This blog on Texas education contains posts on higher education, as well as preK-12 policy accountability, testing, bilingual education, immigration, school finance, race, class, and gender issues at both the state and national level. It also represents my digital footprint, of life and career, as a community-engaged scholar in Texas.
This piece by Leonard Pitts gets to the point on the current anti-Critical Race Theory (CRT) moment. Higher education, in particular, gives the specious appearance of turning out liberals—as Pitts' punchline indicates herein. Do read it.
It should register to all of us as highly problematic that conservatives are morally and ethnically bankrupt when all they have to offer is dog-whistle politics.
Professors, teachers, school board members, and administrators, y'all are on the front lines of this and you must be strong and push back. Our legislature goes into special session after July 8th and you need to make your voices heard. This June 24th Tribcast of the Texas Tribune will help orient you.
Anti-CRT House Bill 3979 that he already signed into law, will come up again in special session, presumably for amendments. It's part of his presidential bid for president, as mentioned in the Austin American Statesmen's editorial that I just posted to this blog.
Republicans are trying to make the world safer for ignorance.
(Chris O'Meara | AP photo) In this Dec. 14, 2020,photo Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis speaks to the media after watching the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine delivered at Tampa General Hospital in Tampa, Fla.
By Leonard Pitts | The Miami Herald
| June 27, 2021, 8:00 a.m.
I owe a lot to Gary Mahoney.
He was the campus conservative back in the middle ’70s, when I was a student at the University of Southern California and we went at it hammer and tongs a few times on the opinion pages of the Daily Trojan. I no longer recall the details of our disagreements. What I do remember is realizing that he was good and that I had to up my game — tighten my reasoning, sharpen my logic — if I hoped to stay in the ring with him.
He made me better in the same way college itself did. Nearly five decades later, I value those years less for any specific thing I learned in class than for the fact that I learned how to think. Not “what” to think, but how, i.e., how to gather and evaluate information, how to analyze and extrapolate from it, how to defend my ideas in the scrum of intellectual conflict.
That’s a lesson students will be denied if Republicans like Ron DeSantis get their way. Last week, Florida’s governor signed a bill requiring the state’s public colleges and universities to survey students and faculty on their ideological beliefs. The aim, he claims, is to prevent schools from “indoctrinating” students. DeSantis has hinted that those failing to show “intellectual diversity” will face budget cuts.
You may gauge the sincerity of his commitment to that diversity by the fact that this comes two weeks after he pushed to ban the teaching of critical race theory — an academic framework originated by legal scholars over 40 years ago. Like other states where similar restrictions are becoming law, Florida seeks not to further intellectual diversity, but to prevent it.
Meaning, it aims to protect kids raised on mom and dad’s steady diet of Fox “News” and Breitbart from the shock of having any ideas they’ve thereby imbibed challenged in the outside world. Which is hypocritical on its face. After all, conservatives once — not unreasonably — chided liberals for trying to bubble-wrap students with trigger warnings and safe spaces. Now they use force of law to do the very same thing.
It should go without saying that it’s none of the state’s business what you or I think. It should be likewise obvious that this law will stifle debate and muzzle instructors and is thus antithetical to the mission of our colleges and universities.
There is no mystery why conservatives find education dangerous. A 2015 Pew Research Center study quantified that the better educated one is, the more likely one is to hold liberal beliefs. But I’d argue, contrary to what conservatives seem to feel, that’s not because of bullying professors shouting left-wing dogma. Rather, it’s because once you learn how to think, you’re less susceptible to thin reasoning and easy answers. And increasingly, that’s all conservatism’s got.
That may not have been true — or at least, may have been less true — decades ago. But back then, the right had some intellectual underpinning, had yet to devolve into the twitching id of perpetual resentment now on daily display. I mean, is anyone overawed by the profundity of Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene? How about Louie Gohmert? Or even Ron DeSantis?
An opinion one can’t defend — using actual facts and recognizable reason — is an opinion not worth having. At some level, conservatives must know they fail that standard, so they work to undermine it instead, to make the world safe for ignorance.
Teach your children well, the songwriter said. But this is the opposite of that.
I like to think Gary Mahoney would agree.
Leonard Pitts Jr.is a columnist for the Miami Herald. lpitts@miamiherald.com
Great editorial by the editors of the Austin American-Statesman. It notes the willingness of the Texas GOP to "stoke conflict," by, for example, signing anti-Critical Race Theory (CRT) Bill—House Bill 3979—into law this past legislative session that is, in fact, not actually getting taught in K-12 schools. CRT is college-level instruction, not K-12. Most teachers do not even know what it means if they have ever even heard of it.
This agenda amounts to dog-whistle politics designed to create a wedge issue that Gov. Greg Abbott can run on in his bid for the U.S. presidency, as indicated in the editorial below. Rather than fearing the teaching of CRT in our nation's classrooms, the only thing to fear is the Texas GOP itself and the whitewashing of history, alongside local political struggles and strife of an unenforceable policy that this mean-spirited law will inaugurate.
American-Statesman Editorial Board | June 27, 2021
When President Joe Biden signed the law making Juneteenth a national holiday, he extolled the power of history to teach.
“All Americans can feel the power of this day, and learn from our history,” Biden said at a signing ceremony at the White House. The law designates June 19 as the national day to commemorate the end of slavery.
Juneteenth might be new to some Americans, but, of course, it has long been celebrated in Texas. It draws its name from June 19, 1865, the day the news of freedom reached enslaved people in Galveston -- more than 2 years after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed.
A federal holiday marking the end of slavery is symbolically potent on the heels of a year of racial strife and Black Lives Matter protests in Austin and across the country. But the same week Biden signed the Juneteenth holiday law, Gov. Greg Abbott signed a law restricting how current events and our nation’s long history of racism can be taught in public schools, for example mandating that teachers must "give deference to both sides" when discussing current events.
In signing the law Abbott has delved yet again into another attempt to stoke cultural conflicts and dictate what Texans, in this case educators, can and cannot do. Once the Party of Small Government, the Texas GOP has become the Party of Government Knows Best under the governor's helm.
The measure Abbott signed, HB 3979, is known as the critical race theory bill though it doesn’t contain the words. Abbott, however, invoked them in signing the law, calling for abolishing critical race theory and for the Legislature to take up the issue at its special session this summer.
If you don’t know what critical race theory is, you’re probably not alone. And if you’re wondering why it’s relevant to your life and why the governor is set on killing it and on telling teachers how to teach, welcome to Texas and its Republican-controlled Legislature. Though we recognize that state lawmakers have a duty to oversee education policy and how our tax money is spent, this is hardly an example of responsible government responding to a critical and urgent need. Indeed, some education experts say there is little if any evidence critical race theory is widely taught in our schools.
"Nobody in K-12 is teaching critical race theory,” Andrew Robinson, an 8th grade U.S. history teacher in Dallas, told the Texas Tribune.
What is critical race theory?
For the uninitiated, critical race theory is the academic discipline practiced by scholars, legal experts and others that questions the role of race in society and why racism endures. Many conservative lawmakers, commentators and parents rail against it, sounding alarms that it is a divisive, racist threat and that it is used to teach white children they are racist and so is the country. They claim, without evidence, that it teaches people of color to hate white people and assigns them blame for the country's racial sins. Legislation similar to Texas' has been proposed in 22 states; Texas is one of a handful of states where it has been signed into law.
With the lack of hard evidence that critical race theory is even being taught in our schools, attacks on an honest accounting of the country's racist past are poorly disguised attempts to whitewash history, to stoke racial anxiety and grievances and to exploit a wedge issue ahead of the 2022 midterms. Abbott is girding for reelection and a possible presidential run. A recent poll found 63 percent of Republicans are against teaching critical race theory in K-12 schools, compared to 13 percent of Democrats.
History has the power to teach. But it requires a willingness to stare down demons like the Tulsa race massacre and in Texas, the historic murderous violence by Texas Rangers against Mexican Americans. Teaching our students about racism is not racist, nor is confronting these ugly truths an exercise in blaming, but an attempt to find healing and paths to justice and equality and to understand how historical racism and racist violence have ramifications today.
How Texans feel about teaching these truths relates to their beliefs about the purpose of an education, said John Morán González, director of the Center for Mexican Studies at the University of Texas and a professor of American and English literature at UT.
If it’s indoctrination into a kind of uncritical nationalism, that is one thing, González told us. "But if we think that our tax dollars should be used to engage critical thinking citizens, that’s an entirely different avenue."
Abbott and elected officials who harbor greater political ambitions use wedge issues like the critical race theory debate to secure positions as champions of conservative causes. In their hands, policymaking becomes the servant of electioneering, not good government.
But in tilting at windmills like critical race theory, non-existent widespread voter fraud and border walls that won't get built, Abbott does a disserve to all Texans. We have real problems, not manufactured ones ginned up for the culture warriors on social media and Fox News. Just four months ago, countless Texans died or lost limbs in the winter storm when the power failed. Texans want a full reckoning. They want an electrical power grid that works, they want a better education for their children and improved access to medical care. Tackle those problems, instead, governor.
Listen to these gems of testimonies delivered before the Texas Senate Higher Education Committee on April 28, 202 this past legislative session. The session is always such a rush that I'm finally posting this.
These are two public testimonies against Senate Bill 1091 that sought to drastically limit the Top Ten Percent Admissions of graduating high school students into our state's higher education system, a policy that in its present form, is critical to rural students, as well as students of color to gain college access.
In the first video, you can listen to a passionate and resolute Dr. Altheria Caldera, a Policy Fellow at the Intercultural Development Institute (IDRA) and mentee of mine who provides clear reasons and data that point to a need to maintain Texas' Top Ten Percent Plan in higher education admission. Next, treat yourself to historically accurate and incisive testimony by Luis Figueroa, J.D., Legislative and Policy Director at Every Texan. These were among the more powerful testimonies that contributed to the bill's demise.
Hats off to Dr. Caldera, as well, for recently securing a tenure-track position at Howard University in Washington, D.C. We'll miss you here in Texas, but know that there's good and important work to get done there, as well.
I post this as it's important for us to maintain this historical memory on the ongoing struggle over higher education admissions in the state of Texas. I myself and many others were involved in this at an earlier time. It's cool to see how the baton gets passed from one generation to the next over time.
Altheria and Luis, thanks for advancing the cause for equity in college admission in the state of Texas.
Life is brief. It's important for us to follow our passions to the extent that we can, understanding that even our passions evolve. All of this speaks, among other things, to a robust education that gives our young people opportunities to experience numerous opportunities. Our legislature instead wants to narrow these by narrowing curricula through anti-CRT bills and high-stakes tests—and much to the detriment of our youth. This, atop the inadequate funding of our schools. It's no wonder our youth often find themselves adrift.
As millennials begin to turn 40 in 2021, CNBC Make It has launched Middle-Aged Millennials, a series exploring how the oldest members of this generation have grown into adulthood amidst the backdrop of the Great Recession and the Covid-19 pandemic, student loans, stagnant wages and rising costs of living.
At 35, Kristen Alfenito laments that she has yet to start her career.
That’s not to say she hasn’t worked. For the last 16 years, she has held a string of jobs, starting with two part-time gigs while attending college for musical theater. Then, she says, she was diagnosed with cancer, dropped out and became “resigned to working in food service or retail for the foreseeable future.” Today, Alfenito works as a cashier at a bakery in Morgantown,West Virginia.
Thinking back to her college days, “I wish someone had helped me figure out what jobs would be applicable for my interests and passions, and what kind of degree was actually required for that — if any,” Alfenito says.
Many older millennials who are now approaching middle age have significant career regrets. Nearly half, 47%, say they wish they had chosen a different career path when they started out, according to a recent survey of 1,000 U.S. adults ages 33 to 40, conducted by The Harris Poll on behalf of CNBC Make It.
Alfenito believes millennials, who this year range in age from 25 to 40 and make up the largest age group in the workforce, were pressured to pursue four-year degrees, and the mountains of debt that can come with them, without always knowing if there was a viable career on the other side of graduation.
As older millennials approach two decades in the workforce, their current roles and responsibilities may not be what they envisioned out of high school or college. We talked with six people from a range of fields about what they would do differently if they could start over again.
A history degree and few job opportunities
For Lee Ruark, earning a history degree was all part of the plan to start a career — he just didn’t know what he wanted to use his degree for. He graduated from college in 2007 just as the economy began to nose-dive into the Great Recession, and many jobs he thought of trying out went away with it.
He spent the next three years figuring out his options, first thinking to join the military until his health prevented him from doing so, then taking the LSATs with the intention to go to law school. He almost became a police officer before he finally stumbled into substitute teaching. When he discovered a knack for it, he got certified to teach full time with a focus on high school science.
Ruark, now 35 and living in Jeffersonville, Vermont, remembers how stressful it felt to be directionless right after school.
“I had anxiety because my friends were finding jobs, and I perceived them as being wildly successful while I wasn’t,” Ruark says. “What’s interesting is, after talking about it with them, I realized all my friends had the same anxieties about perceiving others’ successes. We laugh about it now, but to think about it, [feeling anxious] was a waste of time and energy.”
If he could, Ruark says, he would go back to the time he was in third grade when his mom — also a schoolteacher — told him he had a gift for teaching and encouraged him to pursue it. If he had listened instead of being resistant to following in her footsteps, Ruark says he could have pursued education a lot earlier.
A $170K law degree that doesn’t pay off
Some millennials say financial realities, especially living with student loans, changed their chosen career path. As a college senior studying policy, Brad Walters wanted to be a legislative aide, but seeing the low $30,000 starting salary in comparison with his $60,000 student debt, he went into education instead. “It tells you something when education is the more lucrative option,” he jokes.
Great reporting from Franc Contreras on the climate emergency that
Hondurans have experienced. In November 2020, two major hurricanes slammed the country of Honduras. We need to consider that many of the migrants entering the U.S. are climate change migrants. Their farmlands were either destroyed or disappeared altogether. Add this to the political corruption, violence, poverty, and hunger they're encountering and they have no other choice than to migrate to the north.
What a horrible crisis. We must have compassion in our laws and policies.
This entire piece is worth reading. I like how University of Texas History Professor Dr. Monica Martinez calls out the existing white supremacy in state curricula:
"If anything, Martinez said, the current, longstanding way of teaching Texas history already teaches that one race is superior. 'Look at how it teaches the history of the Texas revolution — that people like Stephen F. Austin are racially superior to the treacherous Mexican, like Santa Anna,' she said. “Texas history has been taught in a way that celebrates people who were fighting for the institution of slavery, that were espousing publicly that Mexicans were an inferior race.”
This, of course, shows just how ludicrous House Bill 3979 is. As if our curriculum were not already conservative enough, reflecting the very biases that conservative Republicans in power espouse. Not that all teachers teach this way, but that far too many do.
I am a product of this school system. My kids and grandkids, too. I should know. This very history of marginalization and exclusion accounts largely for who I am today. What is different today, however, is that our communities are no longer in darkness and thusly, not as easily gaslighted as we were in the past. pre-Internet or Cable News.
Those who study the discipline say attacks on it are targeting any teachings that challenge and complicate dominant narratives about the country’s history and identity.
Gov. Greg Abbottsigned into law a bill last week that restricts how current events and America’s history of racism can be taught in Texas schools. It’s been commonly referred to as the “critical race theory” bill, though the term “critical race theory” never appears in it.
But in signing the bill, Abbott said “more must be done” to “abolish critical race theory in Texas,” and announced that he would ask the Legislature to address the issue during a special session this summer.
Meanwhile, the debate has taken hold across the nation. Last year, conservative activist Christopher Rufo began using the term “critical race theory” publicly to denounce anti-racist education efforts. Since then, conservative lawmakers, commentators and parents have raised alarm that critical race theory is being used to teach children that they are racist, and that the U.S. is a racist country with irredeemable roots. U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz and others have called the theory racist itself for centering the nation’s story on racial conflict. In addition, conservative commentator Gerard Baker has argued that critical race theory bans critical thought in favor of what resembles religious instruction.
Those who study the discipline say that the attacks have nothing to do with critical race theory, but instead are targeting any teachings that challenge and complicate dominant narratives about the country’s history and identity.
They say that critical race theory itself actually shifts emphasis away from accusing individuals — in history or in the classroom — of being racist, which tends to dominate liberal discussions of racism. Instead, it offers tools for shifting public policy to create equity and freedom for all.
So what is critical race theory, and why is it relevant to Texans? And why is there an effort against it in Texas — and around the nation?
What is critical race theory?
Critical race theory is a discipline, analytical tool and approach that emerged in the 1970s and ‘80s. Scholars took up the ways racial inequity persisted even after “a whole set of landmark civil rights laws and anti-discrimination laws passed” during the civil right movement, Daniel HoSang, professor of ethnicity, race and migration and American studies at Yale University, said.
“These scholars and writers are asking, 'why is it that racial inequality endures and persists, even decades after these laws have passed?'” HoSang said. “Why is racism still enduring? And how do we contribute to abolishing it?”
HoSang described critical race theory not as “content,” or a “set of beliefs,” but rather an approach that “encourage[s] us to move past the superficial explanations that are given about equality and suffering, and to ask for new kinds of explanations.”
In the introduction of Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement, a seminal collection of the foundational essays of the movement edited by principal founders and scholars like Kimberlé Crenshaw and Neil Gotanda, the editors write that critical race theory is about transforming social structures to create freedom for all, and it’s grounded in an “ethical commitment to human liberation.”
Key concepts
Racial formation: One key concept in critical race theory is racial formation. Developed by sociologists Michael Omi and Howard Winant, the theory rejects the idea that race — Black, white, Asian — is a fixed category that has always meant the same thing. Instead, it traces the way that race has been defined, understood and constructed in different ways throughout history. Omi and Winant define race as an “unstable and ‘decentered’ complex of social meanings constantly being transformed by political struggle.”
For example, they write that in the U.S., the racial category of "Black" was created as slavery was established and evolved. Africans whose specific identity was Ibo, Yoruba or Fulani in Africa were grouped into the category "Black” as they were enslaved in America. Part of the meaning of being “Black” in America was being less than human and therefore enslavable. James Baldwin wrote in “On Being White and Other Lies” that Europeans who moved to America became “white” through a process of “denying the Black presence, and justifying the Black subjugation.”
Omi and Winant describe racial formation as the “process by which social, economic and political forces determine the content and importance of racial categories, and by which they are in turn shaped by racial meanings” — a process that has continued throughout history.
Monica Martinez, a history professor at the University of Texas at Austin who specializes in Latinx history, described how racial formation has played out in Texas in the racialization of Mexicans and the history of anti-Mexican violence.
“Before this region became Texas, there were debates about the character of Mexicans as a group of people,” she said. Figures like Stephen F. Austin and John Calhoun cast them as “treacherous people, thieves and murderers.”
From 1910 to 1920, she explained, hundreds of ethnic Mexicans were victims of lynchings, as well as violence at the hands of police and the Texas Rangers. Many of them were American citizens, and they included labor organizers and journalists who were writing about race and injustice. This amounted to an effort to “remove Mexicans from having economic or political or cultural influence,” she said.
“Oppression was enacted through violence, and it was sanctioned by governors, Texas legislators and local courts,” she said.
Oppression was furthered by “Juan Crow” segregation laws that racially segregated communities, relegated Mexican American children to poorly developed schools and intimidated Mexicans from voting. This system of laws and policies had lasting effects on Mexican Americans and how they’re conceived of today.
Rhetoric has played a role in racial formation as well, continually loading the term “Mexican” with racial meaning.
“100 years ago, people talked about Mexicans as bandits, as thieves, and as a threat,” she said. “Today, they talk about them as potential cartel members and gang members.”
This language contributes to racial profiling and violence today. “In communities in south Texas, anybody who looks 'Mexican,' or looks like an 'immigrant,' can be targeted—not just with policing, but also by [general] hostility,” she said.
Racism is structural: The mainstream understanding is that racism is an individual prejudice and choice. The default is to be free of bias and racism, so racism is an exception from the norm. It can be addressed by individual measures, such as humiliating and punishing the person who messes up, and enforcing moral codes on an individual level.
On the other hand, critical race theory says that racism is inherent in our institutions and structures of governance. It’s ordinary, and it’s baked into all our consciousnesses in complex ways through our education, government, the media, and our participation in systems. Racism must be addressed not just by punishing individuals, but by shifting structures and policies.
HoSang, the Yale professor, explained that critical race theory isn’t focused on “the stock characters of a racist,” such as Bull Connor, who directed police to use fire hoses on civil rights protesters in Birmingham, Alabama. HoSang said that a focus on denouncing individuals is “not a good use of our energy.” Instead, he said, the question is, “Even in places where civil rights and anti-discrimination laws passed, why do these forms of inequality persist?”
“So [critical race theory] actually says, no, we shouldn't be preoccupied with trying to discern ‘who is the racist here,’ because that moves the attention away from the structures,” he said.
One example of this is in housing segregation — how “many, many complex layers” of “policies around zoning, lending and redlining, around private realtors and developers” have reproduced unequal access to housing, which in turn furthers gaps in generational wealth and stability, HoSang said.
In his article for the Austin American-Statesman, Dan Zehr traces how this process has played out in Austin, which has one of the highest levels of income segregation in the nation. In 1928, city plans created a “negro district” east of Interstate 35 and denied public services and utilities to Black people outside of it, pushing Black residents to the eastern part of the city. When the government began offering loans to promote homeownership and help citizens rebuild wealth as part of the New Deal after the Great Depression, neighborhoods for people of color were excluded through a practice called “redlining.” Austin’s “negro district” was the largest redlined zone in the city, Zehr writes.
“As most Americans gained equity in new homes or upgraded the value of their existing houses, the black population saw a racial wedge driven deeper between Anglo affluence and African-American poverty,” he explains.
All these processes are systemic. “You can’t explain [this] through any one person's biases and prejudices.” HoSang said.
Sharing this piece from Slate.comas it provides some historical grounding on the nature of conservative outrage in the context of the anti- anti-racist teaching and curriculum agenda. We've been here before my friends and it isn't pretty.
How 20th-century curriculum controversies foreshadowed this summer’s wave of legislation.
A demonstrator in Charleston, West Virginia, on Dec. 3, 1974.AP Photo
By the 1970s, backlash against supposedly progressive curriculums had ossified into predictable outcries about unpatriotic content, which often meant targeting material that dignified Black voices. Even if conservative complaints were rote, their activism was literally explosive. In Kanawha County, West Virginia, in 1974, white parents reacted with violent rage to false rumors about the contents of popular textbooks. In this case, a new series of English language arts textbooks had been approved by the state. One school board member, Alice Moore, warned that the books were full of anti-Christian, anti-American, anti-white propaganda and indoctrination.
These warnings stoked a fire that had been smoldering for decades. For weeks at the start of the 1974–75 school year, outraged parents boycotted the schools and their “dirty books.” Protesters shot and vandalized school buses. They threw firebombs into empty school buildings. They exploded a dynamite bomb at the school district headquarters. Their fury, once again, was only loosely connected to reality. In this case, protesters had circulated flyers at the picket lines, warning that the books were sexually graphic. Opponents also objected to the inclusion of excerpts of work by Black authors such as Eldridge Cleaver and George Jackson. By doing so, the textbooks—one conservative parent told a school board meeting—reduced the English language to “the language of the ghetto.”
Outraged white parents took to the streets to defend their children from exposure to such words and ideas. The supposed excerpts about sex were nowhere to be found in the actual textbooks under review. Still, protest leaders such as Alice Moore defended their opposition to Black authors. They were tired—as Moore said—of being called “racist” merely for “insist[ing] on the traditional teaching of English.” When it came to conservative outrage, the actual content of the books did not matter. As one boycott leader explained, “You don’t have to read the textbooks. If you’ve read anything that the radicals have been putting out in the last few years, that was what was in the textbooks.”
In addition to the immediate violence and destruction of the boycott, the Kanawha County campaign led to familiar long-term damage. Teachers censored themselves. As one teacher remembered, she and her colleagues were terrified by all the “chaos.” Another teacher remembered checking with her principal before she taught a lesson in biology class about the asexual reproduction of mollusks. She did not want to be accused of warping young minds about sex. Teachers stopped teaching books such as 1984 and Brave New World, on the off chance that someone might find them too controversial.
Today’s backlash against the alleged teaching of critical race theory in America’s schools, like these earlier flare-ups over humanities curricula, holds the same potential to curb honest reckonings with the American past and present. As with prior reactionary movements, opponents of CRT maintain that American history is not meant to be merely another set of facts for children to learn. Instead, history must be a well of inspiration, a pure source of greatness from the past. From this perspective, CRT is any dangerous drop of doubt that will contaminate comforting white fantasies about America’s past, present, and future.
Classes in subjects that include the history of race and racism might be banned or canceled, due to the chilling effect of the backlash;someschools have already gone there. Even worse, teachers and students may resort to a stultifying self-censorship, avoiding topics that are vitally important precisely because they help students understand the true contours of America’s troubled history. It’s impossible to face history if teachers are always looking over their shoulders. And for those cynically leading the charge against CRT, that’s precisely the point.
Great piece. Folks should admit that they never even hear the phrase until now and that means something. Moira Donegan expresses succinctly what this means:
"the very opacity of the words made them the perfect vehicle for what the right wing wanted: a new vessel for white racial anxiety and grievance."
Anglo republicans are just picking a fight. They seem to have no instinct or desire to heal this country from it's racially unjust past and THAT'S the real problem here. Since they're utterly bankrupt in ideas on how to lead this state and country forward, they weaponize public school curriculum to instill fear of the other and thusly, to hold onto their incumbencies. Legislators like this need to stop power-hoarding and more white folks of conscience need to speak up.
‘Republicans are using “critical race theory” as a catch-all for any discussions of America’s past or present that have the potential to render their base uncomfortable.’ Photograph: Étienne Laurent/EPA
Whatever Republican politicians and rightwing media are referring to when they talk about “critical race theory”, it has little to do with critical race theory as an actual discipline. Developed in the 1970s and 80s by law professors – notably Derrick Bell and his acolyte, Kimberlé Crenshaw, at Harvard – the real CRT is analytic framework through which academics can discern the ways that racial disparities are reproduced by the law, and how the legacies of historical racism can persist even after discriminatory policies are revised.
But maybe the very obscurity of this genuine critical race theory is the point: before it became the object of the American right’s latest moral panic, few people had heard of critical race theory, and even fewer understood what it really was. The phrase itself sounds distant, lofty, and abstract – “critical”, “theory” – the kind of thing that comes out of the mouths of people in tweed blazers who think they’re better than you. The very opacity of the words made them the perfect vehicle for what the right wing wanted: a new vessel for white racial anxiety and grievance.
And so it is that something Republicans are calling “critical race theory” became the center of a series of statehouse bills – some proposed, others already signed into law – that aim to ban honest conversations about race and sex oppression in America from classrooms. Casting themselves in opposition to a supposed ideology of white sinfulness and inferiority that they claim is sweeping through the nation and indoctrinating children, Republicans are using “critical race theory” as a catch-all for any discussions of America’s past or present that have the potential to render their base uncomfortable.
But the bills gesture towards a chilling willingness on the American right to revoke speech protections and crush academic freedom, a tendency that has recently been modeled in other nations with rising authoritarian sentiment. Some instructors have already been affected by the bans.
The wording of the bans is vast enough to prohibit vast swaths of discursive territory. In the North Carolina law, among those “concepts” that public schools “shall not promote” are “the belief that the United States is a meritocracy is an inherently racist or sexist belief” and “that the United States was created by members of a particular race or sex for the purpose of oppressing members of another race or sex”. A proposed bill in Connecticut, meanwhile, bans the teaching of “divisive concepts” or content that causes “any individual to feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of the individual’s race or sex”.
This last item – with its concern for the emotions of white, male students – may be the most telling. The move to ban discussions of racism and oppression as systemic and socially foundational comes on the heels of the University of North Carolina’s decision to deny tenure to the New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, the creator of the 1619 Project, following the interventions of a major donor. It comes, too, a year after the nationwide uprisings in response to the police murder of George Floyd. Both of these events garnered a passionate backlash in rightwing media, which have depicted them as assaults on police, “order” and white people. Packaged together as “critical race theory”, these conversations have been demonized on the right in an attempt to reassert understandings of race, racism, and American history that center white people as the primary moral players.
For Republicans, the preferred narrative of race and American history is one that minimizes the harm done to Black people, overstates white virtue and insists that racism is a personal prejudice in the minds of misguided or amoral people, rather than a system that structures cultures and institutions. Racism was a problem, this story tells us (with an emphasis on the past tense) because some white people made an error; it’s not a problem any more, because those white people have been edified. This version of American history has placed racist injustice squarely in the past, but also, it quarantines racism in individual minds, rather than recognizing it as an infection that has contaminated our culture. Racism, in this telling, is primarily a matter of personality, of individual white people’s souls.
But much modern anti-racist thinking rejects this. The 1619 Project positions Black people, and their enslavement, as central to America’s history, positioning the enslaved not merely footnotes or minor characters, but protagonists. And the real critical race theory that is practiced in law schools does not seem to be concerned with white people’s souls so much as with Black people’s material conditions. Maybe this is part of what Republicans don’t like about these versions of anti-racist thought: they remove white people, and white people’s feelings, from the center of the story.
After all, when racism is merely a personal idiosyncrasy, and not a systemic condition, nothing is required of white people, or of the institutions they control, except to deny that they feel hate in their hearts. But if racism is a foundational reality, and not just a personal prejudice, then much bigger changes have to be made – and more is required of white people than personal innocence.
