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The current public controversy surrounding Critical Race Theory (CRT) has ignited one of the most sustained and vocal discussions of the meanings of race in American life. Developed more than forty years ago by legal scholars to critique the nature of structural racism and its systemic impact on all aspects of American life, CRT has assumed a second life. Today, CRT is often presented as the bogeyman of public discourse. The question is why? The answer lies in the context and politics of our contemporary moment. Over the past year the nation has been convulsed by a twin pandemic: COVID-19 and heightened police brutality and murders of Black citizens. This situation led to sustained protest and calls for reform. This moment has also prompted an intellectual critique of the nation’s origins and institutions. It shapes how CRT is perceived, misperceived, taken out of context, misinterpreted and deployed by conservative lawmakers and school boards to undermine anti-racist agendas.
Not surprisingly, much of the opposition to CRT has emerged after a moment of sustained critique of structural racism in America life. The horrifying Black and Brown body count due to the ravages of the pandemic was compounded by the murders of Ahmed Arbery, Breonna Taylor. George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks, Eric Prude, Jacob Blake, and Daunte Wright. Calls for reform of the public health care system and law enforcement reached fever pitch. Activists called for changes in funding and increased accountability. Efforts to defund the police gained stream in Portland, Oregon and Minneapolis, Minnesota coupled with calls to increase the use of body worn cameras by police officers.
These calls for reform were not limited to healthcare and law enforcement. They found their way into the nation’s halls of learning. One of the most visible examples is the 1619 Project produced by journalist Nicole Hannah Jones, which revisioned the country’s founding narratives. Jones’s formulation presents 1619 as the nation’s founding moment as opposed to the Declaration of Independence (1776) or George Washington’s inauguration (1789). 1619 marks the arrival of 20 Africans in Jamestown. These Africans were the first in the British colonies. Their presence set in motion the institution of chattel slavery. While these first arrivals were indentured servants, Virginia, by the mid-seventeenth century established the principle of slavery ( Durante vita). Centralizing the experiences of Black Americans in the nation’s founding and subsequent development has drawn the ire of many, especially conservative scholars leading to charges of political correctness. These charges, however, are often based on the immediacy of the moment and political motivations. They have little to do with what CRT actually represents.
CRT emerged in the decades following the successful overthrow of Plessy v, Ferguson, which legalized “separate but equal” in the law. Brown v. Board (1954) dethroned Plessy but did not eradicate racism or ensure desegregation. The protracted effort to desegregate schools and embed equality in American society fostered CRT. CRT built on the work of historical and contemporary theorists including Sojourner Truth, Fredrick Douglass, WEB DuBois and Antonio Gramsci as well as the contemporary Black Power, Chicano, Native American and radical and Black feminist movements from the 1970’s up through the 1990s. CRT views racism as embedded in the social, cultural, political, legal and economic structures in American life causing racist and discriminatory outcomes. In legal studies, scholars have argued that laws which appear to be colorblind can actually prove to be discriminatory. Intersectionality, another important component of CRT, describes the ways in race intersects with class, gender and sexuality and to produces power and privilege advantages.
CRT’s principal founders include Derrick Bell and Kimberle Crenshaw. Bell was the first African American tenured faculty member at Harvard Law School. The product of a working class family in Pittsburgh , he attended Duquesne University and the University of Pittsburgh School of Law. After a brief stint in the Air Force, Bell worked as a staff attorney in the Civil Rights division of the Justice Department. He later joined the NAACP as an assistant counsel for the Legal Defense Fund from 1960 to 1966. While there he worked on more than 300 cases on desegregation in schools and restaurants. He subsequently served as deputy director of the Office of Civil Rights in the US Department of Health, Education and Welfare in 1966. He also served as Executive Director of the Western Center on Law and Poverty at the USC Law School (1968). Bell was also a prolific scholarly and popular writer. He is best known for his legal textbook, Race, Racism and American Law, which is now in the sixth edition. Bell’s other books include, And We Are Not Saved: The Elusive Quest for Racial Justice (1989): Faces at the Bottom of the Well; Silent Covenants: Brown v. Board of Education and the Unfulfilled Hopes for Racial Reform (2005)
Kimberle Crenshaw is a Professor of Law at Columbia and the University of California Los Angeles. Her work focuses on civil rights, critical race theory, Black feminist legal theory, race, racism and the law. She coined the term intersectionality which describes the double bind of simultaneous racial and gender prejudice. She is co-author of Black Girls matter: Pushed Out, Overpoliced and Underprotected. She is also the co-editor of Critical Race Theory: Key Documents That Shaped the Movement. When one actually understands what CRT is and its basic principles, it seems pretty benign. But in the explosive debates in K-12 school systems across the United States, CRT is barely recognizable. Parents and school boards have gone on witch hunts to root out administrators and teachers who support the concept. In the past year alone, eight states ( Iowa, Idaho, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Arizona) have passed legislation banning teaching of CRT and its principles and concepts.
One thing is clear, the backlash against CRT is based less on its intended purpose, which is to create a more equalitarian society through the promotion of antiracist institutions, and more on a perceived threat to American institutions and traditional values, especially whiteness. CRT is forcing the nation to determine if the way forward in the 21st century will be toward racial equity or greater division and disharmony.