Critical Race Theory
What is Critical Race Theory & Why is it Under Attack?
By Stephen Sawchuk — May 18, 2021
Is “critical race theory” a way of understanding how American racism has shaped public policy, or a divisive discourse that pits people of color against white people? Liberals and conservatives are in sharp disagreement.
The topic has exploded in the public arena this spring—especially in K-12, where numerous state legislatures are debating bills seeking to ban its use in the classroom.
In truth, the divides are not nearly as neat as they may seem. The events of the last decade have increased public awareness about things like housing segregation, the impacts of criminal justice policy in the 1990s, and the legacy of enslavement on Black Americans. But there is much less consensus on what the government’s role should be in righting these past wrongs. Add children and schooling into the mix and the debate becomes especially volatile.
School boards, superintendents, even principals and teachers are already facing questions about critical race theory, and there are significant disagreements even among experts about its precise definition as well as how its tenets should inform K-12 policy and practice. This explainer is meant only as a starting point to help educators grasp core aspects of the current debate.
Just what is critical race theory anyway?
Critical race theory is an academic concept that is more than 40 years old. The core idea is that race is a social construct, and that racism is not merely the product of individual bias or prejudice, but also something embedded in legal systems and policies.
The basic tenets of critical race theory, or CRT, emerged out of a framework for legal analysis in the late 1970s and early 1980s created by legal scholars Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Richard Delgado, among others.
A good example is when, in the 1930s, government officials literally drew lines around areas deemed poor financial risks, often explicitly due to the racial composition of inhabitants. Banks subsequently refused to offer mortgages to Black people in those areas.
Today, those same patterns of discrimination live on through facially race-blind policies, like single-family zoning that prevents the building of affordable housing in advantaged, majority-white neighborhoods and, thus, stymies racial desegregation efforts.
CRT also has ties to other intellectual currents, including the work of sociologists and literary theorists who studied links between political power, social organization, and language. And its ideas have since informed other fields, like the humanities, the social sciences, and teacher education.
This academic understanding of critical race theory differs from representation in recent popular books and, especially, from its portrayal by critics—often, though not exclusively, conservative Republicans. Critics charge that the theory leads to negative dynamics, such as a focus on group identity over universal, shared traits; divides people into “oppressed” and “oppressor” groups; and urges intolerance.
Thus, there is a good deal of confusion over what CRT means, as well as its relationship to other terms, like “anti-racism” and “social justice,” with which it is often conflated.
To an extent, the term “critical race theory” is now cited as the basis of all diversity and inclusion efforts regardless of how much it’s actually informed those programs.
One conservative organization, the Heritage Foundation, recently attributed a whole host of issues to CRT, including the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, LGBTQ clubs in schools, diversity training in federal agencies and organizations, California’s recent ethnic studies model curriculum, the free-speech debate on college campuses, and alternatives to exclusionary discipline—such as the Promise program in Broward County, Fla., that some parents blame for the Parkland school shootings. “When followed to its logical conclusion, CRT is destructive and rejects the fundamental ideas on which our constitutional republic is based,” the organization claimed.
(A good parallel here is how popular ideas of the common core learning standards grew to encompass far more than what those standards said on paper.)
Does critical race theory say all white people are racist? Isn’t that racist, too?
The theory says that racism is part of everyday life, so people—white or nonwhite—who don’t intend to be racist can nevertheless make choices that fuel racism.
Some critics claim that the theory advocates discriminating against white people in order to achieve equity. They mainly aim those accusations at theorists who advocate for policies that explicitly take race into account. (The writer Ibram X. Kendi, whose recent popular book How to Be An Antiracist suggests that discrimination that creates equity can be considered anti-racist, is often cited in this context.)
Fundamentally, though, the disagreement springs from different conceptions of racism. CRT puts an emphasis on outcomes, not merely on individuals’ own beliefs, and it calls on these outcomes to be examined and rectified. Among lawyers, teachers, policymakers, and the general public, there are many disagreements about how precisely to do those things, and to what extent race should be explicitly appealed to or referred to in the process.
Here’s a helpful illustration to keep in mind in understanding this complex idea. In a 2007 U.S. Supreme Court school-assignment case on whether race could be a factor in maintaining diversity in K-12 schools, Chief Justice John Roberts’ opinion famously concluded: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” But during oral arguments, then-justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said: “It’s very hard for me to see how you can have a racial objective but a nonracial means to get there.”
All these different ideas grow out of longstanding, tenacious intellectual debates. Critical race theory emerged out of postmodernist thought, which tends to be skeptical of the idea of universal values, objective knowledge, individual merit, Enlightenment rationalism, and liberalism—tenets that conservatives tend to hold dear.
What does any of this have to do with K-12 education?
Scholars who study critical race theory in education look at how policies and practices in K-12 education contribute to persistent racial inequalities in education, and advocate for ways to change them. Among the topics they’ve studied: racially segregated schools, the underfunding of majority-Black and Latino school districts, disproportionate disciplining of Black students, barriers to gifted programs and selective-admission high schools, and curricula that reinforce racist ideas.
Critical race theory is not a synonym for culturally relevant teaching, which emerged in the 1990s. This teaching approach seeks to affirm students’ ethnic and racial backgrounds and is intellectually rigorous. But it’s related in that one of its aims is to help students identify and critique the causes of social inequality in their own lives.
Many educators support, to one degree or another, culturally relevant teaching and other strategies to make schools feel safe and supportive for Black students and other underserved populations. (Students of color make up the majority of school-aged children.) But they don’t necessarily identify these activities as CRT-related.
As one teacher-educator put it: “The way we usually see any of this in a classroom is: ‘Have I thought about how my Black kids feel? And made a space for them, so that they can be successful?’ That is the level I think it stays at, for most teachers.” Like others interviewed for this explainer, the teacher-educator did not want to be named out of fear of online harassment.
An emerging subtext among some critics is that curricular excellence can’t coexist alongside culturally responsive teaching or anti-racist work. Their argument goes that efforts to change grading practices or make the curriculum less Eurocentric will ultimately harm Black students, or hold them to a less high standard.
As with CRT in general, its popular representation in schools has been far less nuanced. A recent poll by the advocacy group Parents Defending Education claimed some schools were teaching that “white people are inherently privileged, while Black and other people of color are inherently oppressed and victimized”; that “achieving racial justice and equality between racial groups requires discriminating against people based on their whiteness”; and that “the United States was founded on racism.”
Thus much of the current debate appears to spring not from the academic texts, but from fear among critics that students—especially white students—will be exposed to supposedly damaging or self-demoralizing ideas.
While some district officials have issued mission statements, resolutions, or spoken about changes in their policies using some of the discourse of CRT, it’s not clear to what degree educators are explicitly teaching the concepts, or even using curriculum materials or other methods that implicitly draw on them. For one thing, scholars say, much scholarship on CRT is written in academic language or published in journals not easily accessible to K-12 teachers.
What is going on with these proposals to ban critical race theory in schools?
As of mid-May, legislation purporting to outlaw CRT in schools has passed in Idaho, Iowa, Oklahoma, and Tennessee and have been proposed in various other statehouses.
The bills are so vaguely written that it’s unclear what they will affirmatively cover.
Could a teacher who wants to talk about a factual instance of state-sponsored racism—like the establishment of Jim Crow, the series of laws that prevented Black Americans from voting or holding office and separated them from white people in public spaces—be considered in violation of these laws?
It’s also unclear whether these new bills are constitutional, or whether they impermissibly restrict free speech.
It would be extremely difficult, in any case, to police what goes on inside hundreds of thousands of classrooms. But social studies educators fear that such laws could have a chilling effect on teachers who might self-censor their own lessons out of concern for parent or administrator complaints.
As English teacher Mike Stein told Chalkbeat Tennessee about the new law: “History teachers can not adequately teach about the Trail of Tears, the Civil War, and the civil rights movement. English teachers will have to avoid teaching almost any text by an African American author because many of them mention racism to various extents.”
The laws could also become a tool to attack other pieces of the curriculum, including ethnic studies and “action civics”—an approach to civics education that asks students to research local civic problems and propose solutions.
How is this related to other debates over what’s taught in the classroom amid K-12 culture wars?
The charge that schools are indoctrinating students in a harmful theory or political mindset is a longstanding one, historians note. CRT appears to be the latest salvo in this ongoing debate.
In the early and mid-20th century, the concern was about socialism or Marxism. The conservative American Legion, beginning in the 1930s, sought to rid schools of progressive-minded textbooks that encouraged students to consider economic inequality; two decades later the John Birch Society raised similar criticisms about school materials. As with CRT criticisms, the fear was that students would be somehow harmed by exposure to these ideas.
As the school-aged population became more diverse, these debates have been inflected through the lens of race and ethnic representation, including disagreements over multiculturalism and ethnic studies, the ongoing “canon wars” over which texts should make up the English curriculum, and the so-called “ebonics” debates over the status of Black vernacular English in schools.
In history, the debates have focused on the balance among patriotism and American exceptionalism, on one hand, and the country’s history of exclusion and violence towards Indigenous people and the enslavement of African Americans on the other—between its ideals and its practices. Those tensions led to the implosion of a 1994 attempt to set national history standards.
A current example that has fueled much of the recent round of CRT criticism is the New York Times’ 1619 Project, which sought to put the history and effects of enslavement—as well as Black Americans’ contributions to democratic reforms—at the center of American history.
The culture wars are always, at some level, battled out within schools, historians say.
“It’s because they’re nervous about broad social things, but they’re talking in the language of school and school curriculum,” said one historian of education. “That’s the vocabulary, but the actual grammar is anxiety about shifting social power relations.”
Stephen Sawchuk
Associate Editor, Education Week
Stephen Sawchuk covers district leadership and management, school safety, and civics education for Education Week.
Opinion: Who’s afraid of critical race theory?
Not the students in my classes
Opinion by Vincent Jungkunz
June 23, 2021 at 10:23 a.m. EDT
Vincent Jungkunz is an associate professor of political science at Ohio University.
In a short story called “The Space Traders,” by civil rights lawyer and scholar Derrick Bell, visitors from outer space appear and offer to solve the climate crisis, eliminate the national debt and provide an energy source that would end the country’s dependence on fossil fuels. In return, these space traders demand one thing: all Black people living in the United States.
Ultimately, the American public takes a vote, and it’s no nail-biter — 70 percent vote in favor of trading their fellow citizens.
Bell’s story, which I teach in a course on critical race theory, is partly meant to point out the ways in which throughout history, this White-majority country has traded the rights of Black people to gain a variety of socioeconomic benefits. In class, we discuss the many examples of such trades — slavery, the convict-leasing system, sharecropping, Jim Crow, redlining — and the ways these trades perpetuate racism today.
We also do something even more profound: We consider Bell’s hypothetical trade more directly. I ask, if such an alien force were to appear now, would the American public vote in favor of trading all Black people into slavery for the benefits offered in the story?
My classes are typically about 90 percent White and 10 percent students of color — the latter of whom are mostly Black students. The first time I conducted this lesson, I anticipated that students would say the country would reject this racist and genocidal trade. I was wrong. Not only did they say that the United States would accept the trade, but they did so by a clear majority, White and Black alike. Every year since I introduced this lesson, that majority has grown to the point where, a couple of years ago, every student in the classroom said Americans would send Black people into slavery, except for one who voted no — a Black student.
When I ask students to provide evidence that the United States would accept this trade, storytelling emerges as a vital tool for uncovering truths. The White students begin by talking about their White friends, families, co-workers, classmates and neighbors. They share how the people they love and count on are blatantly racist — how these people regularly make racist jokes and derogatory comments, use racist epithets and show no compassion for those subjected to racist abuse. In response to this honesty, the Black students seem willing to open up about the pain they experience in a society in which racism is so pervasive.
After these conversations, everything changes. The White students generally listen more, and with purpose. They tend to show deep respect toward their fellow students as not merely classmates but as members of a community, and they ask what they can do to challenge and dismantle the racism they witness.
When these White students consider the question raised by Bell’s story — one that might seem far-fetched to many — the hypothetical leads them to an honest accounting of White consciousness. Once they weigh the resources offered by the space traders against what they have witnessed throughout their lives, they willingly testify that, sadly, the people they love and have looked up to are also people who might engage in the horror of genocide.
Without Bell’s allegorical storytelling, without critical race theory, it’s unlikely that such radical honesty and revelation would take place, in the classroom or beyond. Critical race theory offers tools for understanding the persistence of racism in the United States, as well as concepts such as White privilege, microaggressions, the construct of Whiteness, institutional racism and much more.
These are powerful lessons that, when taught and learned, have the potential to bring real change. Sadly, it’s this transformative power that many White people fear. Thus, we see Republican politicians and commentators, and parents across the country, waging a war of misinformation aimed at demonizing what just might be a way out of our racial nightmare.
The people railing against critical race theory not only lose the opportunity to help dismantle racism in America but also lose the opportunity to claim healthy moral standing. My students, on the other hand, have forged ahead without letting fear derail their honesty about the racism they witness. And as they tell their truths, they lose nothing for it. In fact, they benefit from their openness. They gain the ability to empathize, to see others’ pain — and they develop a vision of justice based on its ability to bring peace instead of hate and violence.
Truth tellers learn to link their fates with the fates of those they’ve been socialized to shun. Imagine the possibilities if all White people were to do the same.
Why Conservatives Really Fear Critical Race Theory
Opinion by
Christine Emba
Columnist
May 26, 2021 at 6:04 p.m. EDT
One year ago this week, the police killing of George Floyd rocked the country, setting off the largest mass civil rights protests in a generation and inspiring a wave of soul-searching about the roles that race and racism still play in American life.
But as quickly as the wave rose, it crested and crashed — at least among some groups. Since last summer, Republicans and Whites in particular have become less supportive of the Black Lives Matter movement than they were before Floyd’s death.
Why? Because theoretical discussions of racial injustice turned into a more direct personal challenge to the race in power.
It’s one thing to post a black square of solidarity to one’s feed, as over 14.6 million Instagram users did on #BlackoutTuesday last year. But it’s another to defer to Black voices, to change policies that harm Black people, to truly adjust one’s way of existing in the world in response to a critique of American virtue, and of one’s own innocence.
Calls for racial accountability can feel like an attack when you aren’t ready to acknowledge how your behavior, or that of your ancestors, has harmed others. When your priority is to preserve a particular mythology — the United States as a land of equal opportunity — the push to take a critical view of the United States’ racial history becomes a threat. It might result in a real rethinking of the order of things, which might result in culpability, which might result in recognition that recompense is needed. (Hm, recompense — sounds like “reparations,” a subject America remains unwilling to touch with a 10-foot pole.)
For many White people, a year of trying to be non-racist was more than enough.
In a post-George Floyd world where anti-racist reading lists abound and even John Deere, not exactly a paragon of inclusion, is solemnly pledging to fight racial inequality, being openly uncomfortable with discussions of racial justice is passe. Suggesting you’d rather not change the racial status quo is seen, justifiably, as immoral. But disguising one’s discomfort with racial reconsideration as an intellectual critique is still allowed.
Thus has emerged the conservative obsession with critical race theory (CRT), a mode of pushback that has taken on a life and logic of its own. It is a psychological defense, not a rational one. And it has become so prominent because the status quo is comfortable, and accountability is not.
Critical race theory is an academic concept, a form of analysis developed in the 1970s and ’80s by legal scholars including Derrick Bell and Kimberlé Crenshaw. It suggests that our nation’s history of race and racism is embedded in law and public policy, still plays a role in shaping outcomes for Black Americans and other people of color, and should be taken into account when these issues are discussed. It has a clear definition, one its critics have chosen not to rationally engage with.
Instead, these critics have expanded the concept to stand in for anything that reexamines the United States’ racial history, from the New York Times’s 1619 Project to K-12 curriculums that dare to state (accurately) that the Founding Fathers enslaved people. It’s not just a lens through which to analyze society — it is, in the words of Russell Vought, former director of the Office of Management and Budget, an insidious form of “un-American propaganda.”
At the National Archives Museum on Sept. 17, 2020, President Trump criticized a New York Times project focused on the arrival of enslaved Africans in Virginia. (The Washington Post)
According to Christopher F. Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and perhaps the foremost popularizer of critical race theory alarmism on the right, CRT “prescribes a revolutionary program that would overturn the principles of the Declaration and destroy the remaining structure of the Constitution.” Supposedly, under the auspices of CRT, children are being taught Aztec chants whose “clear implication” is “the displacement of the Christian god.” Critical race theory has been purposely mischaracterized as a divisive form of discourse that pits people of color against White people, that reduces children to their race.
On their face, these arguments might sound considered. Concerned. Academic, even. There is plausible deniability — they aren’t about anyone’s personal discomfort with the changes racial reconciliation would take, they’re about preserving the best of the United States and protecting the children from bad ideas. But these are straw man arguments, the use of which highlights the discomfort underlying critics’ obsession with CRT in the first place: their fear of criticism itself, and an anxiety about what actually addressing racial inequality might look like.
Progressives have tried to push back against the anti-CRT wave by attempting to more clearly explain the concept, or better define the term. They should stop expecting that this will have any effect. Instead, their time would be better spent seeking ways to address the response underlying conservative resistance — worries about culpability, recrimination and displacement.
Objections to CRT are an emotional defense against unwanted change, not an intellectual disagreement. Conservatives were never debating the facts.
Christine Emba
Columnist
May 26, 2021 at 6:04 p.m. EDT
One year ago this week, the police killing of George Floyd rocked the country, setting off the largest mass civil rights protests in a generation and inspiring a wave of soul-searching about the roles that race and racism still play in American life.
But as quickly as the wave rose, it crested and crashed — at least among some groups. Since last summer, Republicans and Whites in particular have become less supportive of the Black Lives Matter movement than they were before Floyd’s death.
Why? Because theoretical discussions of racial injustice turned into a more direct personal challenge to the race in power.
It’s one thing to post a black square of solidarity to one’s feed, as over 14.6 million Instagram users did on #BlackoutTuesday last year. But it’s another to defer to Black voices, to change policies that harm Black people, to truly adjust one’s way of existing in the world in response to a critique of American virtue, and of one’s own innocence.
Calls for racial accountability can feel like an attack when you aren’t ready to acknowledge how your behavior, or that of your ancestors, has harmed others. When your priority is to preserve a particular mythology — the United States as a land of equal opportunity — the push to take a critical view of the United States’ racial history becomes a threat. It might result in a real rethinking of the order of things, which might result in culpability, which might result in recognition that recompense is needed. (Hm, recompense — sounds like “reparations,” a subject America remains unwilling to touch with a 10-foot pole.)
For many White people, a year of trying to be non-racist was more than enough.
In a post-George Floyd world where anti-racist reading lists abound and even John Deere, not exactly a paragon of inclusion, is solemnly pledging to fight racial inequality, being openly uncomfortable with discussions of racial justice is passe. Suggesting you’d rather not change the racial status quo is seen, justifiably, as immoral. But disguising one’s discomfort with racial reconsideration as an intellectual critique is still allowed.
Thus has emerged the conservative obsession with critical race theory (CRT), a mode of pushback that has taken on a life and logic of its own. It is a psychological defense, not a rational one. And it has become so prominent because the status quo is comfortable, and accountability is not.
Critical race theory is an academic concept, a form of analysis developed in the 1970s and ’80s by legal scholars including Derrick Bell and Kimberlé Crenshaw. It suggests that our nation’s history of race and racism is embedded in law and public policy, still plays a role in shaping outcomes for Black Americans and other people of color, and should be taken into account when these issues are discussed. It has a clear definition, one its critics have chosen not to rationally engage with.
Instead, these critics have expanded the concept to stand in for anything that reexamines the United States’ racial history, from the New York Times’s 1619 Project to K-12 curriculums that dare to state (accurately) that the Founding Fathers enslaved people. It’s not just a lens through which to analyze society — it is, in the words of Russell Vought, former director of the Office of Management and Budget, an insidious form of “un-American propaganda.”
At the National Archives Museum on Sept. 17, 2020, President Trump criticized a New York Times project focused on the arrival of enslaved Africans in Virginia. (The Washington Post)
According to Christopher F. Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and perhaps the foremost popularizer of critical race theory alarmism on the right, CRT “prescribes a revolutionary program that would overturn the principles of the Declaration and destroy the remaining structure of the Constitution.” Supposedly, under the auspices of CRT, children are being taught Aztec chants whose “clear implication” is “the displacement of the Christian god.” Critical race theory has been purposely mischaracterized as a divisive form of discourse that pits people of color against White people, that reduces children to their race.
On their face, these arguments might sound considered. Concerned. Academic, even. There is plausible deniability — they aren’t about anyone’s personal discomfort with the changes racial reconciliation would take, they’re about preserving the best of the United States and protecting the children from bad ideas. But these are straw man arguments, the use of which highlights the discomfort underlying critics’ obsession with CRT in the first place: their fear of criticism itself, and an anxiety about what actually addressing racial inequality might look like.
Progressives have tried to push back against the anti-CRT wave by attempting to more clearly explain the concept, or better define the term. They should stop expecting that this will have any effect. Instead, their time would be better spent seeking ways to address the response underlying conservative resistance — worries about culpability, recrimination and displacement.
Objections to CRT are an emotional defense against unwanted change, not an intellectual disagreement. Conservatives were never debating the facts.