Danny's Letter on Critical Race Theory
Given the assault on American democracy which took place earlier this year, my top voting issue in November is whether or not candidates running for office in Virginia reject the insurrectionists and their lies. I’ll also be thinking about policies related to Covid-19 and climate change, as well as the need to fund early-childhood education. But another issue of interest to me is the conversation around critical race theory and the broader questions intertwined with this influential legal concept.
For instance, do politicians seek to build a society where we judge individuals by the content of their character rather than by the color of their skin? Or is such a colorblind society an impossible, even undesirable, pipe dream? Further, is it enough for elementary and middle schoolers to learn accurate history about slavery, Jim Crow, and more modern forms of racial discrimination? Or do those running for local school board think children should learn critical race theory?
Having read a fair amount about CRT over the last five months, I’ve discovered that this term means different things to different people. As often happens with culture war wedge issues, constructive conversations become harder when citizens start with different preconceptions about terminology. People speak past each other and little is resolved. As Jelani Cobb writes in a recent issue of The New Yorker, “Conservatives have been waging war on a wide-ranging set of claims that they wrongly ascribe to critical race theory, while barely mentioning the body of scholarship behind it.” Given all this, I wasn’t surprised by my mother’s reaction when I brought up the topic three months ago. She echoed sentiments I had heard on NPR and read in The Washington Post. My mother argued that critical race theory is a benign academic concept and that partisan activists, seeking political advantage, are blowing it out of proportion.
I agree with part of her analysis. My mother is right that some media and political actors are using critical race theory, which began in the legal academy in the 1970s, as a cudgel to stoke anger and fear. I also agree with my mother that exploring CRT is appropriate for high schoolers, college students, and graduate students. After all, systemic racism has been and remains a real phenomena in America, and many of our nation’s laws and institutions were created when Blacks were denied full participation in American society. Advocates of critical race theory correctly call us to confront and correct the racist structures and systems which have perpetuated racial inequality.
Consider the racial wealth gap. It exists, in large measure, because racist public policies existed in America for centuries. It wasn’t just slavery and Jim Crow. Historic programs that built the middle class mostly bypassed African-Americans. According to The Washington Post, “Of the $120 billion worth of housing built with federal backing between 1934 and 1962, only two percent was available to Black people due to ‘redlining’ and other obstacles.” As for the Social Security Act, “Because agricultural and domestic workers—disproportionately Black at the time—were not covered by Social Security in 1935, Black Americans made up 23 percent of those initially left out of the program, twice their share of the total labor force.” Benefits for World War II veterans were also “administered on a discriminatory basis.” It took decades before these disparities were corrected but the damage had been done. The racial wealth gap is just one example of systemic racism. It can be found in an analysis of the criminal justice system, the education system, and the health care system. Still, I’m not a fan of critical race theory.
Critical race theorists want us to see everyone and everything through the lens of racial group identity and inherited guilt. While we must teach young Americans about their nation’s racist past and lingering forms of discrimination, proponents of critical race theory maintain that America is an irredeemably racist nation and that enlightenment-based liberal ideas (e.g. “due process,” “justice is blind,” “E Pluribus Unum,” “private property,” “free speech,” “meritocracy”) act as mere camouflages for white supremacy.
I stake out this opinion after coming across the writings of Richard Delgado, Jean Stefancic, Kimberle Crenshaw, Cheryl Harris, and Derrick Bell. These five individuals (plus many others) played key roles in creating critical race theory. Delgado and Stefancic authored Critical Race Theory: An Introduction. Crenshaw edited a collection of essays titled Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement and has written influential law journal articles, including one titled “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” Cheryl Harris, meanwhile, is a professor at UCLA law school. Then there is the godfather of the CRT movement, Derrick Bell, who became the first tenured African-American professor at Harvard Law School and published a casebook titled Race, Racism, and American Law.
Delgado and Stefancic argue that, since racism is “the usual way [American] society does business,” neutral principles of law can never be realized and that colorblindness can never occur. Instead, only “color-conscious efforts” to change the status quo can make a difference. As Kimberle Crenshaw writes in Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement, “CRT aims to recover and revitalize the radical tradition of race-consciousness,” a tradition that was “discarded when […] the idea of colorblindness became the official norms of racial enlightenment.” Ibram X. Kendi puts it more bluntly the best-selling How to Be An Anti-Racist: “The most threatening racist movement is the regular American drive for race-neutral one.”
Delgado and Stefancic argue against “traditional civil-rights discourse, which stresses incrementalism and step-by-step progress.” Instead, they want Americans to question “the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism and neutral principles of constitutional law.” These two law professors, who happen to be married to each other, reject the notion that sought-after goods should be distributed through systems that evaluate and reward merit. For Delgado and Stefancic, the metric of “merit” is unacceptable because certain “conceptions of merit function not as a neutral basis for distributing resources and opportunity, but rather as a repository of hidden, race-specific preferences for those who have the power to determine the meaning and consequences of ‘merit.’” To quote one paper written by a critical race theorist, the “myths of meritocracy and personal responsibility [establish] an idealized standard which is unattainable for those exploited by the interlocking systems of racism, sexism, and classism.” In other words, key social concepts rooted in a merit-driven system (i.e. “hard work is the key to success,” “work before play,” “dress for success,” “use of proper grammar”) become mere illegitimate aspects of a “white dominant culture.”
Critical race theorists don’t just reject the ideal notion of colorblindness and the ideal of race-neutral public policy. In one law review article, Cheryl Harris argues that the concept of “private property” is just an aspect of a system rooted in white racial domination. She also argues that the basic conceptual vocabulary of the Constitution and Bill of Rights are mere illusions used by whites to maintain racial supremacy. In one paper from 1994, Richard Delgado raised objections to the First Amendment. Derrick Bell went even farther, writing that “the First Amendment, instead of helping to achieve healthy and robust debate, actually serves to preserve the inequities of the status quo.” It isn’t just the attack on core liberal values of “due process,” “justice is blind,” “private property,” “free speech,” and “meritocracy.” CRT labels the key American concept of E Pluribus Unum as racist. Finally, since racism is pervasive, systemic, and deeply ingrained, no white member of society is innocent. White children are just one more spoke on the wheel of a white supremacist system.
Just as there is debate over the meaning of critical race theory, there is also debate over whether we are teaching it to young Americans. The president of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, argues that “GOP operatives and their far-right media enablers are trying to turn the teaching of honest history into a political wedge issue.” According to Weingarten, “Culture warriors are labeling any discussion of race, racism or discrimination as CRT to try to make it toxic. They are bullying teachers and trying to stop us from teaching students accurate history.”
On the one hand, I believe that Randi Weingarten is correct. It is certainly the case that right-wing activists are weaponizing any attempt to teach of America’s sins. One example comes from a county in Tennessee where, in rebelling against “critical race theory,” education officials are targeting books like Dr. King Goes to Washington, Ruby Bridges Goes to School, and Norman Rockwell’s quintessentially American painting by of a little black girl desegregating a school in Alabama.
On the other hand, it’s noteworthy that, at its annual meeting, the National Education Association adopted an agenda item stating that “curriculum [should] be informed by academic frameworks for understanding and interpreting the impact of the past on current society, including critical race theory.” The National Education Association also passed a measure to support and lead campaigns that “result in increasing the implementation of culturally responsive education, critical race theory, and ethnic studies curriculum” in pre-K, elementary school, and middle school. The delegates called for training of young students in “cultural responsiveness, implicit bias, anti-racism, trauma-informed practices, restorative justice practices and other racial justice trainings.” In February of 2021, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) recommended Critical Race Theory in Mathematics Education to its members for summer reading. A number of school districts in America are requiring “Equitable Math,” a math curriculum which includes recommendations to “dismantle white supremacy in math classrooms.” According to The Washington Post, a school district in Northern Virginia relied on an organization called The Equity Collaborative, which priorities CRT in its training methods, to provide professional development to its teachers. In a leaked video, a teenage student was shown a photo of two teens sitting on a bench.
“What do you see in this photo?” the consultant asked.
“Two dudes sitting on a bench,” the teen responded.
The consultant pressed him a bit more. “Are you sure that’s all you see?”
“That’s it. Two dudes sitting on a bench.”
The consultant asked again for the teen to think harder about what he saw and to focus on the skin color of the teens. Here we see the degrading consequences of critical race theory. The teen was being taught, in this instance, to see race when he had been (and should have been) just seeing “two dudes sitting on a bench.”
To be clear, we should teach about America’s racist past, including the evils of slavery and Jim Crow and more modern racist policies like redlining, which prevented African-Americans from accumulating wealth through home ownership. Personally, I wish I learned about Juneteenth before June 19, 2020, and, as someone who attended University of Virginia in Charlottesville, I wish I learned at a younger age how, in 1965, the city of Charlottesville demolished Vinegar Hill, a thriving black neighborhood. While before I dismissed issues of racial profiling and police abuse as a problem of a “few bad apples,” I now recognize the need for broader reform of the criminal justice system. These days, I better appreciate my privilege, of how I didn’t have to have “The Talk” with my parents about how to behave around police.
In short, racism in America remains an enormous challenge, and it would be a tragic error to only feed fairy tales to children which sidestep America’s dark history. But there is a big difference between teaching about America’s horrific past and teaching that white children bear responsibility for actions committed in the past or that America hasn’t made any progress on race. Yes, we should teach about America’s worst deeds, but we should contextualize those lessons with the fact that this country has made enormous progress. School curriculums steeped in critical race theory heighten every sin but are devoid of important context. For American democracy to work, children should learn the value of the American Project, especially compared with every other project in world governance.
The American Project is, indeed, an actual project. It takes work to close the gap between the promise of our ideals and the sad reality we have, time and time again, failed to live up to those ideals. But I stand with those civil rights leaders who embrace the promise of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. Instead of denouncing America and the Founding Fathers on the steps of the Lincoln memorial, King demanded that blacks be a full part of the American dream. As David French writes, “Americans ended slavery and Jim Crow, not through a revolt against the Founding, but rather through a defense of the Founding. It is through appeals to America’s founding promise, that marginalized American communities have muscled their way into more-complete membership in the American family.”
Of course injustice exists. So in creating the “1619 Project,” Nikole Hannah-Jones was correct to highlight how the introduction of slavery influenced the new American civilization. In this regard, the American project resembled the awful human experience common elsewhere in the world and in human history. But, as French reminds us, the decisions to sign the Declaration of Independence and ratify the Constitution and Bill of Rights were, by contrast, remarkable, earth shattering events. At first, only white male property owners could claim the rights articulated in the Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights, but over time the notions of justice expanded. Today, the amount of cooperation and peace among such a wide variety of races and religions that inhabit the United States is unprecedented.
Children shouldn’t grow up indoctrinated by the idea that their country is irredeemably racist. If America is a rotten place where nothing every improves, then what’s the point of undertaking the hard work of democratic self-government? How can we confront a murderous and racist regime like the Chinese Communist Party, which, right this moment, is carrying out genocide against a religious minority, if we don’t think America is any better?
In sum, if we are to teach to young children that the most important thing about a person is that person’s race, we will be taking a large step away from Martin Luther King Jr.’s aspiration that we judge individuals by the content of their character rather than by the color of their skin. It will take time, but I believe a colorblind society is possible. That should be our goal.