Critical Race Theory — What is it, and Why is it Under Assault in the U.S.?
Critical race theory, or CRT, has become a buzzword in the U.S. political scene in the last couple of years. With the social justice movements such as Black Lives Matter becoming more prominent in the last 4 years, along with policies such as affirmative action being instituted around the United States, critical race theory has risen out of the dark and managed to be discussed by all sides of the political spectrum. But what exactly is critical race theory? Some view CRT as an academic school of thought that analyzes how racially motivated policy affects life today for everyone in our institutions, whereas others view critical race theory as being racist towards white people, and regressive to social progress. Because of this convoluted understanding of critical race theory, there are movements across the United States to “ban” CRT in public schools. This is alarming, however, because how can we decide if an idea is worth being discussed if we don’t know what it is. So, what is critical race theory for real, and why are states all over the U.S. seeking to outlaw it?
Origins of critical race theory
Critical race theory has roots back to the 1970s. It originally emerged in the academic world, and it was a way to examine institutions and policies that affect people based primarily on ethnic and racial background. Critical race theory claims that race is a social construct and that racism is a part of everyday life due to the laws and legal systems that exist within the U.S. today. Many point to redlining of housing communities in the 1930s, where the government would designate certain residential areas as “poor financial risks”, which was often determined by the race of people who lived there. This led to lots of African Americans not being able to get a mortgage, due to being in the area the government “redlined”. This hampered the ability of African Americans to build generational wealth, and even though the redlining policies don’t exist today, the ramifications are still felt and contribute to the fact that certain groups are disadvantaged to others from our policies.
Others point out how the justice system disproportionally hurts African Americans than their white counterparts. For example, African Americans are the most incarcerated racial group in the United States. To add to that, the average federal drug sentence is 49% higher for African Americans than it is for white Americans. Police brutality also affects African Americans at a higher rate than white Americans; all of these would be pointed out by scholars who study CRT and show that racism is institutionalized into everyday life, and not always an individual attitude.
It is important to note that CRT also doesn’t just apply to a specific racial group, and looks to understand how members of all ethnicities are affected by the institutions that critical race theorists claim to be embedded with racism. The whole goal of CRT scholars is to examine how the law constructs race and perpetuates racial inequalities along with unfair racial hierarchies.
What is the debate over?
Many people in the U.S. are opposed to the idea of critical race theory. Critics claim that CRT creates an unhealthy “oppressed” and “oppressors” relationship between minorities and white Americans, which will lead to discrimination against whites. They point out certain works by anti-racists such as Ibram X. Kendi, who suggested that discrimination is okay if it creates a more racially equitable society. Lots of critics conflate the terms anti-racism and social justice with critical race theory, which often leads to confusion amongst the American public.
Some critics believe that critical race theory is the root problem for a whole slew of issues in the country right now. According to the Heritage Foundation, it is the root reason for things they consider issues such as Black Lives Matter protests, LGBTQ+ clubs in school, diversity training, and much more. They believe that critical race theory is fundamentally anti-American, and therefore shouldn’t be used or taught anywhere.
Ultimately, much of the controversy of critical race theory comes from different interpretations of the word. Critical race theory seeks to create racial equality, and often some of the policies that are suggested or enacted to deal with racial inequalities are confused with critical race theory directly. For example, affirmative action is a policy that, simply put, seeks to favor members of groups who have previously been discriminated against. Affirmative action is NOT the same as critical race theory, but critical race theory might’ve been used to find discrepancies between racial groups that policies such as affirmative action look to address. To help better understand this, think of a doctor who uses an x-ray to find a tumor on a patient. The doctor uses the x-ray to find the tumor, but the doctor decides to use surgery to get rid of it. In this analogy, critical race theory would be the x-ray, whereas surgery is affirmative action.
What does any of this have to do with K-12 education?
Lots of scholars have used CRT to examine racial disparities in public schools. For example, they point out that most black and Latino school districts are heavily underfunded compared to mostly white school districts, or the fact that African American students face harsher disciplinary punishments than white Americans, or that it is harder to get into gifted programs if you are a minority, all of which is due to systemically racist policies according to scholars who study critical race theory.
People mistakenly confuse critical race theory with some of the practices used to help address these racial inequalities in the classroom, such as culturally relevant teaching, which seeks to make all ethnic and racial groups feel included in the discussion at the time. It seeks to reaffirm the identities of all students from all racial groups, which is similar to CRT, but not the same goal. The goal of CRT is to help students recognize how certain institutions make them underprivileged and to better fight against inequality in society.
Some critics against culturally relevant teaching and critical race theory believe that these ideas will ultimately harm students of color because you can’t have an accurate curriculum and also have culturally relevant teaching at the same time. They believe that works such as the 1619 Project, which look to show how the United States was founded largely on the institution of slavery are completely inaccurate, and do an injustice to all students because of its inaccuracy.
The debate over what ideas are discussed in public schools is nothing new. In the 1930s, there was a fear that Marxist or socialist works were being taught, and there were plenty of motions to ban books that people felt were communist. Organizations such as the American Legion sought to ban texts that encouraged students to look at economic inequality, fearing it was a communist takeover within our youth.
Laws that seek to ban critical race theory are rather vague, given that CRT is not necessarily a central idea and that it simply looks to show how racism is upheld by institutions today. When a state bans teaching CRT, how far are teachers and educators supposed to go to not discuss systemic racism? Should schools skim over the effects of slavery? Or what about explicit racial institutions meant to hurt minorities, such as Jim Crow Laws, the Japanese Internment Camps of World War II, or the Chinese Exclusion Act? If we go back to our doctor’s analogy I discussed earlier, banning critical race theory would be like banning the tool used to diagnose the problem, instead of discussing how we fix the issue.
We can disagree on policies such as affirmative action but banning the process on how we discover inequalities and injustices is not a good idea. We should be open to addressing the issues in our society and teaching students how to work together in their communities to solve the problems. If we want to create a better educated, more tolerable society, then we should work together to make the system work better for everyone, and critical race theory is simply a tool to find these inequalities. Motions to ban ideas, from critical race theory to socialism, is one of the most anti-American ideas I can think of; if we truly believe in the notion that everyone gets their own opinion and that is protected under the law, then we should fight to protect everyone’s right to their ideas. To create a more just society we must learn to be more inclusive and empathetic because if we don’t, we will lose the whole idea of what it means to be American — at least what it means to me — which is that we fight for liberty and justice for all, no matter the cost.
Sources + further reading
What Is Critical Race Theory, and Why Is It Under Attack?
A Lesson on Critical Race Theory
Explainer: What ‘critical race theory’ means and why it’s igniting debate
