Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

As other reviewers pointed out, this book provides a great summary of the very real pains experienced by African Americans throughout the history of our country, and provides a good summary of the ideas behind Critical Race Theory. Unfortunately for us all, the book fails to point out important flaws in thinking by the CRT adherents. For example, in the discussion of Brown vs. Board of Education and the lack of white’s altruism, the authors fail to mention that the existence of true altruism is a fundamental topic of moral philosophy, and also fail to mention that countless white people have been fighting a hard fight against the culture of racism and slavery since before our country was founded, and fail to give credit to the people of all races whose unyielding determination finally shifted the culture enough to enable this victory. The largest failure of the book, though, is the complete lack of discussion of advances in decision theory and neurology that have revealed that much of what some consider “racism” may be better explained as tribal biases (hard-wired neural pathways in our brain that evolved at a time when humans lived in tribal communities). The authors expressed some confusion as to why differing minority groups in America have not banded together to fight white power, something easily explained through an understanding of neural tribal biases. Almost on par with this largest failure, is a lack of discussion on recent historical research on the “Leviathan” culture of the North, and the “honor-shame” culture of the South, and the fact that the honor culture thrives in areas where policing is ineffectual. The clash of these cultures, brought about by the rapid movement of people and ideas over the past century or so, offers a more complex insight to many problems that CRT adherents view as simple racism. The authors fail to point out that many studies that “prove” racism make the statistical error of assuming that correlation implies causation, and so fail to reveal the underlying truths that may help solve our society’s problems. There was also a lack of discussion on other neural biases, such as confirmation bias, that can incorrectly fool a person into believing assumptions such as “all whites are racist.” CRT, as the authors describe it, was founded by lawyers who see racism as a power-based problem requiring Leviathan-only approaches to solve. Because the authors make no mention of these other advances in human psychology and sociology, they fail to point out that CRT-based solutions, in actuality, may increase racial strife in our country and set back the clock of equality an untold number of years. If you want to understand what CRT authors are saying, this is a good book. If you are interested moving our society towards peace and harmony-in the direction so eloquently described a half century ago by Martin Luther King Jr. in his many writings and speeches, read up on these other science areas before reading CRT.