Exactly What is Critical Race Theory? (1)
/Why has Critical Race Theory (CRT) become such an explosive issue lately? I think that question is important to answer. It’s easy to say, “because those idiots believe it,” or “because those fools won’t believe it,” or some other simple explanation that puts the blame squarely on someone else and dismisses the controversy as stupid. But I don’t think it’s stupid. I think this disagreement is a microcosm of the general polarization of our country, and I believe it’s a good place to start the healing.
And heal we must if we’re ever going to restore a sense of contentment and goodwill - even if we hope ever to feel safe again in our homes and our schools and our workplaces. So I’m going to take a stab at it. I’ve got some long-range plans regarding CRT, but my goal today is very simple and straightforward: I first want to help myself understand exactly what CRT is - not what people claim it is, but what it actually is. And I’m inviting you along for the ride: As I drive, you can look out the window at the scenery, glance at the map, enjoy the progress we’re making together - and maybe even learn what I’m learning. Perhaps there will be another leg to our journey in the future, but for now, let’s just get clear on the basics
Before we hit the road, just a quick view of the map so we can be sure we’re all headed in the same direction. Here is the route I intend to follow:
A brief consideration of the name itself: “Critical Race Theory”
Just a few minutes on the origins and history of this theory
Serious consideration of each of the six basic beliefs underlying
The place where “race” actually begins
The social institutions perpetuating racism - and how we feel about them on a personal level
The intricate patterns of privilege and worth and entitlement that are so clear to some and invisible to others
The changing perception of marginalized groups by the dominant group in response to shifting social, civic, and political realities
The rather simple fact that we all might find ourselves correctly “assigned” to all kinds of groups - certainly not just one
The value of hearing the story directly “from the horse’s mouth,” as my mother used to say
Finally, my attempt to define CRT in my own words (and, throughout, my repeated reminder about the complex philosophical and scholarly nature of all this)
I suspect that “Critical Race Theory” is, by its very name, uncomfortable for some. Those are three words that some might find prickly - and then they’re all sandwiched together:
Critical: Does that mean someone is being criticized? Who are you critical of? Do we always have to begin with criticism?
Race: You are what you are, and I am what I am, and I can’t help that. Why do you always have to play the “race” card?
Theory: Uh huh! It’s just a theory - hasn’t been proven by data or science. Keep your theories to yourself. (I’ve got a few theories about you.)
“CRITICAL”
Here’s what I DO know about CRT. It’s “critical” simply in the sense that it falls into the category of “critical thinking,” and that’s a good thing. We all want to encourage critical thinking. It’s the process of actively and skillfully analyzing and evaluating information from several sources to make a sound decision. For example, a triage nurse looks at all the facts about five cases in front of her and decides who should see the doctor first. A plumber considers all the possible ways to stop the leak and the advantages and disadvantages of each and then chooses the best one.
As a high school teacher, I was encouraged to teach critical thinking so students would learn to think rationally and clearly - for themselves - about what they should or should not believe. Practice in critical thinking helped them learn to engage in their own thoughts and reflect before trying to arrive at a well-informed conclusion. With CRT then, it seems we are simply talking about a carefully analyzed, well thought-out concept that takes into consideration all possible observations, data, and perspectives. So “critical” is not to suggest “judgmental.”
“RACE”
And now we must face the second word “race.” I suspect that, for most people, even if they don’t allow themselves to actually face the fact, race and racism are tender areas. Some people feel superior because of their race. Some feel oppressed because of their race. Some feel entitled because of their race. Some feel threatened because of their race. But no one wants to feel that he or she is a “racist.” I understand.
So, you’ll be very interested to learn what CRT says about “racists” and “racism” - probably not at all what you would suspect. In fact, the crux of CRT is really about just that: the actual seat of racism: Where does racism lie? I learned that when I reviewed the basic tenets of racism, which we’ll get to a bit later in the journey. For now, I think we can accept this much:
Race and racism are sensitive topics.
CRT suggests that we all need to consider the subject from an entirely new perspective.
“THEORY”
And that brings us to “theory.” It’s not Critical Race Science or Critical Race Law. It’s not an ordinance or a conclusion or a decree. A theory is a coherent group of tested general propositions, commonly regarded as correct, that can be used as principles of explanation and prediction. So, we’re talking about “tested propositions,” not necessarily proven facts. We’ll encounter “principles” and “explanations” and “predictions” - all about the phenomenon of race in our society.
Now we’ve talked about the title, Critical Race Theory, and acknowledged some of the red flags inherent in the name itself. The road now takes us into all new territory. Wow! As I sought to learn the basic tenets of this critical theory, I had to confront some totally new (to me) concepts about race. Maybe, though, before we get onto that highway, we should meander a bit through the background territory.
HOW THIS ALL STARTED
A respected Black lawyer and then long-time academic, Derrick Bell, is credited with first writing about something he called “critical race theory.” Serious, ongoing discussion of CRT concepts arose during the 1980s, when disillusionment about the Civil Rights work of the 1960s surfaced - when some Americans began to feel that the promise of the ‘60s was coming to naught. Early, important contributors to that conversation were University of Alabama faculty member Richard Delgado, the son of Mexican immigrants (“migrant workers,” as I was taught to call them) and his White wife, Jean Stefancic. They first published a book called Critical Race Theory in 2001 and have updated it since, but they’ve been at this since the ‘80s.
The early work was part of something called “Critical Legal Studies,” asserting that laws are made to maintain the status quo of society, which results in codification of a society’s biases against marginalized groups. As a critical theory, it argued that social problems stem more from social structures and cultural assumptions than from individuals. I think we need to pause here and make sure we all get that: This study asserts that social problems are more likely caused by either our long-standing social structures or the cultural assumptions we all take for granted – not from “bad” individuals. I just want to repeat that, because I had never considered that before. “The problem is not bad people,” according to Mari Matsuda, a law professor at the University of Hawaii who was an early developer of CRT. “The problem is a system that reproduces bad outcomes. It is both humane and inclusive to say, ‘We have done things that have hurt all of us, and we need to find a way out.’”
In 1989, some like-minded graduates held a workshop at UW Madison titled New Developments in Critical Race Theory. What we are dealing with today might have been influenced by that meeting, but let’s be clear: Critical Race Theory is a graduate-level course taught in law school. No wonder we’re all finding it so challenging!
So let’s try to understand the tenets of this theory that has become a flashpoint in both private conversation and public meetings. Stay with me now; what we’re going to encounter might be very new to you - it was a revelation to me. You might be tempted to “argue” with these doctrines in your mind, but I urge you to keep your mind and heart open as we pursue the journey. Here are the basic tenets of Critical Race Theory, stated in my own terms, if you don’t mind:
WHERE RACE ORIGINATES
The first, very basic principle is that race is not a biological reality; it’s a social construction. Race has nothing to do with genetics, because the differences that are perceived as “race” are a tiny part of any human’s genetic endowment. Society invents racial identity. People are not born “White” or “Black,” for example. They are born human, and other humans assign those labels to them on the basis of a few characteristics, failing to take into consideration the overwhelming number of other human characteristics that they mutually share.
I can understand that such a concept might be untenable to someone who was taught, from birth onward, that a certain group of other people is inferior or undeserving because they were born into a different race. A child raised to perceive differences in people – and judge them – will find it hard, as an adult, to try to focus on similarities and characteristics shared with “others.” This is not easy stuff, emotionally.
WHY RACISM PERSISTS
Secondly, CRT holds that racism in the United States is not an aberration; for people of color, it’s a normal, daily fact of life. For White people like me, racism might be an occasional experience, but for my neighbors of color, it’s simply a way of life, day in and day out. That makes perfect sense to me, intellectually, but it’s really not that simple. CRT tells us that, whenever we’re unable to separate ourselves from the social institutions that govern us - when we perceive ourselves as the system - we struggle with this. It seems that the blame assigned to our society has been assigned to us, personally - and that stirs up another emotional response.
It’s a hard concept to grasp. I had to ask myself: What would it look like, if I perceived myself as the system? And suddenly I had several examples. You see, I served two short years as a member of the Green Bay City Council, and I now realize that I “owned” our decisions, and I felt insulted and disrespected when people criticized the city for things I had approved. Here are some examples:
Criticism of our 2020 elections, including our unanimous vote to accept a grant from the Center for Tech and Civic Life to fund pandemic election needs
Our citywide mask mandate during the pandemic
I owned those Council decisions as my own, and I felt the blame assigned to them was assigned to me, personally. I guess that’s an example of seeing myself as the system.
So, how might that work for the population more broadly? Perhaps any leadership role - or even membership - makes you feel that you are the system, and you naturally want to defend it. Some possibilities:
Are you a board member of the neighborhood association?
Maybe you are active in the parent association of the local public school.
You might be a loyal member of a local altruistic group like the Optimists or Rotary.
Or maybe active participation is not required. How about simple generational history, like being a third-generation resident of this city, maybe even this neighborhood? Perhaps that personal history is what gives rise to comments like this: “This used to be a good neighborhood, but it’s going to hell now… I remember the good old days… Boy! We wouldn’t have done it that way in my parents’ day and age!”
It’s a tough concept, unconsciously perceiving the SYSTEM as SELF, but perhaps we do that much more often than we realize. I ask you to hold it as credible for now, and let’s continue the journey.
WHOM RACISM BENEFITS
The third tenet is quite challenging, intellectually. Stay with me and we’ll struggle through it together. Here CRT theorists use terms I’ve never heard before: “interest convergence” and “material determinism.” I’ve struggled to understand them. The first one suggests that the interest of marginalized groups in achieving racial equality will be accommodated only when that personal interest converges with the interests of Whites. In other, very simplistic terms, what my Black neighbor needs or wants will not be hers unless it conveniently intersects with what I want: She can ride the bus because I also want to have a bus to ride. (Did I get that right?) My research led me to a more sophisticated example, suggesting that the 1954 Supreme Court decision that theoretically ended school de-segregation was based as much on the need to burnish our national image before a critical world as it was to end unequal schooling practices for Black children. (I had never encountered that perspective before; I now understand that Derrick Bell considered it a real possibility.)
The other difficult term in this third tenet is “material determinism,” meaning that the moral, cultural, intellectual, and vocational choices of humanity are determined by material factors. We are what we are, not necessarily because of our faith or ideas, but because of our personal capability to produce material things like property, art and culture. If I understand correctly (and this goes back to Karl Marx - I’ve never been a student or a fan), material determinism means that you and I are born into a certain position in the chain of “production,” and that seals our fate “racially.” I have read, in fact, that Marxists believe that one's social class position, under a capitalistic economy, determines the very thoughts that creep into one's mind. An example might be the difference between the factory owner’s thoughts and the factory worker’s thoughts. I guess that makes some sense.
Still trying to understand material determinism, I found disagreement as to its veracity, suggesting that it “sets off a cascading series of oversimplifications, misconceptions, and outright fallacies that cumulatively can be fatal to genuine understanding” and “reduces human action to a calculus problem.” A very different perspective, then. Interesting!
I spent a lot of time trying to understand this, Googling all over the place. And then, amazingly, I stumbled onto an EdTech learning platform (Instructure.com) that offered a clear PowerPoint slide deck, and I learned this: Idealists believe that “racism and discrimination are matters of thinking, mental categorization, attitude, and discourse that is a social construction that we can unmake,” whereas realists and materialists believe that “racism is a means by which society allocates privilege; racial hierarchies determine who gets tangible benefits, including the best jobs, the best schools and best resources.” Those serious charges gave me pause.
This is not easy stuff to understand. It seems that, over time, oppressive hierarchies and processes become entrenched - maybe taken for granted. The class of people who have historically been on the receiving end of opportunity and privilege come to feel complacent (entitled?), and now the ideas become tangible. I guess I might be a good example of that: Born to a lower-middle-class, working-poor White family, with a mother who had graduated high school and a father who had stormed out of the school permanently in tenth grade, it never occurred to me to doubt my future. I absolutely believed that, if I worked as hard as possible and remained honest and upright, I’d be able to achieve whatever I undertook. And so I did. I never considered what a Black or Latina eight-year-old girl whose father, like mine, worked shifts in a paper mill and drank too much, perceived as her future. I took my place for granted. That doesn’t mean I expected the world to come to my doorstep bearing gifts, but it does mean that I expected the world to be navigable and rewarding and supportive - and I never considered that there might be an alternative perspective.
I think this third tenet of CRT holds that “race” is actually a social construction that allows marginalized people to move ahead and enjoy opportunities only when they converge with an opportunity the dominant “race” wishes to enjoy. Racism serves the purposes of the dominant (White) class in two ways: elite Whites prosper materially from this established social norm, and working-class Whites prosper psychologically from it. Perhaps it might be expressed like this in the White subconscious:
Dominant elite class: I own more. I collect the rent and the interest on loans, so I have more money. I call the shots.
Dominant working class: At least I’m not on the bottom. I don’t have much, but I have more than others have. That’s worth something.
If that is true (and I’m not asking anyone to believe these things, just to understand the perspective), then racism is part of the construction of our social institutions, not a hateful choice made on a daily basis by individuals.
Now, let me pull this car over to the curb for a few minutes, and let’s get our bearings before we travel on: From my perspective, that’s good news. I’d rather work to change long-established, taken-for-granted social constructs than to try to change individual hearts filled with illogical, burning hatred. What about you? We did note above that idealists believe we might be able to unmake biased social constructions; that sounds hopeful.
HOW RACISM FLUCTUATES
Stay with me now. We’re going to continue the journey to the fourth tenet of CRT, and here we encounter another term that is all new to me: “Differential racialization.” This principle holds that the dominant race (and remember, “race” is held to be socially appointed, not genetically inborn) imposes, from time to time, different types of racialization on various segments of the marginalized class. In other words, stereotypes shift over time, depending on the labor market, current international relations, and so on - but always in response to the needs of the dominant group. The marginalized segments here seem to be Black Americans, Native Americans, Latinx Americans, and Asian-Americans. With just a little research, I found some examples:
During the days of Black slavery in the southern U.S., Black people were portrayed as happy, genial people, content to serve the needs of their white masters.
After the slaves were freed, writers and cartoonists portrayed Black Americans as larger-than-life, threatening beings - especially Black men having designs on White women.
We might consider our own understanding of how Asian-Americans were perceived at various points, including “railroad builders” in the nineteenth century and then, in the twentieth century, incarcerated as a national threat during World War II. I’m sure we could all conjure changing images of Native Americans and Mexican immigrants over our nation’s history. This tenet makes sense to me.
HOW WE INTERSECT
The fifth tenet of Critical Race Theory, again stated in terms I’d never before negotiated, makes sense when I rewrite it in my own words. “Intersectionality” and “anti-essentialism” seem to be awfully intimidating words to say, simply, that no individual can be adequately identified by membership in a single group. Well, duh! If you attend a meeting of the League of Women Voters, for example, even if all the attendees are females (which they are not, BTW), might you find some who belong to these various groups?
White
Black
Native American
Asian-American
Latina
Jewish
Protestant
LGBTQ
married
Well, you get the idea. Not all Whites are Republicans; not all Blacks are men; not all Latinx are young, etc. I certainly hope I’m not identified by only one social classification. Might that mean that we could find, if we wished, other groups to which we might assign people? Perhaps groups we ourselves are part of? Is that why they use the term “intersectional”? And might “anti-essentialism” suggest that the race assignment could be less essential than the religious or political affiliation or other categories where we might intersect with each other? I think we’re okay with this tenet for now – with questions to be answered in the future, right?
AUTHORITY TO TALK ABOUT RACISM
That brings us to the final tenet of CRT: the concept of “voice of color.” This principle holds that people of color are really the only ones who can tell their story accurately, because only they have lived that story. So, the story of being Black in America can be told accurately only by a Black American - and the story he tells is his Black American story, not his neighbor’s. In like manner, the story of growing up Native American in the U.S. can really be told with authority only by a Native American who grew up in the U.S. - but the Oneida story will be very different from the Yakama story, and each tribe will have thousands of individual “true stories.” I don’t know about you, but that makes perfect sense to me. Still, it makes me feel just a teeny bit marginalized myself. After all, does that mean I don’t have any worthwhile stories to tell because I’m of the dominant race?
Come on! I’ve got stories, you might say:
Let me tell you about attending Catholic school for twelve years in the 1950s and 1960s.
Were you what we used to call a “city slicker”? Well, then, let me tell you about growing up in the country, on the edge of a woods, close to the Fox River.
You have no idea what it’s like to be a local elected official - let me tell you…
And so it goes. I can see how some people might feel their own significance minimized when they are told repeatedly that they must listen to the stories of marginalized peoples. (Being human is not easy!) I do see, however, why proponents of CRT encourage minority representatives to actively tell their stories so those of the dominant “race” can get the true story. Maybe I need to just shut up and listen sometimes.
Now, I see an off-ramp ahead, so let me try to summarize, again in my own words, remembering that our sole purpose today was simply to understand what CRT is - not to judge it or prove it or disprove it or talk about where it might or might not be applied.
MY ATTEMPT TO DEFINE CRT
I believe Critical Race Theory is a process of analyzing and evaluating information about race and racial bias from several sources in the hopes of drawing a sound conclusion about the subject. It is - or at least hopes to be - a well thought-out concept that takes into consideration all possible observations, data, and perspectives on race in America. It is not law or dogma, but a coherent group of tested general propositions, commonly regarded as correct, that can be used as principles to explain race. It does not necessarily offer proven facts about racism or racial bias or their effects.
CRT holds that race is not a biological fact, but a categorization imposed by society based on a very tiny fraction of a person’s genetic endowment. And, for all but the dominant “race,” racism is an everyday fact of life, built into our social institutions in a way that continually benefits the dominant race without consideration for the effects it has on marginalized populations. Members of the dominant race - in our case White Americans - benefit from those social constructs either materially or psychologically, and therefore are not motivated to dismantle them, even if they are not, as individuals, racists. However, all people of all “races” are actually part of many social groups related to gender, religious or political affiliation, and many more variables in addition to race. Those people who have been marginalized by these convenient social constructs based on the concept of “race” are the only ones who can really explain what the experience has been.
SO, WHAT DO YOU THINK?
If you see it differently, I’d love to hear from you - but not about whether or not you believe in CRT, and not about whether it’s being taught in our K-12 schools. At this point, let’s just make sure we all have a fairly sound understanding of Critical Race Theory before we continue to talk and write about it. Once that’s accomplished, I plan to get back on the road and head for my next destination: an understanding of how CRT has become so politicized, by whom, and what they hope to gain by that effort. If we safely make it to that destination, I’m up for one more trip: I’d love to have an opportunity to hear what my neighbors have to say about CRT and explain to me, in person if possible, why they feel so strongly about it.
And, fellow Americans, when all is said and done, let us remember this: We are discussing a law school course! I’ve never been to law school, so I’m in a bit over my head. What about you?
Now, let me hear from you. Comment here or email me at Lynn@TamarackCommunication.com.