Critical Race Theory

 Here at MonteCedro, Margan and I conduct a biweekly session on current events for our residents. The format is a presentation of the subject for which either M or I prepare a slide presentation, followed by a discussion on the topic. With the state of the world, we have had no shortage of topics to discuss. We ask the audience what they are interested in for the following session. They asked for a critical race theory (CRT) discussion, and it’s my turn in the box in 2 days.

When I began reading up on CRT, I realized how little I knew about what it really is. My heart initially sank but I started reading and accumulating references. I never want to be at the worst end of the Dunning-Kruger effect:

I’m somewhere just beyond the “Valley of Despair” on the steep “Slope of Enlightenment” (you never want to be at the Peak of “Mount Stupid”).  Here is a little of what I have figured out with some of the references I found that may help others grappling with this issue.

First and foremost, CRT is an academic framework developed by people in law schools in an attempt to understand why, after a lot of work to advance civil rights for Blacks and others in America we still have major problems. The primary architect of CRT was the late Derrick Bell. Bell was a Pittsburgh native who went to Duquesne for his AB degree and then to the University of Pittsburgh for a law degree. He held academic positions at several law schools. It was his work in the civil rights arena that led him to question why seeming advances, like the Brown v Board of Education decision of the Supreme Court in 1954 had failed to make education for Black children materially better. Over time he and others, mostly Black academics but also whites, developed a way to understand the profound hold that race and racism had on the United States. While Wikipedia is never a definitive source, its article on CRT lays out the definitions, tenets, and common themes that CRT rests upon. 

CRT has been around for over 30 years but as a somewhat arcane idea buried in legal and social academia. It was not until the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, at the hands of the police, that CRT surfaced to much wider recognition. The reason for this was the twisting of CRT into a catch-phrase for the Trumpist right for all they considered problematic with race in the United States.

After Floyd’s murder, there were worldwide protests and an increased discussion of structural racism (racism baked into law, policing, the courts, government, etc). This included educators in high schools and colleges discussing structural racism. A conservative activist, Christopher Rufo, then made a distorted reference to CRT being taught in public schools. Through an appearance on Tucker Carlson’s show, his view reached Donald Trump and his MAGA supporters. The result was an executive order from Trump banning teaching anything in the federal government that was “divisive” (his rationale) and setting up just before the 2020 election a commission to make a definitive statement about what could be taught that was “patriotic” and not tainted by CRT. 

Trump’s Executive Order was immediately challenged in court and was rescinded on President Joe Biden’s first day in office. But the damage had already spilled over to many protests, some violent, at school boards across the United States where white parents, inflamed by Trump and right-wing media, clamored for teaching only the whitewashed myths of history and forbidding teaching about how race was always an issue for this country and continues to be so to this day. As Adam Harris wrote in The Atlantic, “For Republicans, the end goal of all these bills is clear: initiating another battle in the culture wars and holding on to some threadbare mythology of the nation that has been challenged in recent years.”

It is clear that CRT is not taught in K-12 education anywhere in the U.S. That has obviously not prevented the Trumpists from using it as a deflective wedge in the neverending culture war we are in. There are genuine critics of CRT and their academic points are too abstruse for me to follow with the information I have gathered (unless I want to ascend the peak of Mount Stupid in the figure above). I will say this. I will always side with teaching the truth and facts. I will always side with those whose ardent scholarship is for the purpose of better understanding and furtherance of knowledge. I will never side with those like Chris Rufo, Tucker Carlson, Donald Trump, and the MAGAt cult who pervert facts and twist the truth for the purpose of deception and outrage. They are the real dividers in our country today.