Woke Critical Race Theory as a Reality Deficit Disorder
Richard Gale & Gary Null PhD
Progressive Radio Network, July 1, 2021

Let us be clear. The recent rise in Wokeness is another symptom of
America’s “reality deficit disorder (RDD),” a condition that continues to
proliferate across the American landscape since the Age of
Enlightenment and the 19 th century’s advent of scientific materialism
as a secular religion. The proponents of modern behaviorism and the
neurosciences are likewise saturated with RDD. The gurus of modern
Critical Race Theory, the Woke self-congratulating experts and false
prophets, are its public face. These are plastic intellectuals who have
found a righteous purpose to spread the message in the Woke Critical
Race movement’s bible, Robin DiAngelo’s bestseller White Fragility.
Identity politics, efforts to consolidate groupthink in order to
promulgate illusions about race, social status, and gender have found
their voice in DiAngelo’s and Ibram Kendi’s writings.
Despite the widespread adulation DiAngelo has received from liberal
educators, the mega-corporate elite, and the liberal media, she has
managed to jockey herself away from the deep scrutiny her writings
and lectures deserve. An exception is Jonathan Church, author of
Reinventing Racism, who brilliantly exposes DiAngelo’s flaws and
deconstructs her façade of being objective. Church takes a more
philosophical offensive to shed light on DiAngelo’s implicit biases and
contradictions that in turn distort the very ideas she attempts to
proselytize. While we agree wholeheartedly with Church’s polemic, we
would take a more scientific approach and state that DiAngelo’s racial
theories of irredeemable Whiteness have no basis in reality
whatsoever.
White Fragility reads like a tantrum by an author deeply confused
about her own identity and with a third-rate intellect. “All white
people,” DiAngelo wants us to believe, “are invested in and collude
with racism.” If you were born White then racism is built into your
genetic inheritance. There can be no escape from this curse, DiAngelo
suggests, no redemption or purification by fire regardless of how much
penitence, public service or charity you perform for the greater good.
We wonder whether she would include the indigenous White Finno-
Ugric peoples inhabiting the most northern forests and tundra of
Scandinavia and Russia’s Kola Peninsula are also genetically colluding
in perpetuating the world’s racism.

The author reminds us of someone who has read every published book
about chocolate and thus feels qualified to write one of their own;
however, the person has never actually tasted chocolate. Philosophy
and postmodern sociology in general, notably the modern philosophies
of science and mind, suffer from this mental affliction. They write
books about other philosophers’ books who in turn wrote books about
their predecessors’ scribbling. Many authors writing about religion
suffer from this same malady. Right-wing critics to RCT Wokeness
likewise indulge in a similar cognitive hallucination built upon feeble-
minded pre-Galilean superstitions. When the time comes to take their
last breath, they will have failed to achieve any conscious lucidity to
read the last page in the novel of their lives. Their perceptions of
themselves and the world, their righteous anger and biases, will be
revealed as dreamscapes –nevertheless the phantoms they have
conjured will have had dire consequences to the welfare of innocent
victims prejudiced and canceled by their vitriol and condemnation.
There have always been conflicting ideologies, cherished beliefs and
inflamed emotions towards racial discrepancies, social order or how
the nation should be governed. But today these cognitive afflictions,
masquerading as passions and righteous causes such as Woke
Culture’s anti-racism, have disintegrated into tribalism. This is now
fomenting new class and racial distinctions and struggles as well as
media turf wars. No one can accurately predict where this collective
reality deficit disorder will lead ultimately but it certainly won’t
contribute to any positive advancement of human well-being. It
repeats the old adage of garbage in, garbage out.
“The greatest need of our time,” the Trappist monk Thomas Merton
wrote in his Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, “is to clean out the
enormous mass of mental and emotional rubbish that clutters our
minds and makes all political and social life a mass illness. Without this
housecleaning we cannot begin to see. Unless we see we cannot
think.” Merton believed that this “purification must begin with the
mass media.” We would suggest it also begins with our educational
institutions. Teachers who embrace White Fragility’s social folly, need
to introspectively gaze and observe the destructive ataxia nesting in
their own minds. If anyone wonders why the nation is so angry,
screaming and protesting, it is because the failed neoliberal
experiment, the culture of political nepotism, a captured and biased
media, and a thoroughly corrupt judiciary have created this horror
show. DiAngelo seemingly wants to gather tinder to keep racial
conflagrations burning.

"Nothing in all the world is more dangerous," Martin Luther King
lamented, "than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity." It is
our deep ignorance about not knowing ourselves and appreciating our
intrinsic interconnections with each other and the environment that
perpetuates the suffering around us. These deeper existential
relationships outsmart and surpass most of what Critical Race Theory
might offer. This includes our attachments to whatever
accomplishments and failures we experience in our lives through racial
identity, which lead to a reality deficit with all of its superiority
complexes, apathy and depression.
First, there is sufficient empirical science to reach a consensus that we
are a culture that has become habituated to mistaking its unfounded
perceptions about itself and the world as reality-based. This applies to
our cognitive conceptions of Whiteness, Blackness, Yellowness, etc.
Church makes this clear; DiAngelo’s use of the term Whiteness is
“nebulous” and “vague.” He points out that her logic falls into a Kafka
Trap, referring to Kafka’s novel The Trial when an unassuming man is
dragged into court and accused for an unspecified crime; subsequently
his unwavering denial is itself interpreted as absolute proof that the
accusation is true. “Yes, all white people are complicit with racism,”
writes DiAngelo, “People will insist that they are not racist… This is the
kind of evidence that many white people used to exempt themselves
from that system. It is not possible to be exempt from it.”
Consequently, for DiAngelo and Kendi, Whites can only speak about
their “whiteness” in terms of how it reinforces systemic racism. But
from a neuro-scientific perspective, all colored racisms are skewed
perceptions of reality.
For example, when we gaze into a deep azure sky we immediately
assume there is physical blue over our heads. However, there are no
blue-colored photons reaching our retinas. Rather, our brains receive
the emitted photons and through a complex channeling of information
from the eye to the visual cortex the brain then Photoshops the color
azure and projects it through our glance into the empty space of the
sky. The same is true whether we gaze at a verdant forest canopy, a
fiery sunset, the fluorescent, shimmering hues of a fanning peacock’s
feathers or observing an African, Asian or European person crossing
the street.
There is nothing mysterious behind this; it is visual brain science 101.
No neuroscientist questions this visual phenomena. We reify the
sensory stimuli the brain receives from the objective world and then

grasp and cling to these as being factually real. Theoretically race may
be understood as only a conventional or relative appearance arising to
our mental perceptions. No absolutely objective claims can be made
about it; therefore, there cannot be any absolute analyses or solutions
for confronting racism either.
In striking contrast to White Fragility’s cognitive deficiencies, we may
consider an argument posed by the great German and Jewish
existentialist philosopher Martin Buber. Buber speaks of an I-You
relationship when we engage with another person as another subject
instead of as an object. There’s a subject there, and that subject is
every bit as real as the subject over here. As much as I care about my
own well-being, then so do you. To transcend Critical Race Theory’s
divisions and its many shortcomings, which relate to others as I-Its —
as mere objects — we simply need to be aware of Buber’s advice, and
become fully engaged with that reality. Buber highlights this as a
profoundly existential problem in modern society. It is debilitating. It
is dehumanizing and horrid, although for DiAngelo and Critical
Wokeness preserving racial I-It relationships is not only valid but
essential. When we regard others simply in terms of whether the color
of their skin is appealing or unappealing, pleasant or unpleasant,
superior or inferior, and so forth we are bifurcating impressions that
have no substance in reality. We are simply treating other sentient
beings as if they have no more sentience, no more subjectivity, no
more presence from their own side than a robot or computer. But that
seems fine for DiAngelo and her tragic dehumanizing dogma, the
output of a massive reality deficit disorder.
If DiAngelo were unintelligent or had severe brain damage, we might
understand and would certainly sympathize. But she and Ibram Kendi
— and we would argue all of their followers who carry White Fragility’s
banner into school classrooms — are likely very educated people. That
is the calamity and the clear evidence for the deep-seated spiritual
impoverishment when a person is viewed as nothing more than the
race of their physical bodies.
If anti-racial Wokeness is true, then the more deeply we probe and
investigate it, the truer it should appear. This is one of William James’
fundamental principles when he made efforts to turn the psychology of
his day into a real science. If James’ methodololgy had not been
obliterated by the rise of behaviorism in 1910, psychology would be
completely different today. We would actually be treating and curing
people of mental disorders, and without life-long medications. On the
other hand, if DiAngelo’s hypothesis is false, the more deeply you

investigate, which includes introspection, the more false it will appear.
That is where robust inquiry comes in: to determine what is simply
true regardless of whatever your personal unsubstantiated and biased
beliefs about it might be. What you believe has absolutely no impact
upon whether something is true or not. This is also basic Buddhist
epistemology that has been repeatedly replicated by contemplatives
for several millennia. However, for the Woked who cling to their beliefs
most fiercely they are trapped in a cave of their own system’s illusions.
Neuroscience, including its gross failures and tendencies towards
metaphysical realism, has more to tell us about the inherent dangers
in White Fragility’s doctrine. First, modern brain science has not
produced an iota of evidence to confirm that the mind and
consciousness are solely a product or output originating in neuron and
synaptic activity. None. Contrary to the evidence, most neuroscientists
and evolutionary biologists nevertheless embrace this opinion as being
a settled matter. But it is ridiculous to believe that evolution somehow
dragged along our ancient single-celled ancestors until some point was
reached when a conscious mind — a “nothing” that is not observable,
not measurable, not quantifiable, without atoms or photons, mass,
electric charge or spin – mysteriously arose out of something, such as
genes and biomolecular phenomena. Therefore cognitive scientists
pretend to know something about the mind and consciousness when in
fact they haven’t a clue.
If the genetic determinism of DiAngelo and other materialists
populating the evolutionary and biological sciences is correct, then it
would break the fundamental physical laws of energy conservation and
causal efficacy. Rather the absolutist determinism that underpins
White Fragility’s entire message is just the inverse side of the coin with
Evangelical creationism. In effect, DiAngelo is saying White people
have no choice. It’s genetic chemistry or its genetic chemistry; either
way its genetic chemistry. By disguising and recasting an evolutionary
and genetic determinism about racist Whiteness into her critical race
theory, DiAngelo is in fact admitting that her own perceptions about
reality are fundamentally flawed.
Why is that?
Dr. Donald Hoffman has been a professor of neuroscience at the
University of California at Irvine for over three decades. He has an
impeccable background having studied artificial intelligence at MIT. But
unlike the vast majority of his colleagues, Hoffman broke ranks and
passed beyond neuroscience’s 19 th century mechanistic base and dared

to study modern quantum physics and relativity theory. Theoretical
physics is almost anathema in human biological research and
medicine, which is why these soft sciences have made so little
progress to improve human health and well-being. Hoffman has
performed hundreds of thousands of simulations comparing different
species and their chances for survival based upon their ability to
perceive and comprehend reality more accurately or not. His
discoveries are startling and utterly revolutionary.
Hoffman discovered, across the board, species that best perceive
reality go extinct more rapidly than competing species that only
perceive what is necessary for them to remain fit and survive. During
an interview following a TED Talk, Hoffman stated, “according to
evolution by natural selection,” – and here he is limiting himself solely
to evolutionary biological theory not quantum theories about the
natural world or the deeper theories about the nature of consciousness
– “an organism that sees reality as it is will never be more fit than an
organism of equal complexity that sees none of reality but is just
tuned to fitness. Never.” In other words, evolution has nothing to do
with perceiving reality more clearly, but only to be more fit in order to
adapt, survive and procreate. And now physicists are even telling us
that perceiving reality accurately is consciousness itself, which has no
association whatsoever with natural selection. Yet this only occurs
after we have subdued our connate perceptual obscurations, which are
not hardwired, and conditioned mental and emotional afflictions that
keep us chained to reality deficit disorder
For example, Professor Edward Witten, regarded as “the world’s
smartest” physicist at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton,
has been compared to Newton and Einstein. Witten doesn’t believe
science will ever understand consciousness. “I think consciousness will
remain a mystery,” Witten stated during a lecture, ”I have a much
easier time imagining how we understand the Big Bang than I have
imagining how we can understand consciousness.” Or we can listen to
Stanford University theoretical physicist Andre Linde:
“The current scientific model of the material world obeying laws
of physics has been so successful that we forget our starting
point as conscious observers, and conclude that matter is the
only reality and that perceptions are only helpful for describing
it. But in fact, we are substituting the reality of our experience of
the universe with a conceptually contrived belief…”

One may feel our critique is too abstract with no practical application;
however to at least conceptually understand race in terms of our
sensory perceptions can have enormous benefits to cut through and
lessen the false semblances that arise from reality deficit disorder and
then produce books such as White Fragility and How To Be An
Antiracist.
Therefore, if neuroscientists and modern neo-Darwinists such as
Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Robin DiAngelo, who believe
they are telling the complete story about human existence, racial
differences and a physical causality to the human mind, and that all of
these emerged from natural selection, then Hoffman has shown they
undermine their own credibility. The entire course of natural selection
that gave rise to these scientists and the intellectuals behind Critical
Race Theory has nothing to do with knowing reality as it is, including
Blackness or Whiteness. Consequently, there is no reason to believe
their sociological and scientific convictions are accurate. If we did not
evolve to know reality as it is, then their science and philosophies are
also irrelevant. They are birdbrained beliefs because none of us – if we
take their Darwinian assumptions to their full conclusion — did not
evolve to perceive reality in the first place. Our sole purpose is to
make babies and try to survive contently into old age.
Finally, contrary to DiAngelo, British journalist Melanie Phillips offers a
clearer understanding for why we should not rely upon the pundits of
anti-racial wokeness to save us from ourselves. Despite disagreeing
with Phillips on many of her other socio-political positions, she
correctly identifies the fundamental flaws being voiced by arrested
development Wokeness across our campuses and within the corporate
wing of the Democrat party. First, it is unable to establish a hierarchy
of values and morals. For example, if one refuses to say that any
lifestyle or culture is better than another, then it cannot be said that
liberalism is better than conservatism or any other ideology.
Consequently, faux Woke liberalism cannot legitimately defend the
very principles upon which it defines itself: racial and gender equality,
freedom of speech and religion, tolerance, and class struggle. It
contradicts its own principles and follows DiAngelo’s footsteps to
remove the dignity of the individual, which in the past was at the heart
of authentic liberalism and once served as its moral backbone. What
we are witnessing therefore in Woke liberalism – and in DiAngelo’s and
Kendi’s reinvention of racism — is “the strong dominating the weak,”
and this is an ill-liberal ideology that is already showing signs of having
catastrophic consequences in classrooms and the workplace.