CHRISTOPHER RUFO is a writer, filmmaker, and activist. He has directed four documentaries for PBS, including America Lost, which tells the story of three forgotten American cities. He is a senior fellow of the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of the public policy magazine City Journal. His reporting and activism have inspired a presidential order, a national grassroots movement, and legislation in 22 states. Rufo holds a Bachelor of Science in Foreign Service from Georgetown University and a Master’s of Liberal Arts from Harvard University.
Skeptic: You are a controversial figure for your work in the area of Critical Race Theory (CRT). What led you to this subject?
Rufo: My professional background is in documentary filmmaking. The book writing process was totally different. I hope what I was able to do with the book is bring my narrative training to telling stories that engage people and move them at an emotional level.
Skeptic: Well, you did that. It’s a highly readable book in which you present a history of ideas. One of the difficulties is drawing causal connections between thinkers across generations. How do you address that problem?
Rufo: There was a lot of looking for explicit connections. For example, I profile Angela Davis, who I think is really kind of the godmother of CRT. She tied the original critical theory from the early part of the 20th century to American race politics in a deliberate way. Her thesis advisor was the critical theorist Herbert Marcuse, who is also profiled in the book. Then I connect Davis to the modern Black Lives Matter movement; she is the personal mentor to a number of BLM leaders. I tried not to make any specious connections, and I wanted to be charitable to my subjects, to see the world first through their eyes and treat them fairly. Only then did I layer on my criticism or my critique.
Skeptic: On that political front, how do you distinguish between old-school liberals, such as Steven Pinker, and the more radical progressive thinkers of today?
Rufo: The critical theorists I profile in my book are explicitly anti-liberal, such as Angela Davis, Paulo Freire, and Derek Bell, the father of CRT. Their whole movement is explicitly and deeply anti-liberal. It’s against the concept of individual rights, private property, and Enlightenment values. So, I hope that I can also speak to some of those estranged liberals and explain how the movement that has really taken over the institutional left in the United States has deviated from that small ‘l’ liberal tradition and really originates from something much more radical, revolutionary, and Marxist in nature.
Skeptic: Walk us through these influences, starting with Marx.
Rufo: Over the course of the 20th century, there was a deviation from orthodox Marxism as people became more infatuated with the new left, the more activist 1960s youth movement, and racial unrest. Angela Davis was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party USA, and she ran for vice president of the United States on the Communist Party ticket. She was deeply influenced by Marx (although she had written her graduate thesis on Kant) and was also well-versed in the Western philosophical tradition. Paulo Freire—the same. He was working with Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries in the Third World, and his idea of critical consciousness originates in Marxist concepts that he had learned when he was a student in Brazil.
However, the most interesting case is Derek Bell, who was a Harvard Law professor, and in many ways the founding figure of CRT. His students at Harvard Law and other elite law schools around the country, inspired by Bell, established the discipline of critical race theory in the late 1980s. Bell grew up in the Pittsburgh area, served in the U.S. Air Force, went to law school, and was a very successful—even brilliant—student. Then he became a lawyer for the NAACP, handling cases in the Deep South desegregating schools in places such as Mississippi. I think he oversaw something like 300 school desegregation cases. He was a civil rights advocate and activist, a small ‘l’ liberal at the time.
However, Bell became disillusioned with the Civil Rights Movement and utterly disillusioned with Martin Luther King-style civil rights activism that turned to the Constitution, focusing especially on the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. He thought these were all illusions in that they provided the appearance of freedom but were actually used to reinforce secretly and covertly the structures of racial domination. It is this aspect of Bell’s work that survives and is really the foundation of what we now see as critical race theory.
Skeptic: There’s this push to find deep root causes of specific events among politicians. Is this a useful approach?
Rufo: It’s amazing because it’s totally backwards. Politicians say, “Well, no, we’re not going to do the thing that actually could have a significant and immediate impact, and instead we’re going to implement the 1619 Project and focus on the first arrival of African slaves in North America.” That certainly is something of historical importance and scholarly relevance, and should even be part of the public debate, but what do you do with that? Short of having a time travel machine, you can’t change the past 400 years of history. Nor can you show any real relevance to today beyond a very broad and metaphorical interpretation of current events.
When you go back and look at the civil rights movement, against which Derrick Bell rebelled later in his life, you had, for the most part, people who wanted to cash in the promissory note of the Declaration of Independence. They wanted to conform to not only the system of individual rights in the United States as a form of law, but also conform to middle class or bourgeois values as a matter of culture. Look at these great civil rights marches in the 1960s. Men were dressed in suits and ties and the women in dresses. And these weren’t necessarily wealthy people. They were mostly working-class African Americans. However, the image that they wanted to convey was one of dignity, self-respect, and an immense hope for equal participation in American society. I’m still really moved and struck by some of those images.
Compare those images to the kind you see of Antifa or BLM activists in 2020. You have deranged-looking mugshots of people. You have people that visually look quite disordered, committing sprees of violence. And in the name of what? It was never quite clear what they wanted beyond defunding the police or just having a justification for violence. Those two images, if you look at them side by side, reveal the kind of fundamental change in the modern left.
Skeptic: What do you think is the right approach to social change?
Rufo: When you ask people in surveys, “Do you support affirmative action? Do you support race-conscious college admissions? Do you support mandatory diversity, equity, and inclusion training?” They overwhelmingly say “No.” This is true for people of all political affiliations and all racial backgrounds. And yet, all of those things are now required in nearly all of our major institutions. So, you have this mismatch problem where public sentiment is against something, but all of our institutions and even our public policies are for it. Why is that? If we live in a democracy, shouldn’t majority sentiment eventually translate into public policy?
The answer is that, in my view, there are concentric rings of influence on these issues. You have the tightest ring, which consists of the fanatics, the people who are deeply committed to it. They work in it. These are the DEI administrators. These are the critical race theorists. These are the BLM activists. Then you have another concentric ring of people that say, “Well, you know, I more or less buy into the premise of this. I want more diversity.” That’s roughly 30 percent of the public, maybe a little bit more depending on the issue. Then you have an even larger concentric ring of people who are neutral, slightly opposed, or even quite opposed to it, but they don’t speak out because they fear the consequences. This creates an opinion environment in which those very committed activists can really run up the score and impose their point of view as the de facto policy.
That’s the environment we live in. The people who care most about it have figured out where the levers of power are. They’ve gone, in most cases, around the democratic process to impose their will. And they essentially say—as we’ve seen recently with Harvard and the University of North Carolina [the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that race-based affirmative action programs in college admissions processes violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment]—“We know what we’re doing is unpopular. We know what we’re doing is likely illegal and unconstitutional. But we’re going to do it anyway.”
Skeptic: Erika Chenoweth and Maria Steffen’s research on political violence demonstrates that since 1900, nonviolent campaigns worldwide were twice as likely to succeed outright as violent insurgencies. This trend has been increasing over time. In the last 50 years, civil resistance has become increasingly frequent and effective, whereas violent insurgencies have become increasingly rare and unsuccessful. No campaigns failed once they achieved the active and sustained participation of just 3.5 percent of the population, and lots of them succeeded with far less than that.
Rufo: That’s right. I think academic critique is still valuable. However, what we really need is political opposition because this issue has moved from the realm of academia to the realm of politics. So, it also has to be fought politically. That’s what I’ve done, and I’ve gotten an unbelievable amount of criticism for this approach.
I’ve taken the battle out of the realm of academic discourse and into the realm of practical politics. I’ve been very explicit about that. I said I want to change public perception; I want to turn critical race theory into a brand, and I want to destroy it not just in the realm of public opinion, but also in the realm of public policy.
If it’s in the K–12 school curriculum, it’s a policy question. If it’s in a public university DEI bureaucracy, it’s a policy question. If it’s in our criminal justice system, it’s a policy question. These are political questions, and those who think that we can resolve them through discourse are really doing a disservice. They’re not grappling with the actual difficult nature of statesmanship and political activism that’s required.
If we want to have a society that says, “No, we’re not going to engage in racial scapegoating. We’re not going to judge individuals based on a racial category. We’re not going to imbibe in notions of hereditary blood guilt,” the only way, I think, is through political pressure, by changing the laws by which our institutions are governed.
Skeptic: What are your thoughts on systemic racism? What is your explanation for racial group differences in income, wealth, home ownership, representation in Congress and the corporate C-suite?
Rufo: What is the standard by which we measure systemic racism? How do we define systemic racism? There’s an interesting bait and switch here, because they say, “Well, all of this is systemic racism, from chattel slavery to the fact that a Lakeisha Smith is less likely to get called back than a Lisa Smith.” [“Call back” studies submit the same resumés to businesses and compare the response to identifiably Black versus White names]. You have this transition in the mid-20th century from explicit, formal, and legal racist policies to what amounts to implicit racist policies. Well, what do they mean by that?
They mean that when you measure things statistically, that there is a disparate impact on outcomes. Lisa versus Lakeisha Smith is just one such example. You can say that there are no outright racist policies in policing or housing or geographical distribution, but there are still disparate outcomes. Is it because people are secretly and subconsciously racist? That’s the unconscious bias theory, which has been debunked. [It has been demonstrated that The Implicit Association Test, often cited as confirming evidence, does not measure racial bias but rather reaction time to familiar versus unfamiliar terms.] Are police more likely to shoot a Black suspect than a White suspect? Roland Fryer at Harvard showed that this is not the case. [Although he did find that White police rough up Black people they pull over more than White people.]
Then you have to ask some uncomfortable questions. If, for example, there are more African American men in jail than Asian American men, is it because our society is systemically racist against African American men and systemically giving privileges to Asian American men?
You could make that argument, but I think that on the face of it most people realize that it’s not true. Then you ask about the rate of criminality—do African American males on average commit more crimes than Asian American males? You might find that it’s not racism that is operative. It’s another set of background variables. Robert Rector published some papers on this subject 20 years ago that are still foundational to my thinking. He showed that if you control for those background variables, you find that the argument for active systemic racism vanishes across a whole range of things, not just Lakeisha versus Lisa Smith, but for things that are especially meaningful. For example, if you control for the mother’s academic achievement, the mother’s participation in state welfare programs, and household family structure, the gap between White and Black childhood poverty disappears. It’s zero.
If we aim our public policy towards fixing those variables, we’d be much better served and we’d be much more likely to reduce overall inequalities.
Skeptic: Those causal variables are largely left out of the conversation. Maybe it’s taboo to talk about them right now?
Rufo: I think it is, because it’s a very inconvenient disrupting narrative when you have minority groups that are enormously successful in the United States. The most successful ethnic groups in the United States today are majority non-White ethnic groups, including some Black ethnic groups, particularly Nigerian Americans. Part of that may be due to a selection process—immigrants from Nigeria are disproportionately better educated, have more resources, etc. So, it’s not quite a one-to-one measurement.
Nonetheless, there’s a huge range in success among ethnic groups in the United States. The ones that have stable family structure, commitment to education, a strong work ethic, mutual support within a community, etc., are very successful. Those ethnic groups that do not have those attributes do very poorly on many measures, including income. Appalachian Whites do very poorly while Nigerian Americans or other recent immigrants are doing extraordinarily well.
Skeptic: Are you optimistic we can achieve a colorblind society?
Rufo: There are reasons for optimism and for pessimism. The reason for optimism is that the American people really despise the DEI affirmative action principles of governance. Even in California and Washington state, where I live, voters have rejected affirmative action policies when they’ve been put to a ballot initiative. And the majority of racial groups also oppose these kinds of policies. Despite all of the media dominance, academic dominance, and bureaucratic dominance of the DEI movement—the American people want equal treatment for each individual, regardless of group category. They want colorblind equality, not racial favoritism and enforced equity.
The case for pessimism is that it’s going to be difficult. The problem of racial equality is a thorny one. It is one that has vexed the United States for its whole history and is, frankly, likely to continue. As long as there is visible inequality—statistically measurable inequality—the narrative of critical race theory will have a base of support. It will have the political, emotional, and intellectual grounds that can feed that narrative. This puts us in a bit of a conundrum because paradoxically, the remedies of critical race theory are actually likely to make inequality worse. And for the people who are running a critical race theory style regime, inequality justifies their claims to power. So, they have no incentive to make things better in the real world. If we go in that direction, we face a very long, very brutal, and very disillusioning politics in our future.
Skeptic: Do you see any role for any kind of reparations for formerly oppressed peoples or even currently oppressed people?
Rufo: I have certainly opposed any kind of race-based reparations payments. I think it’s absolutely the wrong direction to go for a host of reasons. Historically, if you look at Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society anti-poverty programs, these were to a large extent a kind of race-based reparations policy that was—they thought—backed up by the latest discoveries in social science, deployed at federal mass scale. These programs now are spending about a trillion dollars a year, disproportionately to African Americans, especially descendants of slaves.
These are policies that sound great, and that’s why they’re often passed in legislation. But we have to be sober and level-headed in analyzing whether they actually work. Do they help us achieve the stated intentions? The evidence that it has helped in any way is lacking. In fact, the most persuasive evidence, in my view, shows that it has had negative, though unintended, consequences. In my reading of it, both statistically and as someone who spent three years researching and documenting public housing projects in Memphis, Tennessee, and getting a first-hand look at their impact, I just don’t think that reparations would work. 
This interview was edited from a longer conversation that took place on The Michael Shermer Show, which you can watch online.
YASCHA MOUNK is a writer and academic known for his work on the rise of populism and the crisis of liberal democracy. Born in Germany to Polish parents, Mounk received his BA in history from Trinity College, Cambridge, and his PhD in government from Harvard University. He is a professor of the practice of international affairs at Johns Hopkins University, a contributing editor at The Atlantic, and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is the author of The Great Experiment: Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure (featured on former President Barack Obama’s summer reading list) and The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time.
Skeptic: Let’s talk about identity politics. Is it really the identity or is it the politics?
Mounk: The great civil rights leader, Bayard Rustin, a gay Black political activist—though I’m not sure that he would want to list the adjectives in that order—said that the idea of a homogeneous Black community is the invention of White elites, as well as of certain Black people who want to lead it. I think this describes the situation very well. And this is important because it speaks to our model for political solidarity.
Let’s examine the popular ban on “cultural appropriation.” When I was growing up in Europe, the people who worried about cultural purity and the influence that other groups might have on your culture were on the right. Today, some of these concerns persist on the right, but a lot of them have moved to the left. It’s gotten to the point of absurdity, like left-leaning actors who apologize for voicing or acting in roles that don’t match their identity.
The core example is that of White musicians in the 1950s and 1960s “stealing” the music of Black musicians or being inspired by them, and going on to have big careers while Black musicians didn’t. The injustice in the 1950s and 1960s was not that there was some White jazz saxophonist inspired by Black musicians. The injustice was that Black musicians could not travel freely across America because of racism—they could not stay at some of the hotels in which they performed, they were banned from many concert venues, they wouldn’t be played on many radio stations, and they couldn’t be signed by many record labels. That’s what was unjust about it, not something called “cultural appropriation.” If you get that wrong, you also get wrong how you solve it. The way to solve that injustice is not to make sure that White musicians don’t play jazz music or rock ‘n roll. It’s to make sure that Black musicians and African Americans more broadly overcome the deep discrimination that they faced.
All culture is appropriation. Every element of our cuisine, the way we write, and the technology we use today is an accrual of past cultural appropriation. If we put those forms of mutual cultural influence under general suspicion, not only will we forego amazing cultural and technological innovations in the coming decades and centuries, but we’ll also fundamentally fail to celebrate positive aspects of our societies.
Skeptic: How do you respond to people such as Noam Chomsky, who argues that critiques of identity politics such as your own are exaggerations, that things such as critical race theory are just legal or academic ideas that are not filtering down to grammar schools or up to corporations, and that what you are saying is part of a vast right-wing moral panic?
Mounk: I think that’s a mistake. There are people on the right who brand anything they don’t like critical race theory or claim that teaching kids about slavery is critical race theory. That’s absurd. Of course we should teach American children about the terrible history of racial injustice and slavery in this country. However, as a result, a lot of people on the mainstream left, including smart people like Chomsky, end up saying, “Isn’t critical race theory just speaking critically about race in society?” Or they say it’s an academic theory and first graders aren’t reading the academic articles published by Derek Bell and Kimberlé Crenshaw.
What I worry about is teachers walking into classrooms in the third, second, and first grade and saying, “If you’re Black, go to that classroom; If you’re Asian American, go to that classroom; If you’re Latino, you go to that classroom; and if you’re White, you go to that classroom over there.” I think it’s fine for kids to be uncomfortable at times, because everything we know from social psychology is that how we define ourselves is malleable. However, when they’re told, “This is your in-group and that over there is your out-group,” that can lead to having endless empathy for the “my group” and terrifying disregard for the suffering of the other group.
So, while the aim may be to create White anti-racists, I think it’s much more likely to create White separatists or White supremacists. The other thing I would say is that these ideas not only now inform the norms and the practices of a great many institutions in the United States—important institutions such as schools—they also inform public policy in really worrying ways.
A shocking example of this was when I sat in on a meeting of the ACIP—the key advisory group advising the Centers for Disease Control—on how to roll out vaccines during the COVID-19 pandemic. Now we know that by far the best predictor of how seriously sick you will get from COVID is your age. Therefore, nearly every country in the world prioritized the elderly in their distribution. You might also prioritize hospital workers, because in the middle of a pandemic you don’t want the doctors to be sick. But after that, nearly every country started with the over 85s, and then the over 80s, and then the over 75s. And that also made it easier to communicate this to the public.
Well, ACIP said no. We have to care about racial equity. Older Americans are disproportionately White, and therefore it would be unjust to give a vaccine to them first, even though the CDC’s own model shows that deviating from prioritizing the elderly would raise the death toll by between 0.5 to 6.5 percent—in other words, by thousands of human lives. This had disastrous consequences, literally thousands of additional deaths because of identity politics.
Skeptic: You mentioned “identity politics.” How should we think about this term?
Mounk: The way I think about politics, there are two sets of distinctions: between liberal and authoritarian, and between the left and the right. I am a center-left liberal. I joined the German Social Democratic Party at the age of 13. I had to lie about my age to join it because by law you’re only allowed to join when you’re 14. So, I can claim as long an allegiance to the left as anybody my age. In the distinction between liberal and authoritarian, there are those who want to impose their views by force, have no tolerance for people who disagree with them, and see the world as split into the good and the evil. I want a society in which individuals have free speech and the right of free assembly, and the right of free worship. So even if I win a majority, I’m not going to impose my substantive moral views on you. And I recognize that just because you take what I consider the wrong position on some political issue, that doesn’t make you an evil person. That is what defines me as a true “liberal.” I think the liberal versus authoritarian distinction is more important than the left v. right one.
Skeptic: So there’s left-wing authoritarianism, just as there’s right-wing authoritarianism?
Mounk: How can anyone look at the history of the 20th century without recognizing that? Left-wing authoritarianism, which you may have more sympathy for, should also scare you. It’s much easier for people who think they’re doing good in the world to follow into believing that such forms of authoritarianism are for the good of all humanity, and so we are creating paradise on Earth, not just for one group, but for everybody. That can be very appealing. My grandparents, whom I loved and who were deeply decent human beings, were attracted to such ideas for understandable reasons. They grew up in shtetls, living in poverty and being discriminated against. They thought that we should fight for the rights of proletarians. So I have empathy for people who are tempted by that set of ideas, but I’m also aware of how easily they can seduce you in ways that eventually make you complicit in genuine evil.
Skeptic: You often discuss corporations adopting identity politics. Do they really believe this, or do they not want to be bogged down in lawsuits? What is your sense about that?
Mounk: I would say that there’s a real split. There are certainly true believers in Human Resources departments, and some true believers make a good living as diversity consultants. However, there are also some true believers in the elite class, some among CEOs, and so on. At the same time, there are a lot of people who have an incentive to shut up and stay quiet. People who are not that politically motivated just ask themselves, “Is it really worth my while to push back against this? You know, I’m going to be branded as a troublemaker and perhaps somebody will accuse me of being a racist or a bigot. I better just keep my mouth shut.” And there’s an interesting legal incentive for CEOs to go along with some of this, which is that if your company is sued for racial discrimination or sexual harassment, whether you have engaged in industry standard practices to avert those forms of bias constitutes a key defense. So once your competitors offer a deeply divisive diversity training, you have a legal incentive to do that too. If you don’t, a plaintiff might argue that you clearly didn’t care about discrimination.
So, I think that there is an incentive from social sanction—that speaking up against these ideas is perilous, and there is also an incentive from the actual legal system in the United States in terms of how you can defend yourself against lawsuits, no matter how frivolous.
Skeptic: Given how deep this trend is in education, are you worried about the next generation?
This article appeared in Skeptic magazine 29.2
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Mounk: Yes. My students are deeply and fundamentally shaped by these ideas. Especially if they went to private schools, or schools in good school districts and affluent liberal-leaning parts of the country, these ideas have been drummed into them from day one. It’s the water that they swim in, and they take much of it for granted.
Skeptic: What can we do about it?
Mounk: Well, the first step is to argue back against these ideas from the moral high ground. And part of that is to argue on the basis of principles that you deeply believe in and that might make the world a better place. Now, there’s a broad range of principles that are compatible with liberalism that you can embrace. Perhaps you have a religious motivation, perhaps you’re a socialist, or perhaps you’re a conservative, all of that is fine. My own conviction is that of a philosophical liberal, as well as someone in the American context that has great admiration for certain movements.
Consider Frederick Douglass. When he was invited to hold a speech commemorating the Fourth of July, he called out his compatriots on the hypocrisy of talking about all men being created equal. He asked, “How can you celebrate that value and pat yourselves on the back when Black people around the country are enslaved right this moment?” However, he didn’t say to rip it all up. And while he recognized that newspapers and magazines said terrible things about Black people at the time, he didn’t reject free speech. He called free speech the dread of tyrants, because he realized that it was what allowed genuine political minorities, people who were very unpopular in their time, to fight for their rights.
This interview was edited from a longer conversation that took place on The Michael Shermer Show, which you can watch online.
This article was published on October 4, 2024.
