In watching the confirmation hearings for Judge Jackson, President Biden's pick to fill the seat on the Supreme Court that is about to be vacated, it amazes me at the direction the questions have gone. Understandably, the questions regarding her sentencing of those guilty of child pornography are important, but the most puzzling ones revolve around her thoughts on Critical Race Theory, presented by Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, who sends his own children to a school where Critical Race Theory is taught. I find it odd, since she is a black woman.
Critical Race Theory, especially when it comes to the teaching of history in schools, is, by definition, a body of legal scholarship and an academic movement of civil-rights scholars and activists in the United States who seek to critically examine the intersection of race and United States law and to challenge mainstream American liberal approaches to racial justice by examining social, cultural, and legal issues primarily as they relate to race and racism in the United States.
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 exploded in the public arena in the spring of 2021 - especially in schools, where numerous state legislatures have debated 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, 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 school policy and practice.
Critical race theory is an academic concept that is more than 40 years old. The core idea is that racism is a social construct and 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 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.
Critical Race Theory 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 Theorydiffers 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 Critical Race Theory 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.
One conservative organization, Heritage Foundation, recently attributed a whole host of issues to Critical Race Theory, 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 Promise program in Broward County, Florida, that some parents blame for the Parkland school shootings. “When followed to its logical conclusion, Critical Race Theory 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.
The theory says that racism is part of everyday life, so people - white or nonwhite - who do not 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.
Fundamentally, though, the disagreement springs from different conceptions of racism. Critical Race Theory thus 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 is a helpful illustration to keep in mind in understanding this complex idea. In 2007, Chief Justice John Roberts, concluding in a case on whether race could be a factor in maintaining diversity in schools, stated: “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.
Scholars who study Critical Race Theory in education look at how policies and practices contribute to persistent racial inequalities in education, and advocate for ways to change them. Among the topics they have 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 Theoryis 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 is 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.
But they do not necessarily identify these activities as related to Critical Race Theory.
An emerging subtext among some critics is that curricular excellence cannot coexist alongside culturally responsive teaching or anti-racist work, arguing that efforts to make changes will ultimately harm black students, or hold them to a less high standard.
As with Critical Race Theory in general, its popular representation in schools has been far less nuanced. 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 spoken about changes in their policies using some of the discourse, it is not clear to what degree educators are explicitly teaching the concepts, or even using curriculum materials or other methods that implicitly draw on them.
By the end of last year, legislation purporting to outlaw the teaching in schools had passed in four states.
The bills are so vaguely written that it is 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 is 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.
History teachers cannot 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.
The charge that schools are indoctrinating students in a harmful theory or political mindset is a longstanding one, historians note. Critical Race Theory 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 fear, as with Critical Race Theory, 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 toward 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 recent example that fueled much of the recent round of criticism was 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.
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