Like Fresno State professor Dr. Malik Simba, I have taught Critical Race Theory for years, as well, and have, in the process, enlightened generations of students who realize that race is much more than a control variable for a regression equation or a census category, but very much a historical, social, economic, and political project. However much conservatives resist CRT, the inconvenient truth of American racism will most certainly bleed through the lines of any bogus policy that seeks to delegitimate the truth of history.

At its core, this contrived struggle over CRT indeed demonstrates the uses of history. For the dominant group, this is one of rationalization and justification. For the non-dominant group, it is to inspire and motivate struggle. The idea is never to subscribe to dominant group ideologies in the process, but rather foster an awareness of history—including the uses of history, as stated herein—to expose a societal problem without which there can be no remedy. 

By exposing and naming it, we can chart a redemptive path for interracial and interethnic harmony. In fact, this is exactly what we have been doing, many of us in colleges and universities, for decades.

In Lak' Ech. This is Mayan for...

I am you. You are me. We are one. 

-Angela Valenzuela

Fresno State professor taught Critical Race Theory for more than 40 years to no one’s harm

BY MALIK SIMBA

JULY 24, 2021 05:00 AM

Malik Simba, Fresno State professor emeritus, History Department-Africana Studies. FRESNO BEE FILE

In 1987, I was fortunate to be selected for a National Endowment for the Humanities 

research seminar at the University of Wisconsin Law School. The law school 

had faculty who wrote Critical Legal Theory. The “Crits” advocated that law

was a coercive cultural institution that serves the rich or capital and not those

at the social bottom. This legal theory became the basis for Critical Race Theory.

Conservatives attacked the Crits by arguing that Lady Justice remains blind to

social conditions of inequality. A name I suggest for this response is Hypocritical

Race Theory. However, Critical Race Theory, in part, seeks to explain why, in

1957, the white teen, Hazel Bryant, yelled racial epithets at Elizabeth Eckford,

who was attempting to integrate Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Eckford, along with eight other Black teenagers, with the protection of the 101^st

Airborne, was successful. Critical Race Theory seeks to explain to Bryant’s

grandchildren today why Granny was so angry or what Thomas Jefferson meant 

when referring to slavery as having a “wolf by the ears” or a “fire bell in the night.”

The 1960s is known as the period of the non-violent civil rights movement, 

but unfortunately, white racial hate produced an inordinate amount of violence 

against Blacks. Critical Race Theory seeks to explicate this violence in the 

social relations of white over Black and to explain the resistance to how civil 

rights laws sought to equalize to a certain extent this social relationship.

The veracity of how racism affects American culture is vehemently resisted by

conservatives today in the guise of multiple “red” Republican states passing laws

forbidding public schools from teaching Critical Race Theory. This situation reminds 

one of the famous dialogue in the film, “A Few Good Men.” In one scene, Tom Cruise, 

a naval lawyer or JAG, stridently questions Jack Nicholson’s character, Col. Nathan 

Jessup, about truth in the case. Jessup loses his cool and shouts at Tom Cruise,

“You can’t handle the truth.” Critical Race Theory seeks to clarify the truth about 

the dark racism within American culture and law, but conservatives just cannot handle

the ugly man or woman in the mirror.

To better understand why truth-telling is so important today, one need not look any

further than the state of Israel and its clarion regarding the Holocaust: “Never again.” 

Jews in Israel and around the world are required to remember the darkest days of 

their history, which is not comparable to the slavery thesis of the 1619 Project but 

is important to how Blacks think about the American past. In fact, one Black 

National Anthem stanza is germane to both Jews and Blacks alike: “Stony the road

we trod, Bitter the chasten rod, Felt in the days when hope unborn had died . . . 

treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered.” Vanessa Williams sang 

this anthem on July 4^th and was called out by conservatives as “divisive” and 

“racist.” However, American history is exactly that as demonstrated by the 

Civil War. Critical Race Theory helps all to understand Herbert Aptheker’s 

observation that the oppressor needs history for rationalization and justification, 

while the oppressed use history to inspire struggle against that oppression. 

However, theory per se is only taught at graduate school level.

In response to the conflict over Critical Race Theory, Fox News hosted, on July 4,

Trump’s former press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany who ahistorically bragged 

that the major Founding Fathers were all against slavery. However, George

Washington’s Mount Vernon was a slave plantation, as was Thomas Jefferson’s

Monticello, as was Andrew Jackson’s The Hermitage, and most of the signers of

the Declaration of Independence were slaveholders. We as historians call this

illusion “cherry tree” history per the myth about George Washington never 

telling a lie. McEnany applauded Frederic Douglass, not knowing of Douglass’s

famous 1852 speech, “What to a Slave is the Fourth of July?” Read closely, this

speech conjures up the themes within Critical Race Theory.

I taught American history via Critical Race Theory for 40-plus years to white, Black, 

and all others, and no student concluded my courses hating America, but instead 

came to appreciate the complex and difficult mirror of this nation’s history. 

Malik Simba is professor emeritus of history and Africana Studies at Fresno State.