Critical Race Theory: A Made-up Hysteria

Critical Race Theory (CRT) is the latest specter raised by the right to scare and mobilize people. The campaign is, as John Oliver said, “manufactured panic.” Nothing new: in advertising and politics, fear tactics have proven effective for centuries. Christopher F. Rufo, a conservative activist, initiated the attack on CRT. He said his goal was to “drive up negative perceptions” of CRT, to “eventually turn it toxic.” By the evidence of school board disruption across the country, it appears he’s been successful. Fox News helped, of course. Oliver documented that they mentioned CRT 4,707 times last year.

Sidewalk message

So what is it? CRT is a body of legal scholarship. It examines biases embedded in our systems and how those biases contribute to racial inequalities. It originated at Harvard Law School in the late 70s as a way to study how the law and legal institutions serve the wealthy and powerful at the expense of the poor. Worth noting: the first group of lawyers to look at these issues called it “critical legal theory” and were mostly white.

Despite conservative wishful thinking, racial biases are still with us. This is not to say we haven’t made great progress—we have. But biases in our institutions did not disappear with Jim Crow laws and are well-documented: people of color as qualified as comparable whites are more often denied loans or jobs; routinely receive inferior health care and are more often victims of police brutality.

CRT has never been taught in public schools, including the high schools where I taught. The sudden interest in and opposition to CRT puzzled me: first, because it’s been around for 40 years in law schools and second, because people started showing up at school boards, hysterical about it being taught to their kids, when it never has been taught to their kids. It’s like the fake fear over voter fraud, which is also nearly non-existent, as court case after court case has shown.

CRT is not culturally relevant teaching, which emerged in the 1990s. I taught culturally relevant material and so did everyone I knew. It was traditional to teach Julius Caesar in 9th grade Language Arts, but I had Black and Latino kids in the room, so I also taught Raisin in the Sun or The House on Mango Street. Young people need to be able to see themselves in literature and there’s plenty of fine literature by people of color.

Does that literature often deal with injustices? You bet. And then we’d talk about how the characters in the stories reacted to or overcame obstacles and the ways in which things have improved and the ways in which we have work to do. Teenagers are resilient, tell stories of discrimination they’ve experienced, but don’t blame all white people or lose hope for our country. We are not yet an equitable democracy. Something I love about young people—they mostly believe we can be.

Judy, ready for the Women’s march

There’s talk (and God forbid, legislation) about prohibiting teaching what will make white people uncomfortable. It did not make my students uncomfortable to discuss such matters as arose in the literature we read together. Yet now 37 states have introduced bills to restrict teaching CRT, but they don’t mean the scholarly study of institutions. They mean restricting black American history, Hispanic history, indigenous history. I’m not surprised to learn that the school choice movement underpins much of this anti-CRT panic. As John Oliver pointed out, some of those folks would prefer to teach “antebellum fan fiction.”

Progress followed by backsliding is standard operating procedure for the human race. We appear to be in an era of backsliding. School integration is an example. Brown Vs. Board of Education was 1954. It took its sweet time to be enacted. I graduated from a still all-white Florida school in 1962. A great deal of suffering accompanied integrating schools. Once it was done, probably not until the late 70s, it didn’t stick. In 2019, over half of Hispanic and Black K- 12 students in most states were in schools that were more than half Hispanic and Black. And 79% of white students were in majority white schools. (Pew Research Center, September 15, 2021) Re-segregation, brought to you in part by the school choice movement.

Nineteen states have enacted voting restrictions that mainly impact minority communities, another reversal. People died to achieve voting rights in 1965. Those rights are being eroded again in 2022. One step forward, two back. We are not an equitable democracy yet.

Oliver showed a clip of an interview with a parent protesting CRT at a Virginia school board. The woman said the usual things—CRT was divisive, taught children to be ashamed of being white, to hate their country. Then she concluded, “you won’t notice racism if you don’t talk about it.” How’s that worked for us so far? It hasn’t. It won’t. If we don’t face the problems our past left us, we’ll never be free of them.

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10 Responses to Critical Race Theory: A Made-up Hysteria

  1. Excellent in every way, Pat! Thank you so much for your teacher’s-eye view, based so solidly in experience and fact. Brava!

  2. Renardo says:

    CRT was a nono when I was in high school, too. The workaround was not to teach history at all. One summer I got a library card and read nothing but Civil War history until school started again. From one text I got the idea that maybe the Civil War was about slavery. The others? Nah, just states rights.

  3. normando1 says:

    Whew! Right on down the line. You’ve nailed it and I only grieve how many people might read this and still miss the point. Lies promulgated by unscrupulous people in power for the purpose of getting people riled up so they can play the hero. A strategy that has been around since humans began to talk. As you say, we’re in a backsliding moment and the liars who keep on feeding ignorance to their listeners are swamping our democracy, sliding us deeper and deeper into the mud.

  4. Judith Weaver says:

    Critical thinking seems to be in short supply these days. As a result anyone desiring power can create hysteria with any lie they wish and who questions or does any research? So we now have kicked out school board members and superintendents and teachers based on the lie that they are teaching CRT in their classrooms. No wonder Putin invaded Ukraine .. he knows he can hoodwink most people because that’s what they are trained to do .. be hoodwinked.

  5. “You won’t notice racism if you don’t talk about it.”

    That woman’s remark can’t help but remind me of another hot button issue in education/parenting: sex education. “They won’t have sex if you don’t tell them about it” or “They’ll have sex if you tell them about contraception.” Look at teenage pregnancy rates in the USA. Lousy or nonexistent sex education hasn’t worked too well. Similarly, not discussing racism will not make it go away.

    Off topic: When my daughter got her ONE DAY (one hour?) of sex ed in DPS 5th grade, on the drive home from school she asked me, “Daddy, how does the sperm get to the egg?” Good job DPS!

    We enrolled her in a fantastic program taught in the Unitarian/Universalist Church basement to girls and boys both, called Our Whole Lives (OWL), a weekly class both honest and graphic about love and sex.

    Exploring difficult topics like slavery, racism, our country’s treatment of Native Americans, and sex should be part of every child’s education. Religion I would leave to the families. (Teaching 18th century British poetry, though, to DSA students from generally secular families, I found myself playing the role of Sunday school teacher, explaining the Fall of Man, Redemption through the crucifixion of Jesus, etc.)

    • dubrava says:

      On one of the other ends of that spectrum, the vast majority of my 30-something grad students had never read Alice in Wonderland and found the language difficult. They’d all seen the Disney film though.

      • Gregg says:

        Really? That’s hard to believe. Ms. Threet encouraged Quinn to read Frankenstein in 7th grade and she enjoyed it. I took a re-look at it and found the language much more difficult than The Scarlet Letter, which sophomores in American Lit had a hard time with. (Quinn liked that one, too!)

  6. Bob Jaeger says:

    Thanks, Pat.

  7. Jana says:

    Great article and comments, here, Pat. I remember the day I asked Gregg Painter where in the curriculum the kids ever learned ANY cultural literacy (I learned most of mine in church and three years of high school Latin). I was appalled my writers did not get a reference to the Trojan Horse! And yes, Gregg, I ended up teaching Bible stories to mostly white kids who never went to church. Most of my African American and Hispanic kids knew the Bible stories. It’s hard to teach literacy to high schoolers who have no bases to understand history or literature.

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