Most CRT Defenders Don’t Know What It Is
Progressives who minimize critical race theory often claim their opponents don’t understand it. But the opposite is true more often than not.
Dramatic underperformance by Democrats in Virginia as well as in statewide and local races in New Jersey has caused a new conversation to bloom about Critical Race Theory, wokeness, and the like. This came about especially because the new, Republican governor-elect of Virginia — a Biden plus-10 state — made banning CRT in Virginia schools a focus of his late-campaign stump speeches.
Who knows whether backlash against CRT and wokeness really swung the needle in these races; many pundits on cable news seem to think it did, and that’s all that was needed for a debate to begin.
Almost instantaneously, the plan of attack in this debate from the sorts of folks who really believe in CRT became apparent. The tactic would not be, it turns out, to try to defend CRT from its detractors in terms of its popularity or even its moral urgency. Instead, the progressive counterpunch went something like the following:
Part one, insist that there is no CRT in schools. Part two, state a rather insulting corollary — people who are angry about CRT don’t know what it is.
Frankly, I don’t think there’s any chance this strategy will have its intended effect. It also carries with it some ironic baggage: most of the people advancing these arguments don’t seem to have looked much at CRT materials and have instead repeated their claims from other people making the same argument. In effect, these fired-up progressives have wound up in the position of labeling others ignorant about a concept they don’t know much about themselves.
Law School Only?
The first irony: it’s nothing short of baffling that left wingers who have engaged in dramatic and sustained contestation of the academic disciplines, especially history, are now asking the entire political community to accept a rigid and minimalist definition of CRT, essentially in order to help the left out politically. The move creates a 180-degree whiplash from initiatives like the 1619 Project and the fights to teach “real history” in school. 1619 in particular asks us to question the entire project of U.S. history by beginning the history with a different date:
[1619] is not a year that most Americans know as a notable date in our country’s history. Those who do are at most a tiny fraction of those who can tell you that 1776 is the year of our nation’s birth. What if, however, we were to tell you that this fact, which is taught in our schools and unanimously celebrated every Fourth of July, is wrong, and that the country’s true birth date, the moment that its defining contradictions first came into the world, was in late August of 1619? (Pulitzer Center 1619 Project)
The Project, its authors warn, includes “gruesome material.” But even this material is used to support a wager about Truths underlying U.S. history; “American history cannot be told truthfully without a clear vision of how inhuman and immoral the treatment of black Americans has been.”
The authors of the Project clearly want us to view the ideas and themes we’ve internalized as “U.S. History” or even simply “History” as up for grabs. If the reader approaches the Project with belief in a single True History for the country — with 1776, the Fourth of July, the Melting Pot, and all of that — then the Project has no chance of succeeding. Crucially, that same belief would also lead to strangulation in the crib for any of the other historical projects the left holds dear. No one could accept Howard Zinn, Michelle Alexander, and so on.
And yet there clearly is a single, uncontestable Truth much of the left wants us to accept about CRT. That is, unlike with history, psychology, economics, and so on, there can be only one True version of CRT, and it is taught in law schools.
This counts as a generous interpretation of comments from MSNBC standbys like Nicolle Wallace, who famously fumed that banning CRT is like “banning ghosts — there are no ghosts!” Wallace analyzed the Virginia gubernatorial race with a claim that “critical race theory, which isn’t real, turned the suburbs 15 points to the Trump insurrection-endorsed Republican.”
Many users on Twitter, including aspiring politicians, elaborated on the Wallace position by specifying that the discipline of CRT — which definitely exists — can be found only in postgraduate schools of law:
The last of these tweets is most interesting, because it implicitly concedes the existence of conflictual views on the discipline of history while denying that such disputation can exist for CRT. Progressives might have to strap up and enter the “long battle over U.S. history,” but no such battle can take place over racial theory.
Still, along with what I can only call rank hypocrisy, the “CRT is only in law school” explanation of things conveys a fairly deep ignorance of what scholars have actually written about the discipline.
An explanatory write-up on CRT — published in SAGE Research Methods by Professors David Gillborn and Gloria Ladson-Billings — blows up the narrative around law school in particular:
CRT quickly moved beyond law schools and has become influential in numerous social science disciplines including sociology, political science and, in particular, education. (SAGE Research Methods)
Already, the notion of CRT as a baroque form of legal theory, cognizable only by undergraduates at best, must be scrapped. Established scholars of education and race studies have cast CRT as a mode of thought with broad influence across several academic disciplines, especially within the realm of education.
Gillborn and Ladson-Billings aren’t the only ones to advance this view. During the initial freak-out over CRT in summer 2021, discipline founder Kimberlé Crenshaw told MSNBC’s Joy-Ann Reid that “classic” CRT is a law-school course. But what about CRT in general?
Crenshaw’s own words — in an essay featured in the book Seeing Race Again — describe “the contemporary trajectory of CRT’s travels across disciplines.”
“Today,” writes Crenshaw,
CRT can claim a presence in education, psychology, cultural studies, political science, and even philosophy. The way that CRT is received and mobilized in other disciplines varies, but it is clear that CRT has occupied a space in the canon of recognized intellectual movements that few other race-oriented formations have achieved. (Seeing Race Again)
It really sounds like CRT is actually a “race-oriented formation” that can show up in all sorts of disciplines, in all sorts of ways, and not just within specific legal coursework! CRT certainly sounds adaptable, and not at all like a frozen and cordoned-off discipline. Another passage gets at what I mean:
… the view of CRT as a stable project sometimes denies the extent to which CRT was and continues to be constituted through a series of dynamic engagements situated within specific institutions over the terms by which their racial logics would be engaged. … Today, critical race theories both inside and apart from the university are being primed to map the continuing significance of race despite the rhetorics of denial that are now commonplace within the societal order. (Seeing Race Again; emphasis mine)
The attempt to limit CRT’s definition is a recent political intervention. It’s therefore more than worth it to look at the parts of CRT that enjoy the furthest reach.
Forming CRT
The pressing question is what exactly composes CRT as a race-oriented formation. What are the tenets associated with the discipline? Why view it as its own type of theory?
Contrary to views in the mainstream media, the most foundational CRT principles are simple, flexible, and ubiquitous in contemporary left-liberal understandings of the world.
Gillborn and Ladson-Billings give us a concise summary of these core principles. A set of “six defining elements,” the authors write, were “coauthored by four of the foundational figures in legal CRT” (Charles R. Lawrence III, Mari Matsuda, Richard Delgado, and Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw).
These CRT “founders” named the following six defining principles:
1. CRT recognizes that racism is endemic to American life.
2. CRT expresses skepticism toward dominant legal claims of neutrality, objectivity, colour-blindness, and meritocracy.
3. CRT challenges ahistoricism and insists on a contextual/historical analysis of the law.
4. CRT insists on recognition of the experiential knowledge of people of colour.
5. CRT is interdisciplinary and eclectic.
6. CRT works toward the end of eliminating racial oppression as part of the broader goal of ending all forms of oppression. (SAGE Research Methods)
Many of these ideas should sound familiar. But since being “interdisciplinary” and “eclectic” is woven into CRT’s very self-definition, it’s also helpful to understand the key ideas and assertions that have actually spanned disciplines and prompted scholars to mark off CRT as a distinct approach.
Gillborn and Ladson-Billings argue, “there is strong commonality in the substantive characteristics that most writers take to be the signature questions and concepts that are utilized by critical race theorists.”
One of these concepts is an idea of racism meant to reinforce the centrality of racism in American (or all) life:
In the public imagination “racism” is generally associated with crude, often violent, acts of race hatred, but such acts form only a small part of the much wider understanding of racism that informs CRT … (SAGE Research Methods)
According to (CRT founder) Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic:
CRT begins with a number of basic insights. One is that racism is normal, not aberrant, in American society. Because racism is an ingrained feature of our landscape, it looks ordinary and natural to persons in the culture. (Delgado & Stefancic, 2000, p. xvi) (SAGE Research Methods)
Yet again, these words have a familiar feeling. The capacious understanding of racism described here rings eerily close to the tossed-about phrase “systemic racism,” which surged in popularity especially under Trump and during the Black Lives Matter protests for George Floyd. Indeed, a litany of “systemic” racism ideas, as we now understand them, come directly from much earlier work in the field of CRT:
CRT views racism as including actions, beliefs, and policies that are much more extensive and subtle than crude and obvious forms of race discrimination. … CRT suggests that racism operates much more widely; often through the routine, mundane activities and assumptions that are unquestioned by most White people, including policy makers and those who shape social agencies such as the economy, criminal justice system, health services, and education. (SAGE Research Methods)
This view of racism makes it “systemic” or “structural.” But perhaps the most obvious and directly traceable legacy of CRT lies in the recent expansion of the term “white supremacy.” Gillborn and Ladson-Billings explain that “critical race theorists use the term White supremacy to refer to the economic and political systems that operate across North America, Europe, and much of Australasia …”
F.L. Ansley writes, by way of Delgado:
[By] “white supremacy” I do not mean to allude only to the self-conscious racism of white supremacist hate groups. I refer instead to a political, economic, and cultural system in which whites overwhelmingly control power and material resources, conscious and unconscious ideas of white superiority and entitlement are widespread, and relations of white dominance and non-white subordination are daily reenacted across a broad array of institutions and social settings. (SAGE Research Methods)
This expansive idea of white supremacy not only crystallizes what most of us mean by “systemic racism” — it also stands as a definitional component of CRT itself. According to Gillborn and Ladson-Billings, who cite David Stovall, “Many critical race scholars view White supremacy, understood in this way, as central to CRT in the same way that the notion of capitalism is to Marxist theory and patriarchy to feminism.”
So what is it, really?
There is a reason why hearing the phrase “the U.S. is a white-supremacist society” casually uttered in a classroom would have seemed outrageous just a decade or two earlier. Such a statement actually makes a discrete theoretical argument.
A through-line exists from CRT to such ideas as “white supremacy is a value on which the U.S. was founded;” “racism is embedded within systems and institutions;” “we need to explore this text in order to learn the lived experiences of people of color;” and even “racism is responsible for difference of outcomes between whites and people of color.”
We’ve seen a quantum leap in cultural interest in such ideas as a set because the entire set shares the same theoretical basis, CRT.
No need to accept this argument just from me. The United States Conference of Mayors — the official non-partisan organization of cities with a population of 30,000 or larger — passed a formal Resolution at its 2021 Annual Meeting called “In Support of Critical Race Theory in Public K-12 Education.” The actual language of this Resolution exposes the error in insisting K-12 teaching is somehow allergic to CRT. The text also supports most of the claims I make in this piece. Here’s just a selection of what’s included:
In Support of Critical Race Theory in Public K-12 Education
WHEREAS, Critical Race Theory ("CRT") is the practice of interrogating the role of race and racism in society, in which racism can be seen across systemic, institutional and interpersonal levels operating over the course of time and across generations; and …
WHEREAS, the basic tenets of CRT are as follows:
Recognition that race is not biologically real, but it is socially constructed and socially significant as a product of social thought not connected to biological reality;
Acknowledgement that racism is a normal feature of society and is embedded within systems and institutions, like the legal system, that replicate racial inequality, meaning that racist incidents are not aberrations but instead manifestations of structural and systemic racism;
Rejection of popular understandings about racism, including claims of meritocracy, colorblindness, and arguments that confine racism to a few bad apples, in recognition that the systemic nature of racism, which is codified in law, embedded in structures, and woven into public policy, bears primary responsibility for reproducing racial inequality;
Recognition of the relevance of people’s everyday lives to scholarship, embracing the lived experiences of people of color, including those preserved through storytelling, and rejecting deficit-informed research that excludes the epistemologies of people of color; and
WHEREAS, this evolving, malleable practice critiques how the social construction of race and institutionalized racism perpetuate a racial caste system that relegates people of color to the bottom tiers and recognizes that race intersects with other identities, including sexuality and gender identity; and …
WHEREAS, CRT notes that learning and scholarship that ignores race is not demonstrating “neutrality” but adherence to the existing racial hierarchy, challenging white privilege and exposing deficit-informed research that ignores, and often omits, the scholarship of people of color …NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, the nation’s mayors support the implementation of CRT in the public education curriculum to help engage our youth in programming that reflects an accurate, complete account of BIPOC history … (The U.S. Conference of Mayors)
Let’s recap. An association of mayors representing all major U.S. cities not only accepted the definition of CRT advanced by scholars in the field (which I’ve explored here); it also explicitly called for the integration of such CRT into K-12 curricula. If this group felt any doubt about the ability for K-12 education to absorb this material, it showed up nowhere in the group’s explicit call for CRT to provide curricular “programming” descriptive of “BIPOC history.”
CRT Blindness
Some readers may have noted something unusual about the headline for this piece. I refer to “CRT defenders,” but I’ve only described people who minimize and stringently define CRT so far. It might be clear by now, however, that I view the two groups of people as largely equivalent.
I’ve seen a good amount of folks online ask for examples of CRT taught or promoted in schools, only to retort that the examples provided in response are not CRT. Usually the proffered school assignments have to do specifically with white identity and privilege. And I believe the individuals minimizing CRT in these instances would both a) not object to the following text appearing in a lesson plan and b) describe it as not CRT:
Sue (2003) discusses the concept of White privilege and defines it as follows:
The unearned advantages and benefits that accrue to White folks by virtue of a system normed on the experiences, values, and perceptions of their group. White privilege automatically confers dominance to one group, while subordinating groups of color in a descending relational hierarchy; it owes its existence to White supremacy; it is premised on the mistaken notion of individual meritocracy and deservedness (hard work, family values, and the like) rather than favoritism; it is deeply embedded in the structural, systematic, and cultural workings of U.S. society; and it operates within an invisible veil of unspoken and protected secrecy. (p. 137)
When thinking of the concept of White privilege, below are some advantages and disadvantages of being a recipient of White privilege. (NASP)
This passage comes from a lesson plan explicitly for middle and high school students from the National Association of School Psychologists (NASP). It does a good job of tracing how the newly popularized concept of white privilege — a type of privilege intrinsic to whiteness itself — ties directly back to CRT. This privilege “owes its existence” to CRT-style white supremacy; it ties back to the “mistaken notion of individual meritocracy” that CRT rejects; and it is consequent to the “deeply embedded” systemic racism that CRT theorizes.
The problem is that this whole suite of first- and second-order CRT ideas is not something the left tends to recognize as being CRT at all. Therefore, grade 7-12 lesson plans on white privilege promulgated by PBS, high-school assignments asking students to reflect on the benefits to self and harm to others that flow from white privilege, and other, similar work strikes the CRT minimizers as perfectly acceptable pedagogy, something which in no way qualifies as CRT. But everyone should recognize that discussion questions from NASP’s middle- and high-school lesson plan would fit right into any class directly discussing CRT itself:
1) Should the United States be a color blind nation? Is it important to discuss concepts of privilege and prejudice? Note: The instructor should be prepared to discuss what color blind means perhaps by citing examples of people who state, “I don’t see race.”
Suggested answers: The U.S. should not be a color blind nation. People should recognize individuals’ ethnicity and their own. Prejudice and privilege affect all of us in different ways. Having discussions about these concepts when they occur can help the world respond and work to end prejudice and privilege. (NASP)
This lesson plan helpfully suggests a Kimberlé Crenshaw-approved answer for instructors, lifted directly from the basic tenets of CRT! (Essentially, it replicates the thesis of the book Seeing Race Again: “Countering Colorblindness across the Disciplines.”)
The PBS lesson plan, meanwhile, recommends assigning students readings from Peggy McIntosh’s essay “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” a text whose subhead reads, “I was taught to see racism only in individual acts of meanness, not in invisible systems conferring dominance on my group.”
The embeddedness of CRT in K-12 schooling extends much beyond the “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” trainings that describe such things as “white individualism” and “color group collectivism” — pace Eric Levitz. Even comments from conservative voices such as John McWhorter often miss the mark. It is not the case — pace McWhorter — that CRT is only a “legal doctrine developed decades ago.” Nor is there a “technical sense” in which “critical race theory isn’t being taught to children.” CRT is the very conceit behind videos such as “See Color | The Crystal Gems Say Be Anti-Racist” from Cartoon Network, which implores us to “see color and the unique experiences that come from it.”
It’s almost as if allowed opinion in mainstream media has to stick to a certain line. But blindness to CRT extends far beyond such media, suggesting a deeper phenomenon, a more general blindness to ideology itself.
As Slavoj Žižek and others have pointed out, a form of blindness actually represents the highest form of allegiance to ideology. Žižek’s work makes the claim that “[because] ‘ideology’ since Marx has carried a pejorative sense, no one … taken in by such an ideology has ever believed that they were so duped.”
“For subjects to believe in an ideology,” Žižek argues, “it must have been presented to them, and been accepted, as non-ideological indeed, as True and Right, and what anyone sensible would believe,” (emphasis mine).
For Alenka Zupančič, the “highest level of ideology” presents itself as “empirical fact,” a thought that cuts extremely close to most of the knee-jerk minimizing and denial of CRT.
Recall that one of the tweeted responses to CRT fears was to say “I want straight history taught, all of it.” The notion that CRT detractors are really expressing grievance with “straight history” implies that some particular version of history is True and Right and, further, should be taught to eight-year-olds (or what have you). “Straight history” implies empirical fact, as opposed to the lies, distortions, and propaganda of the anti-CRT crowd. Put another way, this thinking suggests that it is the anti-CRT crowd inserting politics/ideology into education, not the other way around. Conversely, what the CRT minimizers claim to support is some sort of pure education: education as such.
An extreme version of this mentality manifests in MSNBC discourse, as when Hayes Brown argues that CRT grievances amount to “apologias for white supremacy in American history.” Brown fears these apologias are “finding success in their real goal: making white voters feel less bad about the racism built into the structures around them.” Again, white supremacy and structural racism are posited as empirical or objective fact, in no sense ideological — it never occurs to Brown that he believes in these ideas because he believes in the very form of ideology to which CRT detractors are opposed. To the contrary, Brown takes great pains to distance his own thoughts from the named ideology of Marxism (which he seems to think is reasonable to oppose in schools).
To be sure, many conservatives have concocted extremely dubious definitions of CRT; their efforts to eradicate whatever they think it is have led to gross violations of free speech and the First Amendment. It’s just that, on the other hand, I’m not really sure that the left has a more accurate stance on CRT and its whereabouts. The right at least has been able to understand that, as a discipline or ideology, CRT can and will be taught in K through 12. And oftentimes, contemporary left-wing thought is just as bad on free speech as the right. Maybe all of this means it’s time for the left to take a different tack to escape from the CRT bind: less time obfuscating the discipline and more time finding distinct thoughts to teach and defend through commitment to First Amendment rights.
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