Using a "Moves to Innocence" Approach to Dissect and Debunk the Claim That Critical Race Theory is Antisemitic

Authors

Diane Kemker, DePaul University College of Law, Southern University Law Center

First Page

1145

Abstract

In the United States, law and policy have most frequently reflected dominant white Christian majority interests. Critical Race Theory (CRT) offers powerful tools for understanding our history and situation, including that of American Jews, and how the social positions and interests of American Blacks and Jews, real and perceived, have intersected, sometimes aligning, sometimes diverging, and sometimes conflicting. And yet, among other charges leveled against it, Critical Race Theory is frequently accused of being antisemitic.

Intentionally or not, this charge delegitimizes and discredits CRT, and therefore advances the aims of all who oppose it for any reason, including white supremacists who are often openly both racist and antisemitic themselves. Their ideology of white Christian nationalism threatens both Jewish and Black people, and fighting it effectively is urgent. We are less able to accomplish that if CRT is made unavailable. While the allegation that Critical Race Theory is antisemitic can be readily debunked, stopping there leaves the deep sources of the allegation unexplained.

This Article argues that the most fruitful, albeit potentially unsettling, way to understand the charge of antisemitism in CRT involves the “moves to innocence” model pioneered by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang in the context of indigenous decolonization theory. This approach uncovers deeper self-understandings, including a desire to render American Jews blameless for racial inequality and structural anti-Black racism in America; to foreground the Jewish experience of discrimination and exclusion and deemphasize Jewish benefit from white supremacy and white privilege; and to erase from view patterns of Jewish complicity with anti-Black racism or incidents of Jewish anti-Black racism itself; as well as the ways in which generations of Jewish immigrants and their descendants benefited from the relative Jewish proximity to whiteness in America.

By going beyond a rebuttal of the allegation that CRT is antisemitic to expose and dismantle these problematic “moves to innocence,” this Article aims to rehabilitate CRT and recognize it as the most useful intellectual approach currently available for understanding both racism and antisemitism in the United States. CRT offers a rich account of the operations of white Christian nationalism and white supremacy. Opponents of antisemitism should not needlessly deprive themselves of these tools simply to avoid a more honest reckoning with how Jews have benefited from white supremacy and anti-Black racism in America.

Recommended Citation

Diane Kemker, Using a "Moves to Innocence" Approach to Dissect and Debunk the Claim That Critical Race Theory is Antisemitic, 27 Lewis & Clark L. Rev. 1145 (2024).
Available at: https://lawcommons.lclark.edu/lclr/vol27/iss4/7