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Christopher Rufo Wants To Make Segregation Great Again
The anti-critical race theory activist is a driving force behind ending DEI
A new interview published in the New York Times (this is a free link from the internet archives) with Christopher Rufo presents him as a hero of anti-DEI efforts.
Conducted by Ross Douthat (because of course it is), it outlines the history of Rufo’s efforts as a documentarian and author to highlight the supposed dangers of critical race theory to American society. It also portends that DEI and CRT efforts during the first Trump administration were too radical and need to be abolished.
Let’s clarify here: critical race theory originated in the mid-1970s from a range of legal scholars as an explanation for why the 1960s civil rights transformation was necessary. It did not suddenly spring out of the woodwork. I was studying CRT in college in the 2000s.
From Wikipedia (something I’m sure Rufo would love to see destroyed):
CRT began in the United States in the post–civil rights era, as 1960s landmark civil rights laws were being eroded and schools were being re-segregated.[18][19] With racial inequalities persisting even after civil rights legislation and color-blind laws were enacted, CRT scholars in the 1970s and 1980s began reworking and expanding critical legal studies (CLS) theories on class, economic structure, and the law[20] to examine the role of US law in perpetuating racism.[21] CRT, a framework of analysis grounded in critical theory,[22] originated in the mid-1970s in the writings of several American legal scholars, including Derrick Bell, Alan Freeman, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Richard Delgado, Cheryl Harris, Charles R. Lawrence III, Mari Matsuda, and Patricia J. Williams.[23] CRT draws on the work of thinkers such as Antonio Gramsci, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, and W. E. B. Du Bois, as well as the Black Power, Chicano, and radical feminist movements from the 1960s and 1970s.[23]
The interview itself is largely uninteresting. Rufo starts with some typical right-wing whining that marginalized groups were getting opportunities he wasn’t while pretending marginalized groups don’t need extra opportunities, given that they are marginalized. It’s the same whitewashing (emphasis on white) that we see from many of these mediocre humans.
Rufo tells a story about not being able to receive grants as a documentary filmmaker and makes a homophobic quip:
And I had been rejected for some grants and told explicitly: This grant is restricted for minorities and women. And it was like: Oh, interesting. That’s quite odd. That doesn’t seem fair. But you kind of deal with it and figure out alternative opportunities. I remember joking with a producer of mine saying, we really need to get this grant. We’re going to mark you down as bisexual to give us the edge that is needed to compete in this new identity landscape.
Rufo does mention something I’ve talked about before, that these guys see their bigotry as “counterrevolution” against Liberalism, and he even uses that term.
In speaking about the protests following George Floyd’s murder, Rufo says this:
I think now in retrospect it led to — you could call it “antiwoke," you could call it “a backlash,” you could call it “a conservative counterrevolution.” It really set the stage, but what was happening at that time was a derangement. I think people who participated in it are now embarrassed to admit their participation.
I’m not embarrassed to admit my participation in activism following Floyd’s murder by police. However, Rufo and the other bottom-feeders like him need that narrative to be true to convince you that people are embarrassed. This keeps you from protesting again in the future.
Rufo goes on to credit Ron DeSantis’ reelection as governor of Florida as the moment when he and the other terrified white people started to take back their damaged egos. He calls DeSantis “the key political figure in the war on woke.” I nearly sprained a muscle rolling my eyes.
They spent several minutes talking about things I found boring, and I honestly tuned out a bit, but my ears perked back up when Rufo gave his interpretation of modern conservative thinking on civil rights:
But I think that there are really two avenues forward for the right. One avenue that is the most radical libertarian argument, which would be that the Civil Rights Act is a fundamental infringement on civil liberties, freedom of association, freedom of speech, and therefore it requires abolition.
The second argument and the argument that I favor is that the right needs to have its own interpretation of civil rights law and it needs to take over the enforcement of civil rights law. It needs to have essentially an alternative vision, a kind of Spartan system of colorblind equality, that is in my view better grounded in the Constitution and the law.
There is no reward or punishment based on ancestry. And if you do that in admissions, hiring, promotions or contracting you should pay just as heavy a price as if someone was segregating lunch counters in the past.
I found this interesting because they are fundamentally the same. Whether civil rights are ignored completely or they are being reinterpreted through the lens of white nationalism, the same result will come about: marginalized groups will be further marginalized, and the most mediocre of white men will ascend based upon nothing more than their whiteness, but mostly due to their mediocrity allowing them to identify with other mediocre white men.
Rufo mentions the Civil Rights Act (he again says it shouldn’t be abolished) while ignoring why it needed to happen. After all, it wasn’t white people who were being denied seats at lunch counters or made to sit at the back of buses or denied entrance into universities based specifically on their skin color, national origin, or ethnicity. However, this simple fact must be ignored if you’re going to grow up someday to be like Christopher Rufo.
If you want to have a government that enforces civil rights laws, we need to have a government that enforces civil rights laws for everyone. Not just the favored groups, but for every individual.
It’s clear that Rufo is intelligent enough to understand why the Civil Rights Act was necessary, but he must pretend it didn’t happen to make a supposedly salient point.
They go into proposals for the Department of Education that I find quite interesting. Both men acknowledge the DoE has many programs that are extremely popular, especially in rural areas. I wrote recently about how dismantling the DoE would be devastating for kids with disabilities, and these two seem to want those kinds of initiatives going.
However, Rufo goes on to say that because those initiatives are popular, the key to dealing with the DoE is firing everyone they don’t align with politically, but that’s not feasible, so they need to use some firebrand fascism to force compliance:
Douthat: Well, just to be clear, you are advocating eliminating all of the people who you think are sort of irredeemably left wing, right? Like they will not have jobs anymore?
Rufo: The unfortunate answer is yes. They’re redeemable as people, but they aren’t entitled to lifetime federal employment with no accountability.
Douthat: Absolutely. I’m not making a moral case for their right to a job. You’re saying we can fire them?
Rufo: I believe that to be true as far as part of an overall reorganization. But I think the other problem that you’re identifying is one that I take seriously and the unfortunate answer is, no. Conservatives cannot fully staff the Department of Education. Conservatives cannot fully compete for education grants, or university-level research programs. No, conservatives can’t do any of those things.
So we have to figure out what we can do. Where can we have leverage? Where can we take over or recapture an institution? And if we can’t do those things, then what do we have to shut down? Shutting things down is actually a very effective strategy.
Either teach the things they demand you teach or you’re fired. It’s no wonder these guys hate Liberalism so much. Imagine people saying things you don’t agree with! The horror!
Rufo is a standard fascist who brands himself a centrist ideologue. Many of those who surround him do the same because they’re too cowardly to admit what they actually are, white nationalists with a bit of paint smeared over them.
Too middling to succeed in a level playing field, Rufo would rather burn the place down.