by Megan Olson
A University of Minnesota professor thinks the only problem with critical race theory is that “it’s not revolutionary enough.”
According to political science professor August Nimtz, CRT is “rooted in the frustrations of African American civil rights lawyers who more than seven decades ago had sought to employ the country’s legal system to redress racial discrimination.”
“Their increasing recognition that there were institutional barriers to racial equality birthed what later became CRT. Marxist-inspired ‘critical theory’ seemed to offer an explanation — systems of oppression. But critical theory was a poor cousin of genuine Marxism. It was bereft of the revolutionary element from its supposed progenitor — resistance, namely the class struggle,” Nimtz writes in the Star Tribune.
In other words, the problem with CRT is that it’s not as revolutionary as outright Marxism. To drive this point home, Nimtz criticizes academics “for whom intellectual work and not activism is primary.”
“Capitalism, class society’s modern edition, depends on, reproduces and over time deepens social inequality — including that of race. So, yes, ‘systemic racism’ exists: it’s called capitalism,” he continues.
The only way to create true racial equality in the United States is through “a radical redistribution of economic and political power,” something Martin Luther King Jr. stated in the 1960s. Nimtz argues that these words are just “as relevant today as when first uttered more than half a century ago.”
“Well-intentioned proponents of CRT, unlike its self-serving entrepreneurs, ignore it at their peril,” Nimtz concludes.
The professor has disclosed in previous interviews that he “would have probably ended up in the Communist Party” if he had been hired by the University of Chicago in the 1970s. He ended up joining the Socialist Workers Party in 1972 instead and ran for mayor as an SWP candidate.
He recalled teaching at the University of Minnesota during the 1972 anti-war movement and seeing “graduate students with their heads buried in books while a mass revolt was going on downstairs on the ground.” He called this his “first reality check about the academy.”
Nimtz also authored an opinion piece in MinnPost on the George Floyd riots in which he applauded the many protesters who “disobediently” engaged in the “biggest progressive action so far anywhere in the United States under the state-sanctioned pandemic lockdown.”
In another article, Nimtz defended the Cuban Revolution and said Cubans accept the limitations on their civil liberties as “the price they pay for defending their revolution.”
The University of Minnesota is home to many other left-wing professors. In August, for instance, a professor spoke out against the school hiring more police officers, despite rising crime around campus.
The University of Minnesota also maintains a research guide that claims “search algorithms are racist,” encouraging students to check the races of authors they cite.
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Megan Olson is a 2020 graduate of the University of Minnesota with degrees in political science and history. She works in public affairs in addition to serving on the Legislative Advisory Council for School District 196. She is also on the school board for FIT academy, a charter school in Apple Valley.
Photo “Students at University of Minnesota” by University of Minnesota Twin Cities.
