, avoids these issues by treating everyone as individuals, not as collective groups or racial categories. Unlike CRT, which assumes that every interaction between White and Black people is shaped by race, the colorblind perspective requires clear evidence that race played a role. Without such evidence, there’s simply no reason to conclude that Neely’s death was racially motivated. Seen through this lens, it would appear that Penny made a questionable, split-second decision to protect his fellow passengers, without regard for anyone’s race, Neely’s included.
Readers might object, at this point, that a colorblind perspective risks invalidating the lived experiences of racial minorities, but this is a strawman misrepresentation of colorblindness. In reality, its advocates—from the abolitionist Wendell Philips to the civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr.— have always valued the lived experiences of individuals, no matter their race. What we object to are the logical fallacies discussed in this piece. Moving forward in my classes, I will work to expose CRT’s oversimplified view of racial disparities, push back against its monolithic portrayal of “the Black experience,” and encourage my students to engage the rich diversity of individuals who already make up the Black American community. I urge other professors who teach on these subjects to do the same.