Critical Race Theory as a Political Tool (2)
/[Note: The author assumes you have read “Exactly What is Critical Race Theory?” before you tackle this article. If you haven’t, please do so now and then return. This article assumes a basic, somewhat unbiased understanding of CRT.]
What a ride it’s been! On the first leg of the journey (I was such a neophyte!) I invited you to ride along with me as I sought to understand the very simplest facts about Critical Race Theory. Why? Because so many people are screaming about it, and school board meetings are spinning out of control, teachers are being “monitored,” and books are being banned. And I’ve had the impression that most people don’t have a clue what they’re fussing about. I surely didn’t. So we spent a little time discovering where this all came from and what the basic tenets of this critical theory are. We tackled some sophisticated concepts and vocabulary, and we even considered the significance of the words “critical” and “theory”; we spent a good bit of time considering the emotional baggage attached to the word “race.”
Most of our time on that first trip, though, was devoted to gaining a legitimate understanding of the tenets of CRT. A tenet is an opinion, principle, doctrine or dogma held to be true by members of a profession, group or movement. So we were dealing with the beliefs of the people who articulated CRT concepts in the 1980s and who have promulgated them since. I think we all understand that we have the right to our own beliefs and others have the right to their beliefs. Still, I wanted to understand what they believed.
Since I published that first article on May 23, 2022, I’ve continued my research, gaining a sincere respect for the originators of CRT. They were very bright law professors and law students working with conviction and a sincere determination to be understood. My hat is off to those who crafted these challenging concepts. As I’ve said before, I never went to Law School, and I’m driving through new territory here. Next I hope to understand how and why Critical Race Theory has become such a political torpedo. I hope you’ll continue the journey by my side. First let’s circle back to the origins of CRT, because I’ve learned some really interesting facts about it since we were last together.
A closer look at how CRT got started
I’m happy to report that I now have a pretty good idea about why the whole thing got started! There was a movement among law school faculty and students, launched in the 1970s, to improve their discipline by addressing a belief many of them shared: that the law is necessarily intertwined with social issues, and, in particular, that the law has inherent social biases. Proponents of Critical Legal Studies (CLS) believed that the law supports the interests of those who create the law.
In the 1980s, a subsection of those legal eagles included some very smart, articulate – including many nonwhite - law professors and students. (You’ve heard of Derrick Bell, Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, but there were others, including Kimberle Crenshaw.) If I understand this correctly, this particular group saw their CLS compatriots driving complacently toward the concept of “color-blindness”: the conviction that skin color or race is virtually never a legitimate ground for legal or political distinctions – so, once you achieve color-blindness, the problem is solved.
Affirmative Action enters the conversation
This subsection of CLS was convinced that color-blindness is not the antidote to racism. They also recognized the uselessness of affirmative action, a system created and administered by those in power. While many presume that racial identity exists somewhere outside of law and is merely reflected in legal decisions that turn out to be adverse to nonwhites, this group believed that the law does not passively adjudicate questions of social power. The law is, rather, an active player in the very power politics it purports to avoid. The law actively constructs the rules of the game, selects the eligible players and chooses the playing field. In other words, Law constructs race.
Many legal rules are not directly related to race relations, these thought leaders said, but still, they create and affirm the structures and practices of racial domination. They reasoned that law both produces social power and is the product of social power. Now, put that into the context of race and racism: If race is truly not biological and genetic (the first tenet of CRT) but is constructed by society, then the laws of that society sustain racialism. (If you are finding this a bit overwhelming, perhaps never having thought about it before, join the crowd. I never entertained these thoughts before 2022, and I am struggling to understand.)
In the mid-1990s, CRT proponents stated that our Supreme Court “not only accepts but affirms the current racial regime.” The group asserted that the Court had become politicized. It’s interesting to note that, in 1993, President Bill Clinton nominated a woman to lead the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department. She had written about Critical Race Theory in the past, it turns out, and Republicans would not confirm her. Clinton eventually withdrew her nomination. Clearly the politicization of CRT was well underway before I’d ever heard of it. You?
At any rate, law students and professors supporting CRT maintain that the Court has a conservative agenda which controls the current debate, and yet liberals seem unwilling to examine the hidden racial dimensions of the structure the law has both created and preserved. And then add in the concept of “meritocracy.” First, the definition: meritocracy is leadership by able and talented persons, regardless of their class, privilege or wealth – or lack thereof. CRT supporters refer to the “meritocracy mythology,” insisting that structural racism continues to limit the realization of goals such as equal opportunity. In fact, it has been asserted that affirmative action itself has a hidden racial dimension, because it represents “racialized power” embedded in practices and values that do not explicitly and formally manifest racism. What it does, instead, is give racial preference in place of non-racial neutrality.
As I read these arguments for the first time in my life, having been a grandmother already for 22 years, I have to remind myself that I am of the dominant race, one who never wondered, for a minute, whether she had the freedom to pursue her dreams. If I sometimes want to push back and say, “Oh, get outta here! What next?” I have to remember my position of privilege. At least, that’s how I feel about it.
In Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement, I read that “the aim of affirmative action is to create enough exceptions to white privilege to make the mythology of equal opportunity seem at least plausible.” Affirmative action is not a “fully adequate political response to the persistence of white supremacy.” It is “a limited approach which has achieved a meaningful, if modest measure of racial justice.”
The history of affirmative action
I feel the need at this time to take a slight detour and refresh my memory about the history of affirmative action in the United States, because it has always seemed a part of my life, although I hear little of it today. It was actually John F. Kennedy who issued the first executive order using that term in 1961 (when I was in grade school), requiring government employers to "take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin." In 1965 President Lyndon Johnson replaced that with an executive order of his own, "to promote the full realization of equal employment opportunity through a positive, continuing program in each executive department and agency."
Affirmative action has been the subject of numerous court cases, and it has shifted substantially over the years. A 2003 Supreme Court decision allowed institutions of higher learning to consider race in admissions decisions. As of 2014, I believe, eight states had banned affirmative action. Apparently some conservatives now even allege that colleges use illegal quotas to discriminate against Asian, Jewish and Caucasian applicants! We are definitely in an era of racialism politicized, wouldn’t you say? But let’s get back to Critical Race Theory, specifically, because that’s the cudgel in use today.
Understanding systemic racism
Kimberle Crenshaw, who is often credited with coining the term “Critical Race Theory,” described the CRT movement as “a way of seeing, attending to, accounting for, tracing, and analyzing the ways that race is produced.” She talks about systemic racism as the systems in place that create and maintain racial inequality in nearly every facet of life for people of color. Also called structural racism or institutional racism, these are procedures and processes that naturally disadvantage African Americans. Systemic racism holds in place the outcomes we see in our lives. Another name for it, Crenshaw says, is white supremacy, making it more challenging for people of color to participate in society and in the economy.
Housing insecurity, the racial wealth gap, education and policing are intimately connected, we are told. In fact, USA Today provides incontrovertible evidence that Black Americans fare more poorly than Whites in no fewer than twelve specific ways, including:
Pregnancy related deaths per 100,000 live births: White women suffer 13 such deaths; Black women, 41.
Black people are 17.7% of the population but accounted for 23% of deaths from Covid in the first 3 months of the pandemic.
Average life expectancy is shorter for Black Americans:
For Black men 71.9 years as opposed to White men at 78.5 years
For Black women 76.4 years as opposed to White women at 81.2 years
The percentage of high school students who graduate on time varies significantly by race:
Asian American/Pacific Islander 92%
White 89%
Hispanic or Latino 81%
Black 79%
American Indian 74%.
Four-year college graduation rates vary significantly by race:
Asian American 74%
White 64%
Hispanic/Latino 54%
Black 40%
American Indian 39%
Unemployment rates (seasonally adjusted, and reported early in the pandemic):
Average for the US 13.3%
White unemployment 12.4%
Asian unemployment 15%
Black unemployment 16.8%
Hispanic unemployment 17.6%
Of all the Fortune 500 CEOS, four are Black.
Black median income trails other races:
Asian $81,331
White $68,145
All races combined $61,372
Hispanic $50,486
Black $40,258
Black homeownership rates are lowest in the US:
Average is 65.3%
White 73.7%
Black 44%
Hispanic 48.9%
All other races 56%
The Black poverty rate is more than double the White poverty rate:
8.7% of White Americans live in poverty
10% of Asian Americans live in poverty
All races combined living in poverty numbers 12.3%
18.3% of Hispanic Americans live in poverty
21.2% of Black Americans live in poverty
Consider inmates in federal and state prison: Mass incarceration is declining, but:
475,900 Blacks are in prison, 436,500 Whites, 336,500 Hispanics
And the US population is 61% White, 18% Hispanic, and 13% Black.
Finally, consider the racial makeup of Congress: 3 Black senators out of 100; 52 Black representatives out of 435.
But is CRT being taught in schools?
Next I turned to Education Week, because I wanted to head toward the hot-ticket item: teaching Critical Race Theory in American schools. Is it happening? And what exactly would that look like? This article starts with an important observation: Critical Race Theory puts an emphasis on outcomes, not merely on individuals’ own beliefs, and it calls on these outcomes to be examined and rectified. That gave me pause. Remember that, up above, I asserted that we all have a right to our own beliefs? However, we don’t have a right to our own data: Outcomes such as the 12 listed above are statistical facts. I need to acknowledge the facts, regardless of what I believe.
Education Week goes on to say, “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…” The author refers to a group called Parents Defending Education, which claims that schools teach children that “white people are inherently privileged, while Black and other people of color are inherently oppressed and victimized.”
Am I stupid, or isn’t that what I just learned from the data? Isn’t it statistically true that White people like me are inherently privileged simply by our racial designation, even if we never realized it, never promoted it at the expense of others, never sought to undermine the opportunities of others? Didn’t I just see 12 examples of that?
This advocacy group (Parents Defending Education) goes on to charge that schools are teaching 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.” Here the author explains: 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. I find that an interesting perspective – something that might deserve another drive-by in the future.
Education Week continues: 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. May I please second that motion?! I was a high school teacher for many years, and language was the tool of my trade, yet I have struggled mightily to understand the legal concepts inherent to CRT. I cannot imagine teaching it when I, myself, have trouble fully grasping it. And, when asked, the overwhelming majority of American teachers say they neither teach CRT nor are asked to do so.
So, what are states trying to stop?
As of just a couple weeks ago, I learned, legislation purporting to outlaw CRT in schools has passed in Idaho, Iowa, Oklahoma, and Tennessee and has been proposed in various other statehouses. Some of this legislation that has already passed bans teachers from introducing concepts such as these:
One race or sex is inherently superior
Any individual is inherently racist or sexist because of their race or sex
Anyone should feel discomfort because of their race or sex
Actually, legislators in 15 states have introduced bills that seek to restrict how teachers can discuss racism, sexism, and other social issues. According to this source, the legislation, all introduced by Republican lawmakers, uses language similar to an executive order former President Donald Trump put in place to ban diversity training for federal workers. The order has since been rescinded by President Joe Biden.
Supporters of such legislation say, point-blank, that their goal is to stop schools from teaching Critical Race Theory. That leaves me confused because, in all my research on CRT, I never found any mention of one race being superior or members of any race being inherently racist. What are these legislatures trying to prevent? Personally, as a member of the race that clearly has been dominant and privileged throughout American history, I feel neither superior nor inferior. Nor do I feel like a racist.
I feel pretty dumb, actually – to think that I never even considered the possibility: that race is socially assigned rather than genetically determined; that I might be squeamish about considering racial disparity because I perceive condemnation of the system as condemnation of me; that people of other races enjoy opportunities only when their needs converge with mine as a White person; that my perception of other races might be influenced by totally unrelated factors such as the economy, the job market, international relations and such; that I might fail to recognize my intersectionality with others simply by relegating them to a “race” and failing to see our other shared identities; or that I probably ought to talk less about race and racism and racial equality and listen to voices not within the dominant group.
Could it be a false flag?
Wow! I’ve learned a lot on this journey, and I’m so glad I did. Now for the elephant in the room: How and why has this become so politicized? Well, clearly, affirmative action, beginning in the early 60s and engaging the courts ever since, probably set the stage for that. As CRT spun off from the Critical Legal Studies movement of the 70s and 80s, it has been somewhat “political” all along, its authors viewing both conservatives and liberals as off the mark. And we know CRT already had some political association during the Clinton administration in the early 90s. I am aware that then-president Donald Trump issued an executive order in September 2020 that all federal agencies must “cease and desist from using taxpayer dollars to fund these divisive, un-American propaganda training sessions,” referring to race-relations training and, specifically, Critical Race Theory training. Around the same time, he rebuked the 1619 Project as “warped” and “distorted.” All that, coming from the nation’s biggest megaphone, must have had some political effect. Pour those ingredients into the recent stew of white supremacy, Black Lives Matter, the death of George Floyd and such, and you might wonder how CRT could not be politicized.
Well, no matter how we got here – here we are! I’ve been driving down the road, gawking and gaping and taking in the sights (with you at my elbow), striving to learn the facts about Critical Race Theory, while all over the country people are frantic about abortion rights (or not), gun control (or not), and the possibility that their children might be learning Critical Race Theory in school (or not). Again, as a long-time high school teacher, I sincerely doubt the likelihood that even the teachers could grasp CRT concepts – much less the students. No, I have to believe CRT is a false flag, being conveniently (desperately?) wielded to exacerbate political unrest, and it has been unwittingly adopted as a talking point (yelling point?) by folks who trust that others know better than they – and find that sufficient. I don’t.
Oh, how I would love to talk to those people - no, to listen to those people: good Americans, I suspect, caring parents, perhaps fine neighbors and hard workers and all. If I could ask questions of the Americans – especially in Green Bay, Wisconsin – who are frantic that their children are being taught Critical Race Theory and so are banning books and insisting on observing classes and who-knows-what-else – what would I like to learn from them? What do you think of this? Have I chosen the right questions? (I’m not asking you to answer them – just to review them and help me choose the best questions.) I’m thinking of these questions:
Do you believe that race is genetically determined or socially assigned?
On what data do you base that belief?
On a scale of 1 to 100, with 1 being “absolutely not racist” and 100 being “as racist as possible,” how would you rate yourself?
As you look back on your life, do you believe you had any privilege or lack of privilege because of your race?
On a scale of 1 to 100, with 1 being “not at all” and 100 being “absolutely and unquestionably,” do you believe White people in the U.S. are the dominant and privileged race?
To what extent do you believe laws are made by those in power to serve those in power: Not at all? Somewhat? Mostly? Completely?
Do you believe children of minority groups need to have special consideration in school to ensure they feel safe and supported?
Do you believe that learning about slavery and Jim Crow laws and forced relocation of indigenous Americans makes White children feel uncomfortable?
Do you believe your children are being taught Critical Race Theory in school?
With what race do you identify?
If you had to take a 10-point quiz on Critical Race Theory right now, how many points do you think you’d score?
So, what do you think of my questions? How would you feel about answering them? Are there some other questions you think I should be asking?
In case you’re wondering how I feel about this trip we’ve been on, I will tell you that I’ve had my ups and downs. I definitely experienced some motion sickness when my eyes were first opened and I finally viewed race from the perspective of astute, educated members of marginalized groups whose beliefs were clearly based on sound analysis over years of consideration. Their conclusions made me, the White person at the wheel, feel a little queasy. However, the more I learned about Critical Race Theory – the real stuff that started with Critical Legal Studies, not today’s political squawking - the more confident I became in my ability to drive this vehicle responsibly toward a destination where all Americans enjoy the same privileges and opportunities. It will be a very long drive, and I’m not young, but I’m up for it.
Now, let me hear from you.