Anyone paying attention to the news or browsing social media lately would easily notice the term 'critical race theory (CRT)'. There are some questions regarding to this complicated and controversial term, especially when it was used by the Republican Party.
At a House Armed Services Committee hearing on June 23, Florida Republican Rep. Michael Waltz said the U.S. Military Academy at West Point offers instruction in CRT and on “understanding Whiteness and White rage”. CRT centers on the idea that racism is systemic in U.S. institutions and that they function to maintain White dominance in society.
Waltz called these offerings at West Point destructive, and he demanded that Pentagon leaders “get to the bottom of what is going on”.
In an extraordinary response, Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, took direct aim at the accusations by Waltz and similar, separate comments earlier in the hearing by Rep. Matt Gaetz, another Florida Republican. Milley said the military needs not apologize for fostering open-mindedness.
“I personally find it offensive that we are accusing the United States military, our general officers, our commissioned and noncommissioned officers, of being, quote, ‘woke’ or something else because we’re studying some theories that are out there,” Milley said, his voice rising with emotion.
An article in The Atlantic states, “You can definitely read Marx without becoming a Marxist. You can read critical race theory without becoming a critical race theorist, however you define that. Doing both will help you become an educated person”.
Milley said it is important for military members to be open-minded and to be exposed to unconventional ideas.
“I’ve read Mao Zedong,” he said. “I’ve read Karl Marx. I’ve read Lenin. That doesn’t make me a communist. So what’s wrong with understanding, having some situational understanding, about the country for which we are here to defend?”
The origin of critical race theory
CRT, created four decades ago by legal scholars, is an academic framework for examining how racism is embedded in America’s laws and institutions. It is just now receiving widespread attention because it has morphed into a catchall category, one used by Republicans who want to ban anti-racist teachings and trainings in classrooms and workplaces across the country.
Over the past six months, Republicans in more than two dozen states have proposed bills that aim to stymie educational discussions about race, racism, and systemic oppression in the U.S., potentially eliminating the conversations altogether.
It all began as racial justice protests took off across the country in the summer of 2020 and a Fox News story fashioned CRT as a boogeyman. Though the school of thought had been relatively obscure outside of academia, a conservative campaign was launched against it, and by September, then-President Donald Trump had signed an executive order restricting implicit bias and diversity trainings by government agencies. His exit from office did not put an end to the assault on CRT; and instead, this only amplified it.
By January, U.S. lawmakers began quietly drafting and introducing bills that mirrored one another in an effort to stop schools from teaching about racism or any topics that confront America’s history of racial and gender oppression. While they do not all name critical race theory, which in and of itself is not being taught in many, if any, K-12 schools, the new state bills rest on the same foundation: the desire to broadly stop teaching and training on “divisive concepts”.
Many focus on public grade schools, while some target community colleges, universities, state government entities, contracts, grant recipients, and private schools. A bulk of the bills include vague language, calling for a ban on what they call “race and sex stereotyping” or “race or sex scapegoating,” meaning they want to stop instruction that makes “value judgments” that lead to, for example, white men writing apology letters, as Russell Vought, a conservative activist whose organization has written model legislation for these bills, told Vox.
Some bills specifically want to prevent the teaching of the New York Times’s 1619 Project — a sweeping collection of essays and literary works that center Black Americans’ founding contributions to the country via enslavement — which conservatives have scrutinized since it was first published in 2019. Others reflect calls by Trump for “patriotic education,” or instruction that does not stray from the traditional telling of American history (think: the American Revolution, Thomas Jefferson, and the fight to make the greatest country in the world).
Together, the bills amount to a Republican scare tactic and disinformation campaign, and CRT has in some circles become a dog whistle that communicates resistance toward racial justice progress.
So far, about 10 of these bills have passed through state legislatures, and about two dozen others are in committee; several have died. Even though legal experts told Vox that many of these bills are likely to be shot down on free speech grounds, hysteria around the term “critical race theory” has already caused chaos in local school boards, at community colleges, and for educators who want to teach students all of American history — even the parts about systemic oppression that may cause discomfort.
“When you’re really serious about addressing a problem, the last thing you do is punish people for building the tools to see the problem, to analyze the problem, and to develop the capacity to remove the problem,” legal scholar and critical race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw told Vox. “You can’t fix a problem that you can’t name. Racism is a problem in the United States, and conservatives don’t want us to name it because they are uncomfortable with it”.
What then, is actually CRT?
CRT emerged in law schools in the 1970s and ’80s as an alternative to the mainstream discourse and classes on civil rights law, many of which held that the best way to fight racial discrimination was to enact legal reforms. According to the doctrine of the time, when these reforms took root, they would eventually phase out racial discrimination.
Critical race theorists saw this as a surface-level understanding of the role of race and racism in the law and instead posited that racism is endemic and institutionalized in the United States. For example, one legal reform cannot undo decades of housing discrimination that have kept Black people out of the housing market, nor can one bill end the health care inequities that created poor health outcomes for Indigenous communities.
CRT also highlighted how, even when the law changed to increase racial equity, institutions disrupted the intentions of those laws and tried to get around them, Laura Gomez, a University of California Los Angeles law professor who co-founded the school’s critical race studies program in 2000, told Vox. At its core, CRT identifies this dynamic: When the country takes two steps forward in the name of progress, racist forces push it a step back.
The late Harvard professor Derrick Bell is credited with establishing critical race theory through his publications and groundbreaking course “Race, Racism, and American Law”. The academic concept was further cemented in 1993 when a group of legal scholars — Mari Matsuda, Charles R. Lawrence III, Richard Delgado, and Crenshaw — published a seminal book on the theory, "Words That Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, and the First Amendment”. “Individual law teachers and students committed to racial justice began to meet, to talk, to write, and to engage in political action in an effort to confront and oppose dominant societal and institutional forces that maintained the structures of racism while professing the goal of dismantling racial discrimination,” the authors wrote.
In addition to claiming that racism is endemic to American society, the authors put forth five tenets of CRT.
First, the group was skeptical of legal theories that supported colorblindness, objectivity, and neutrality, which created an “abstracted story of racial inequality as a series of randomly occurring, intentional, and individualized acts.” In other words, the scholars wanted the legal field to think of racism on a scale much larger than one-to-one interactions; racism could never be a random act because race was socially constructed for the purpose of oppression. To be objective is to support the status quo, and thus the country is not working to actively redress racial inequities.
Second, the scholars stated that every analysis of the law should be grounded in historical context, arguing that “racism has contributed to all contemporary manifestations of group advantage and disadvantage along racial lines, including differences in income, imprisonment, health, housing, education, political representation, and military service”. For example, the Black-White wealth gap — which exists because Black people have historically been excluded from wealth-building measures like homeownership — has not changed since researchers started collecting related data more than 50 years ago; the typical White family is almost 10 times wealthier than the average Black one.
Third, the theorists wrote that CRT acknowledges, values, and centers the knowledge of people of color who experience racism daily.
Next, the scholars noted that CRT is “interdisciplinary and eclectic,” meaning it borrowed from a number of traditions like feminism, Marxism, and critical legal theory. The thinkers argued that a combination of these ideas only strengthened their framework.
Lastly, they identified CRT’s goal: eliminating racial oppression as a step toward eliminating all oppression. “The interests of all people of color necessarily require not just adjustments within the established hierarchies, but a challenge to hierarchy itself”.
With this foundation, critical race theory has informed many disciplines, from education to political science to sociology, driving scholars across the country to investigate how race and racism impact their fields.
Over time, even before the recent wave of U.S. Congressional bills, CRT has faced pushback from both conservative and liberal scholars. Liberals held that race couldn’t be theorized in relation to the law since it’s a social construct (critical race theorists countered that class was also a construct that has legal ramifications).
Conservatives held that critical race theorists were taking their analysis too far, with remedies for problems like segregation turning White people into the victims.
For decades, CRT — and discussions and criticisms of it — have mostly been relegated to higher education, with students studying the concept in college- and graduate-level courses. It is not, despite what the Republican bills would have their constituents believe, being discussed in many elementary or high school classrooms. What has changed over the past year, though, is the growing conservative fear that schools and educators may want to reexamine what perspectives have been traditionally left out of American history lessons.
Controversy over CRT
Former President Donald Trump and Fox News TV personality Tucker Carlson have to be credited for the new wave of attention to critical race theory.
The backlash began last summer as America was trying to reckon with racism in the wake of the police killings of Black Americans including Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, and millions of people in major cities and small towns protested for racial justice and helped change public opinion about racism. Organizations pledged to be anti-racist. The Merriam-Webster dictionary even changed the definition of racism to include how it is systemic. Events of the summer set off what appeared to be a huge change ahead of a pivotal presidential election.
In July, a month after the height of the protests, Fox News began airing segments featuring conservative activist and Manhattan Institute senior fellow Christopher F. Rufo, who on Twitter claimed that he was uncovering a new “cultural revolution” that was being carried out through corporate HR, government diversity trainings, and public-school curriculums.
Later in the summer, he told Tucker Carlson that he was “declaring a one-man war against critical race theory in the federal government, and I’m not going to stop these investigations until we can abolish it within our public institutions”. He pointed to a total of six training sessions or programs in federal departments that told attendees that America was “founded on racism” and “built on the backs of people who were enslaved,” and that white people “benefit from racism”.
The term "critical race theory" seems to be popping up at state legislatures and political rallies. In the past few months, it has evolved from an arcane academic discussion on the left to a political rallying on the right.
As this article mentioned above, CRT was a focus of attention last Wednesday during a congressional hearing on the military's efforts to address racism and extremism, with Gen. Mark Milley, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, forcefully pushing back against accusations by Republican lawmakers that the effort is creating division and hurting morale.
Yet, even those who condemn or seek to ban CRT in schools often struggle to define what it is. Real-world examples of students being indoctrinated in its principles are difficult to find.
What was the reaction to the Republican move?
Teachers unions, educators and social studies organizations worry the limits will whitewash American history by downplaying the role past injustices still play today. They also fear a chilling effect on classroom discussions.
Leading CRT scholars view the Republican-led measures as hijacking the national conversation about racial inequality that gained momentum after the killing of George Floyd by a White police officer in Minnesota.
Some say the ways Republicans describe it are unrecognizable to them. Cheryl Harris, a UCLA law professor who teaches a course on the topic, said it’s a myth that CRT teaches hatred of white people and is designed to perpetuate divisions in American society. Instead, she said she believes the proposals limiting how racism can be discussed in the classroom have a clear political goal: “to ensure that Republicans can win in 2022”.
Since March, Fox News has mentioned “critical race theory” nearly 1,300 times, according to an analysis by Media Matters. In March, Rufo, the man who spearheaded much of the outcry, declared a victory on Twitter: “We have successfully frozen their brand — ‘critical race theory’ — into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category”.
The less people understand an issue, the more leeway there is for the Republican party to gin up controversy, as Gomez points out. What the fight against critical race theory really shows is how Republicans are threatened by the progress that has been made with respect to racial justice and are uncomfortable with what it might actually look like to confront and eradicate racism.
“The strategy basically takes an academic concept that’s been around for three decades and suddenly turns it into an existential crisis in American politics,” said Crenshaw. Republicans “filled it with any kind of meaning — with the worst nightmares of those who believe that the American republic has turned their backs on them, that they’re seeking to replace them, that no one cares about them,” and then created “a scare tactic around it that works because there hasn’t been much conversation and critical thinking about race in the public square”.
bans against race discussions are children of color, who often do not learn about their histories or are not given a fundamental understanding about oppression in school. “To preserve the idea that the past doesn’t shape the future, they are willing to heap on to current generations of students of color a story that explains how our communities have been situated in American society,” Crenshaw said of opponents of CRT. “That is an affront to this generation and future generations and an intolerable dimension of this assault”.
Even if the bills do pass, they are likely to be killed in court, as the states are discriminating by singling out viewpoints that they disagree with, Amber Koonce, a human rights attorney with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, told Vox. The bills also possibly violate the equal protection of the laws since they prevent employers from complying with Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by banning workplace diversity trainings.
Is CRT being taught in schools?
There is little to no evidence that CRT itself is being taught to K-12 public school students, though some ideas central to it, such as lingering consequences of slavery, have been. In Greenwich, Connecticut, some middle school students were given a “White bias” survey that parents viewed as being part of the theory.
Republicans in North Carolina point to the Wake County Public School System as an example, saying teachers participated in a professional development session on CRT. County education officials canceled a future study session once it was discovered but insist the theory is not part of its classroom curriculum.
“Critical race theory is not something we teach to students,” said Lisa Luten, a spokeswoman for the school system. “It’s more of a theory in academia about race that adults use to discuss the context of their environment”.
Where did Republican pushback begin?
Many Republicans view the concepts underlying CRT as an effort to rewrite American history and convince White people that they are inherently racist and should feel guilty because of their advantages.
But the theory also has become somewhat of a catchall phrase to describe racial concepts some conservatives find objectionable, such as White privilege, systemic inequality and inherent bias.
Republicans often cite the 1619 Project as a cause for concern. The New York Times initiative, published in 2019, aimed to tell a fuller story of the country’s history by putting slavery at the center of America’s founding.
CRT popped into the mainstream last September when then-President Trump took aim at it and the 1619 Project as part of a White House event focused on the nation's history. He called both “a crusade against American history” and “ideological poison that ... will destroy our country”.
How are states addressing it?
So far, 25 states have considered legislation or other steps to limit how race and racism can be taught, according to an analysis from Education Week. Eight states, all Republican-led, have banned or limited the teaching of CRT or similar concepts through laws or administrative actions. The bans largely address what can be taught inside the classroom. While bills in some states mention CRT by name, others do not.
Last week Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed a bill prohibiting public school teachers from making any of 10 concepts part of their curriculum. That includes the idea that the advent of slavery in what is now the United States marks the true founding of the nation.
At the request of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, that state's education board approved a resolution last week stating that teaching CRT and using instructional material related to the 1619 Project violate state standards. U.S. Sen. Rick Scott, R-Florida, and two other Republican senators introduced a resolution last month that “condemns the practice of requiring teachers to receive critical race theory education”.
Regardless of their viability, the bills and the discussion around them have already captured the media’s attention, caused confusion as to what CRT actually is, and are now having a chilling effect at some educational institutions.
In Oklahoma, a community college paused its fully enrolled summer course on race and ethnicity over fears of legal trouble. In Nevada, where CRT hysteria is only just beginning, a conservative group suggested that teachers wear body cameras to ensure they are not teaching CRT. In Loudoun County, Virginia, a group of conservative parents is attempting to recall school board members after the district required teacher training in “systemic oppression and implicit bias”.
Ultimately, the controversy over CRT exemplifies a tenet of the theory itself: “Any racial progress will be met with great resistance”.
