Critical race theory

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Source URL	https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_race_theory
Title	Critical race theory
Date published	2021-12-11
Curation date	2021-12-11
Curator	Dr. Victoria A. Stuart, Ph.D.
Modified
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Summary	Critical race theory (CRT) is a cross-disciplinary intellectual movement that began in the United States in the post-civil rights era as 1960s landmark civil rights laws were being eroded and schools were being re-segregated. With racial inequalities persisting even after civil rights legislation was enacted, CRT scholars in the 1970s and 1980s began reworking and expanding critical legal studies' theories on class and economic structure and the law to interrogate the role of U.S. law in perpetuating racism.
Key points	Show Critical theory is any approach to social philosophy that focuses on reflective assessment and critique of society and culture in order to reveal and challenge power structures. With roots in sociology and literary criticism, it argues that social problems stem more from social structures and cultural assumptions than from individuals. It argues that ideology is the principal obstacle to human liberation. Critical race theory (CRT) is an intellectual and social movement and loosely organized framework of legal analysis based on the premise that race is not a natural, biologically grounded feature of physically distinct subgroups of human beings, but a socially constructed (culturally invented) category that is used to oppress and exploit people of colour. Critical race theorists hold that racism is inherent in the law and legal institutions of the United States insofar as they function to create and maintain social, economic, and political inequalities between whites and nonwhites, especially African Americans. Critical race theorists are generally dedicated to applying their understanding of the institutional or structural nature of racism to the concrete (if distant) goal of eliminating all race-based and other unjust hierarchies. [Source: Britannica.com, 2021-12-11] Structural violence is a form of violence wherein some social structure or social institution may harm people by preventing them from meeting their basic needs.
Related	[Anti-transgender] wedge tactics
Comments	Show Comments: Persagen.com U.S. conservatives, including the Republican Party, have corrupted critical race theory as a wedge issue, with the aim of dividing the American public: "the goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think critical race theory." Republican Party operatives have buried the actual definition of critical race theory: "a way of looking at law's role platforming, facilitating, producing, and even insulating racial inequality in our country," as the law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, who helped coin the term, recently defined it. Instead, the attacks on critical race theory are based on made-up definitions and descriptors. "Critical race theory says every white person is a racist," Senator Ted Cruz has said. "It basically teaches that certain children are inherently bad people because of the color of their skin," said the Alabama state legislator Chris Pringle. ... The Republican operatives, who dismiss the expositions of critical race theorists and anti-racists in order to define critical race theory and anti-racism, and then attack those definitions, are effectively debating themselves. They have conjured an imagined monster to scare the American people and project themselves as the nation's defenders from that fictional monster. The evangelist Pat Robertson recently called critical race theory "a monstrous evil." And over the past year, that "monstrous evil" has supposedly been growing many legs. First, Republicans pointed to Black Lives Matter demonstrators. Three days after George Floyd's murder last year, President Donald Trump recast the largely peaceful demonstrators as violent and dishonorable "THUGS." By the end of July, Trump had framed them as "anarchists who hate our country." ... [Source: The Atlantic (2021-07-09), There Is No Debate Over Critical Race Theory.] A key architect of the weaponization of critical race theory is Manhattan Institute for Policy Research Senior Fellow Christopher F. Rufo, who has been actively involved in Republican efforts to ban or restrict critical race theory instruction or seminars. Rufo was previously a visiting fellow for domestic policy studies at the The Heritage Foundation, and a Lincoln Fellow at the The Claremont Institute. Later, he was a research fellow at the Discovery Institute, a Christian think tank known for its opposition to the theory of evolution and advocacy for intelligent design to be taught in public schools.
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Ontologies	Show Society - Rights - Human rights - Civil and political rights - Right to nondiscrimination - Colorblindness Society - Issues - Critical race theory Society - Issues - Violence - Structural violence

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Background

Critical race theory (CRT) is a cross-disciplinary intellectual movement that began in the United States in the post-civil rights era as 1960s landmark civil rights laws were being eroded and schools were being re-segregated. With racial inequalities persisting even after civil rights legislation was enacted, CRT scholars in the 1970s and 1980s began reworking and expanding critical legal studies' theories on class and economic structure and the law to interrogate the role of U.S. law in perpetuating racism. They said that the liberal notion of value-neutral U.S. laws had a significant political role in maintaining a racially unjust social order, where formally color-blind laws continue to have racially discriminatory outcomes.

Critical race theory  (CRT) is a framework of analysis grounded in critical theory which originated in the mid-1970s in the writings of several American legal scholars, including Derrick Bell, Alan David Freeman  [University at Buffalo Law School; obituary (1995)  |  local copy], Kimberlé Crenshaw,   Richard Delgado,   Cheryl Harris,   Charles R. Lawrence III  [local copy], Mari Matsuda, and Patricia J. Williams. One tenet of CRT is that racism and disparate racial outcomes are the result of complex, changing, and often subtle social and institutional dynamics, rather than explicit and intentional prejudices of individuals.

Critical race theory  CRT draws from thinkers such as Antonio Gramsci,   Sojourner Truth,   Frederick Douglass, and W.E.B. DuBois, as well as the Black Power,   Chicano, and radical feminist movements from the 1960s and 1970s. Scholars of CRT view race as a social construct that is not "biologically grounded and natural." They state that the idea of "race" advances the interests of white people at the expense of people of color.

A key CRT concept is intersectionality - the way in which different forms of inequality and identity are affected by interconnections of race, class, gender and disability.

Academic critics of CRT argue that it is based on storytelling instead of evidence and reason, rejects the concepts of truth and merit, and opposes liberalism. Since 2020, conservative U.S. lawmakers have sought to ban or restrict the instruction of CRT along with other anti‑racism education in primary schools and secondary schools. These lawmakers have been accused of misrepresenting the tenets and importance of CRT and of having the goal of broadly silencing discussions of racism, equality, social justice, and the history of race.

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Additional Reading

Critical race theory (CRT) has become a new bogeyman in conservative circles in the United States. Right-wing groups are indiscriminately applying the term critical race theory, using it inaccurately as a catch-all buzzword to stand in for everything they oppose, including any discussion of systemic racism  [institutional racism] in the classroom. But as critical race theorist Gary Peller recently pointed out, CRT - an academic discipline that has been around for more than 40 years - "in the real world describes the diverse work of a small group of scholars who write about the shortcomings of conventional civil rights approaches to understanding and transforming racial power in American society. It's a complex critique that wouldn't fit easily into a K-12 curriculum."

The current right-wing panic surrounding the idea of CRT speaks volumes of the impact of former President Donald Trump and of Trumpism in early 21st-century U.S. society. The frenzy occurring over the idea that schoolteachers would dare to discuss racism - or be in any way inspired by an academic discipline that seeks to reveal how "colorblindness" is an inadequate goal because of the many ways in which racial power continues to be exercised in supposedly "colorblind" institutions - reveals the unmistakable hold that overt racism continues to have among large segments of the white population in the United States.

For a better understanding of what CRT is and what it is not, TruthOut reached out to one of the key founders of CRT, Richard Delgado, the John J. Sparkman Chair of Law at the University of Alabama School of Law. Professor Delgado - the author of 30 books and one of the most-cited legal scholars on race and the law in the country - has become a target of numerous threats by racist and neofascist elements since the recent right-wing campaign against CRT began.

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C.J. Polychroniou  [local copy]:  Professor Delgado, I would like to ask you to describe to us where CRT comes from, and then to discuss in some detail what CRT is and what it is not.

Richard Delgado: CRT stems from critical legal studies and, a little before that, the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, which is most closely associated with the work of Max Horkheimer (philosopher),   Theodor W. Adorno (philosopher, sociologist, musicologist),   Erich Fromm (psychoanalyst), and Herbert Marcuse (philosopher). My book with Jean Stefancic,   Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, describes these intellectual origins.

As a self-aware, cohesive movement, CRT began when a small group of scholars of color asked the Conference on Critical Legal Studies  [local copy  |  see also: Critical legal studies  |  Critical Legal Conference] to include a panel on race at their 1986 conference in Los Angeles. Early writing by Derrick Bell, Alan David Freeman  [University at Buffalo Law School; obituary (1995)  |  local copy], myself [Richard Delgado], and a few others had laid a foundation and demonstrated that a left-leaning exploration - like that of critical legal studies, that built exclusively on a foundation of class analysis but not race - could not fully explain modern-day currents. Other intellectual influences include Black liberationist writing, radical Chicano writers and Marxism.

CRT is primarily a graduate field of law and legal studies. Today, though, it has spread to many other disciples, including American studies, education, sociology, political science and philosophy, and to other countries. Some K-12 teachers introduce certain of its principles in high school classes, which has become a source of high controversy.

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Given that CRT has been around for several decades, why has it become such a controversial issue in today's U.S.?

Three reasons stand out, in my own view. First, some disappointed followers of Donald Trump were upset with the results of the recent election [2020 United States presidential election] and went in search of a bogeyman. Second, certain white supremacist are concerned over the impending demographic tipping point and fear that white American society is in danger of being replaced by one of color. The third reason is the COVID-19 pandemic, which saw many schoolchildren spending a lot of time at home. Many of their parents were shocked to learn that their children had attitudes and beliefs that were anathema in their social circle.

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Some skeptics have wrongly asserted that CRT rejects affirmative action, while others appear anxious that CRT attacks the entire liberal order  [liberalism in the United States]. How do you respond to such criticisms?

CRT doesn't really reject affirmative action, although many critics think that it doesn't go far enough. But it does question many liberal mainstays, such as "ccolorblindness" - the notion that the "rule of law" is slowly but surely improving the fortunes of people of color  [persons of color].

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The United States is not in the midst of a "wedge issues such as abortion, homosexuality, transgender rights, pornography, multiculturalism, racism and other cultural conflicts based on values, morality, and lifestyle which are described as the major political cleavage." href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_war">culture war" over race and racism. The animating force of our current conflict is not our differing values, beliefs, moral codes, or practices. The American people aren't divided. The American people are being divided.

Republican Party operatives have buried the actual definition of critical race theory: "a way of looking at law's role platforming, facilitating, producing, and even insulating racial inequality in our country," as the law professor Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, who helped coin the term, recently   defined it. Instead, the attacks on critical race theory are based on made-up definitions and descriptors. "Critical race theory says every white person is a racist," Senator Ted Cruz has said. "It basically teaches that certain children are inherently bad people because of the color of their skin," said the Alabama Legislator   Chris Pringle.

There are differing points of view about race and racism. But what we are seeing and hearing on news shows, in school-district meetings, in op-ed pages, in state legislature halls, and in social-media feeds aren't multiple sides with differing points of view. There's only one side in our so-called culture war right now.

The Republican operatives - who dismiss the expositions of critical race theorists and anti-racists in order to define critical race theory and anti-racism, and then attack those definitions - are effectively debating themselves. They have conjured an imagined monster to scare the American people and project themselves as the nation's defenders from that fictional monster.

The evangelist Pat Robertson recently called critical race theory "a monstrous evil." And over the past year, that "monstrous evil" has supposedly been growing many legs. First, Republicans pointed to Black Lives Matter demonstrators. Three days after George Floyd's murder last year [2020], President Donald Trump   recast the largely peaceful demonstrators as violent and dishonorable "THUGS." By the end of 2020-07, Trump had framed them as "anarchists who hate our country."

Then "cancel culture" was targeted. At the Republican National Convention in 2020-08, Trump blasted "cancel culture" as seeking to coerce Americans "into saying what you know to be false and scare you out of saying what you know to be true."

Next came attacks on the The 1619 Project and American history. "Despite the virtues and accomplishments of this nation, many students are now taught in school to hate their own country, and to believe that the men and women who built it were not heroes, but rather villains," read Trump's executive order on 2020-11-02, establishing the President's advisory committee, the 1776 Commission.

And now the Black Lives Matter demonstrators, cancel culture, The 1619 Project, American history, and anti-racist education are presented to the public as the many legs of the "monstrous evil" of critical race theory that's purportedly coming to harm white children. The language echoes the rhetoric used to demonize desegregation after the Brown v. Board of Education decision of the Supreme Court of the United States in 1954.

In the 1950s and '60s, the conservators of racism organized to keep Black kids out of all-white schools. Today, they are trying to get critical race theory out of American schools. "Instead of helping young people discover that America is the greatest, most tolerant, and most generous nation in history, critical race theory teaches them that America is systemically evil and that the hearts of our people are full of hatred and malice," Trump wrote in an op-ed on 2021-06-18.

After it was cited 132 times on FOX News shows in 2020, critical race theory became a conservative obsession this year [2021]. Its mentions on Fox News practically doubled month after month: it was referred to 51 times in February 2021, 139 times in March 2021, 314 times in April 2021, 589 times in May 2021, and 737 times in just the first three weeks of June 2021. As of 2021-06-29, 26 states had introduced legislation or other state-level actions to "restrict teaching critical race theory or limit how teachers can discuss racism and sexism," according to Education Week, and nine states had implemented such bans.

I [Ibram X. Kendi] have been called the father of critical race theory, although I was born in 1982, and critical race theory was born in 1981. Over the past few months, I have seldom stopped to answer the critiques of critical race theory or of my own work, because the more I've studied these critiques, the more I've concluded that these critics aren't arguing against me. They aren't arguing against anti-racist thinkers. They aren't arguing against critical race theorists. These critics are arguing against themselves.

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LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST: It may be time for summer break. Schools are closing, but there's a lot of agita [heartburn] still about textbooks and lesson plans. Here's some tape from FOX News.

(SOUNDBITE OF FOX NEWS MONTAGE)

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Critical race theory is racist.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: These theories that are not based in fact.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: CRT is racist. It is abusive.

LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO: Critical race theory is the newest manufactured wedge issue, and it's following a pattern we've seen with others recently. A cultural squall pops up, gets amplified on cable news and turns into a political storm. NPR's Barbara Sprunt is going to take us through how an obscure academic theory now has parents laying siege to school board meetings. And she joins us now. Hi, Barbara.

BARBARA SPRUNT: Good morning.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: We need to start with what critical race theory is and what it is not.

SPRUNT: Because they are very different things. In the late '70s, early '80s, legal scholars developed an academic approach that examines American institutions and laws through the lens of race and racism. So it's been around for decades, and it's used in postgraduate studies. But many Republicans and right-wing media have co-opted this term, and they're using it as a catch-all way of describing basically any conversation about race or racism that makes white people uncomfortable. So conversations about white privilege, having dialogues about anti-racism - these have all been branded falsely as critical race theory.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: In 2020-09, President Donald Trump issued the executive order on combating race and sex stereotyping [the 1776 Commission], which President Joe Biden has rescinded. Trump's executive order didn't actually mention critical race theory then, even in the sections specifying what shouldn't be taught in the armed forces or at federal agencies. It has been mentioned a lot on FOX News, though.

CHRISTOPHER RUFO: It's absolutely astonishing how critical race theory has pervaded every institution in the federal government. And what I've discovered is that critical race theory has become, in essence, the default ideology of the federal bureaucracy and is now being weaponized against the American people.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: Now, that's Christopher Rufo on 2020-09-02. Talk to us about his role in all this.

SPRUNT: Yeah. So Christopher Rufo is a central player in this. He's a former documentarian, and he's the one who called on Trump to issue that executive order you just mentioned. And this all started in 2020-07. A Seattle city employee sent Rufo an antibias training that they did at work, and Rufo essentially saw it as a political opportunity to manufacture a culture war issue. And Rufo's been transparent about that. I mean, he tweeted in 2021-03 that, quote, "the goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think critical race theory."

And Christopher Rufo added that he's rebranding the theory and driving up negative perceptions to turn it toxic. And, I mean, it's worked. I mean, you can go on Twitter and type in critical race theory, and you'll see videos of hundreds of parents at school board meetings with signs saying, stop critical race theory, even as the superintendents are saying, hey, this is not something that we teach. Saying critical race theory is being taught in schools is like saying electrical engineering is being taught in K-12. It's just not happening.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: But when you talk to conservative lawmakers, what are they saying?

SPRUNT: Well, the overall argument is that talking about race and racism leads to more division in an already very divided country. Byron Donalds is a Republican congressman from Florida, and he told me recently that, look. It's important to teach the full history of the country, but he thinks that the approach just further divides Americans.

BYRON DONALDS: As a Black man, I think our history has actually been quite awful. I mean, that's without question. But you also have to take into account the progression of our country, especially over the last 60 to 70 years.

SPRUNT: You'll also hear some Republican lawmakers and media outlets say, you know, this theory is unpatriotic. It tells white people that they're racist, you know, just for being white, when, of course, the actual theory itself is about institutions, not individuals.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: Right. It's about the systems that are in play and how that has actually created more difficulties for Black and brown people. But there is an actual legislative movement on this. It's not just people talking about critical race theory. They're actually legislating about it now, right?

SPRUNT: That's right. I mean, this is something where perception has led to actual movement in legislatures. Republican lawmakers in nearly two dozen states have proposed legislation that would limit how teachers can talk about race and racism in the classroom. Now, just like you pointed out earlier, that Trump's executive order on this didn't actually mention critical race theory, that's the same thing that you're seeing here on the state level. Only a handful of these bills explicitly mention critical race theory, but they're moving forward regardless.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: As we've discussed, critical race theory is a technical term. It's sort of a framework for graduate programs. So money isn't being spent on it in public grade schools, you know, teaching it to young people. But that doesn't seem to stop people getting upset.

SPRUNT: Exactly. I mean, this is a perfect culture war issue. Unlike issues like taxes or foreign policy, this is something that strikes people at their very identity. And that's what makes it an effective political strategy, to be honest. I spoke with Christine Matthews  [local copy]. Christine's the president of Bellwether Research & Consulting and a public opinion pollster, and she says there's evidence that Republican voters have been responding much more to culture issues and that this issue could impact turnout in next year's midterm elections [2022 United States elections].

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