Bill Berkowitz for BuzzFlash: Christopher Rufo: How a Relatively Obscure Right-Wing Gadfly Became a Major Anti-Critical Race Theory Hustler
The right-wing attack on Critical Race Theory is an effort to divert white American responsibility for racism, and for whites to ludicrously claim they are the victims of racism. (Taymaz Valley)
July 21, 2021
By Bill Berkowitz
“Those…teaching and spreading critical race theory…must be deplored in public” – Christopher Rufo
Christopher Rufo is having his 15 minutes … and lots more. After years of toiling in right-wing think tanks and public policy institutes, Rufo has hit the jackpot; becoming a point man for eviscerating critical race theory. Over the past few weeks, stories about Rufo’s work have metastasized: The New Yorker, “How A Conservative Activist Invented The Conflict Over Critical Race Theory”; New York magazine, “How to Manufacture a Moral Panic”; The Washington Post, “Republicans, spurred by an unlikely figure, see political promise in targeting critical race theory”; Education Week, “Who’s Really Driving Critical Race Theory Legislation? An Investigation.” And Rufo is unabashedly claiming he is outmaneuvering “hostile media,” and that most people are “on our side.”
According to New York magazine’s Sarah Jones, “Rufo isn’t interested in denying that racism exists. No, he says, racism is real — but the actual racists are those who are teaching and spreading critical race theory, and they must be deplored in public.”
Critical race theory, an outgrowth of critical theory and critical legal studies, has been around for decades. Its core tenets -- including that racism isn't just an individual phenomenon, it's structural and systemic -- have long undergirded academic discussions about race.
Rufo intends to stir up fear among individual white people -- that they are the targets of critical race theory -- poisoning the atmosphere, and making a discussion of structural racism practically impossible.
A senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor to City Journal, Rufo has a significant right-wing pedigree. He’s made stops along the way as a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute alongside James O’Keefe of Project Veritas, and at the Discovery Institute, a Christian think tank based in Seattle.
It is at the Manhattan Institute where he has found his footing. His attacks on anti-racist curriculums have earned him appearances on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News Channel show, Newsmax, and multiple shout-outs from a host of conservative media outlets.
As The New Yorker’s Jones recently reported: “Last summer, Rufo seemed to come from nowhere, arriving on the scene after a national uprising against racism to lead the charge against the supposed excesses of anti-racism education, branding it all with a once-obscure academic term: critical race theory. Armed with a prolific Twitter account and the backing of the conservative Establishment, he brandished “scoops” about the widespread infiltration of the theory and eventually caught the attention of the Trump White House. In short order, he had transformed himself from a limited kind of Twitter star to bona fide conservative influencer. The proof lies offline in the new moral panic he helped instigate. Republican operatives, legislators, and commentators, all professing concern for young hearts and minds, claim that children are being taught to hate white people.”
“There’s no question about it that he’s quite influential,” said Charlie Sykes, a Rufo critic and former conservative talk-show host who broke with the GOP over Donald Trump. “People were looking around for some way to play this card of racial grievance. They were looking for another cause in the cultural war. And this happened to be it, and he happened to be on it.”
The fact that Rufo cherry-picks quotes, distorts documents, and is a super spreader of misinformation is of little concern to either him or his followers. Jones notes that “Rufo’s is clear …. Rufo’s role is clear. He takes critical-race theory as a concept, strips it of all meaning, and repurposes it as a catchall for white grievances.”
In a tweet Rufo stated: “The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory.’ We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.” In an interview with the New York Post, Rufo said the tweet was an “obvious” approach: “If you want to see public policy outcomes you have to run a public persuasion campaign.”
In early June, Inside Higher Ed’s Colleen Flaherty reported that a number of states have enactive legislation targeting critical race theory. “Lawmakers in [20] states have introduced or passed legislation this year seeking to limit the teaching of critical race theory within public institutions. These bills all resemble former President Trump's now-defunct executive order prohibiting federally funded institutions from teaching ‘divisive concepts’ about race and gender. But whereas Trump's order was widely interpreted to apply to diversity training, and lacked serious bite with the 2020 election fast approaching, these new state-level bills are already impacting the college curriculum.”
The Heritage Foundation, one of Rufo’s former employers, “has published an actions toolkit to help root out the theory, which it called a ‘dangerous ideology that is rooted in Marxism, and is infiltrating our children's schools, the military and society at large,’” Flaherty pointed out.
Jonathan Butcher, the Will Skillman Fellow in Education at Heritage, said in an interview that “Critical race theory is a philosophy, it's a worldview that believes that the perspective that we should take on for everything around us is about race and ethnic identity, and the founders of critical race theory and their predecessors in critical theory have said as much.
“By its very nature, critical race theory is a call to action, to ask people to apply the idea that this world is divided between people who are victimizers and people who are victims, and that goes back to your ethnicity. And so the consequences of that -- and sometimes it’s, it's simply stated this way -- are that you should be treated differently based on the color of your skin. And that's an awful idea that should have been left in the ash heap of history, many years ago.”
Rufo didn’t invent the racial chasm in this country, but his unreliable bloviating is stoking a white backlash. And while he is not relinquishing the battle against critical race theory, he announced in April that he had formed a new “center for narrative, legal and policy warfare,” called Battlefront, an entity that “will produce films, wage legal warfare, and advise policymakers on legislation.” He also tweeted that he would be leading a “new initiative on Critical Race Theory” at the Manhattan Institute.
Follow BuzzFlash on @twitter
Continue the conversation at the BuzzFlash Nation group on Facebook