What Is Critical Race Theory, and Why Is It Under Attack?
What Is Critical Race Theory, and Why Is It Under Attack?
Education Week is the #1 source of high-quality news and insights on K-12
education. Sign up for our EdWeek Update newsletter to get stories like this
delivered to your inbox daily.
Is “critical race theory” a way of understanding how American racism has
shaped public policy, or a divisive discourse that pits people of color
against white people? Liberals and conservatives are in sharp disagreement.
The topic has exploded in the public arena this spring—especially in K-12,
where numerous state legislatures are debating bills seeking to ban its use in
the classroom.
In truth, the divides are not nearly as neat as they may seem. The events of
the last decade have increased public awareness about things like housing
segregation, the impacts of criminal justice policy in the 1990s, and the
legacy of enslavement on Black Americans. But there is much less consensus on
what the government’s role should be in righting these past wrongs. Add
children and schooling into the mix and the debate becomes especially
volatile.
School boards, superintendents, even principals and teachers are already
facing questions about critical race theory, and there are significant
disagreements even among experts about its precise definition as well as how
its tenets should inform K-12 policy and practice. This explainer is meant
only as a starting point to help educators grasp core aspects of the current
debate.
Just what is critical race theory anyway?
Critical race theory is an academic concept that is more than 40 years old.
The core idea is that race is a social construct, and that racism is not
merely the product of individual bias or prejudice, but also something
embedded in legal systems and policies.
The basic tenets of critical race theory, or CRT, emerged out of a framework
for legal analysis in the late 1970s and early 1980s created by legal scholars
Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Richard Delgado, among others.
A good example is when, in the 1930s, government officials literally drew
lines around areas deemed poor financial risks, often explicitly due to the
racial composition of inhabitants. Banks subsequently refused to offer
mortgages to Black people in those areas.
Today, those same patterns of discrimination live on through facially
race-blind policies, like single-family zoning that prevents the building of
affordable housing in advantaged, majority-white neighborhoods and, thus,
stymies racial desegregation efforts.
CRT also has ties to other intellectual currents, including the work of
sociologists and literary theorists who studied links between political power,
social organization, and language. And its ideas have since informed other
fields, like the humanities, the social sciences, and teacher education.
This academic understanding of critical race theory differs from
representation in recent popular books and, especially, from its portrayal by
critics—often, though not exclusively, conservative Republicans. Critics
charge that the theory leads to negative dynamics, such as a focus on group
identity over universal, shared traits; divides people into “oppressed” and
“oppressor” groups; and urges intolerance.
One conservative organization, the Heritage Foundation, recently attributed a
whole host of issues to CRT, including the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests,
LGBTQ clubs in schools, diversity training in federal agencies and
organizations, California’s recent ethnic studies model curriculum, the
free-speech debate on college campuses, and alternatives to exclusionary
discipline—such as the Promise program in Broward County, Fla., that some
parents blame for the Parkland school shootings. “When followed to its logical
conclusion, CRT is destructive and rejects the fundamental ideas on which our
constitutional republic is based,” the organization claimed.
(A good parallel here is how popular ideas of the common core learning
standards grew to encompass far more than what those standards said on paper.)
Does critical race theory say all white people are racist? Isn’t that racist,
too?
The theory says that racism is part of everyday life, so people—white or
nonwhite—who don’t intend to be racist can nevertheless make choices that fuel
racism.
Some critics claim that the theory advocates discriminating against white
people in order to achieve equity. They mainly aim those accusations at
theorists who advocate for policies that explicitly take race into account.
(The writer Ibram X. Kendi, whose recent popular book How to Be An Antiracist
suggests that discrimination that creates equity can be considered
anti-racist, is often cited in this context.)
Fundamentally, though, the disagreement springs from different conceptions of
racism. CRT puts an emphasis on outcomes, not merely on individuals’ own
beliefs, and it calls on these outcomes to be examined and rectified. Among
lawyers, teachers, policymakers, and the general public, there are many
disagreements about how precisely to do those things, and to what extent race
should be explicitly appealed to or referred to in the process.
Here’s a helpful illustration to keep in mind in understanding this complex
idea. In a 2007 U.S. Supreme Court school-assignment case on whether race
could be a factor in maintaining diversity in K-12 schools, Chief Justice John
Roberts’ opinion famously concluded: “The way to stop discrimination on the
basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” But during oral
arguments, then-justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said: “It’s very hard for me to
see how you can have a racial objective but a nonracial means to get there.”
All these different ideas grow out of longstanding, tenacious intellectual
debates. Critical race theory emerged out of postmodernist thought, which
tends to be skeptical of the idea of universal values, objective knowledge,
individual merit, Enlightenment rationalism, and liberalism—tenets that
conservatives tend to hold dear.
What does any of this have to do with K-12 education?
Scholars who study critical race theory in education look at how policies and
practices in K-12 education contribute to persistent racial inequalities in
education, and advocate for ways to change them. Among the topics they’ve
studied: racially segregated schools, the underfunding of majority-Black and
Latino school districts, disproportionate disciplining of Black students,
barriers to gifted programs and selective-admission high schools, and
curricula that reinforce racist ideas.
Critical race theory is not a synonym for culturally relevant teaching, which
emerged in the 1990s. This teaching approach seeks to affirm students’ ethnic
and racial backgrounds and is intellectually rigorous. But it’s related in
that one of its aims is to help students identify and critique the causes of
social inequality in their own lives.
Many educators support, to one degree or another, culturally relevant teaching
and other strategies to make schools feel safe and supportive for Black
students and other underserved populations. (Students of color make up the
majority of school-aged children.) But they don’t necessarily identify these
activities as CRT-related.
As one teacher-educator put it: “The way we usually see any of this in a
classroom is: ‘Have I thought about how my Black kids feel? And made a space
for them, so that they can be successful?’ That is the level I think it stays
at, for most teachers.” Like others interviewed for this explainer, the
teacher-educator did not want to be named out of fear of online harassment.
An emerging subtext among some critics is that curricular excellence can’t
coexist alongside culturally responsive teaching or anti-racist work. Their
argument goes that efforts to change grading practices or make the curriculum
less Eurocentric will ultimately harm Black students, or hold them to a less
high standard.
As with CRT in general, its popular representation in schools has been far
less nuanced. A recent poll by the advocacy group Parents Defending Education
claimed some schools were teaching that “white people are inherently
privileged, while Black and other people of color are inherently oppressed and
victimized”; that “achieving racial justice and equality between racial groups
requires discriminating against people based on their whiteness”; and that
“the United States was founded on racism.”
Thus much of the current debate appears to spring not from the academic texts,
but from fear among critics that students—especially white students—will be
exposed to supposedly damaging or self-demoralizing ideas.
While some district officials have issued mission statements, resolutions, or
spoken about changes in their policies using some of the discourse of CRT,
it’s not clear to what degree educators are explicitly teaching the concepts,
or even using curriculum materials or other methods that implicitly draw on
them. For one thing, scholars say, much scholarship on CRT is written in
academic language or published in journals not easily accessible to K-12
teachers.
What is going on with these proposals to ban critical race theory in schools?
As of mid-May, legislation purporting to outlaw CRT in schools has passed in
Idaho, Iowa, Oklahoma, and Tennessee and have been proposed in various other
statehouses.
The bills are so vaguely written that it’s unclear what they will
affirmatively cover.
Could a teacher who wants to talk about a factual instance of state-sponsored
racism—like the establishment of Jim Crow, the series of laws that prevented
Black Americans from voting or holding office and separated them from white
people in public spaces—be considered in violation of these laws?
It’s also unclear whether these new bills are constitutional, or whether they
impermissibly restrict free speech.
It would be extremely difficult, in any case, to police what goes on inside
hundreds of thousands of classrooms. But social studies educators fear that
such laws could have a chilling effect on teachers who might self-censor their
own lessons out of concern for parent or administrator complaints.
As English teacher Mike Stein told Chalkbeat Tennessee about the new law:
“History teachers can not adequately teach about the Trail of Tears, the Civil
War, and the civil rights movement. English teachers will have to avoid
teaching almost any text by an African American author because many of them
mention racism to various extents.”