So, What’s the Big Deal About Critical Race Theory?

Famed nineteenth-century writer Christian Nestell Bovee once said, “We fear things in proportion to our ignorance of them.” We need look no further than the pages of our history books for evidence as to how society behaves in the face of the unknown. The federal government’s decision to desegregate schools was met with violent protests, and threats and harassment towards black students. Ignaz Semmelweis, who discovered germ theory, lived his final days in an insane asylum for suggesting that physicians wash their hands between procedures, and Galileo was tried and convicted for trying to convince the world that the Earth revolves around the sun. The latest incarnation of the proverbial monster under the bed is a theory that, while not exactly new, has come to prominence thanks to conservative political activist Christopher Rufo. The year was 2020—the height of the pandemic—and while many people were learning to bake bread and navigate their way around web-conferencing technology, Rufo was staging the battleground for the next big skirmish in the so-called “culture wars” happening on the political stage against an enemy known as Critical Race Theory or CRT.

What Is Critical Race Theory?

Though Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, UCLA and Columbia University law professor, is credited with coining the term, the concept of Critical Race Theory can be traced back to former Harvard law professor Derek Bell. Bell, who passed away in 2011, was a scholar as well as a crusader for civil rights. He “helped to develop critical race theory, a body of legal scholarship that explores how racism is embedded in laws and legal institutions,” and over the course of his 50-year career “worked to expose the persistence of racism” (“Derek Bell: 1930–2011”). Bell resigned from not one, but two different law schools in protest due to the dearth of people of color selected for tenured positions.

His experience with systemic racism inspired many of his academic writings, including the casebook Race, Racism and American Law, which is a standard textbook in many American law schools. After Bell stepped down from his Harvard faculty position in the 1980s, Crenshaw, then a graduate student, created a workshop aimed at examining the continuance of racial inequality following the civil rights movement. This workshop “helped to establish these ideas as part of a new academic framework called critical race theory” (Fortin). So how did an evolving theory about the persistence of institutional racism studied primarily in law schools lead to concerned parents protesting outside of public schools? How did the general public begin to conflate the teaching of American history with legal theory? It all leads back to one man, Christopher Rufo.

Who Is Christopher Rufo?

According to the article “How a Conservative Activist Invented the Conflict Over Critical Race Theory,” published in June 2021 and written by Benjamin Wallace-Wells of The New Yorker, it all started with a leaked anti-bias training video from an employee for a Seattle-based company. Rufo, who was a journalist when he came across the training video, took issue with the language and structure of anti-racism seminars and retreats happening in corporations across the country and began studying the scholars behind the literature that these companies adopted. Wallace-Wells wrote: “Rufo read the footnotes in those books, and found that they pointed to academic scholarship from the nineteen-nineties, by a group of legal scholars who referred to their work as critical race theory, in particular Kimberlé Crenshaw and Derrick Bell.” Due to the pervasiveness of the ideology which has spanned more than 40 years and had, for lack of a better word, infiltrated political groups in Washington, Rufo considered CRT more than just a catchphrase like “political correctness,” “cancel culture,” and “woke,” and instead found it to be more insidious.  Rufo stated, “Strung together, the phrase ‘critical race theory’ connotes hostile, academic, divisive, race-obsessed, poisonous, elitist, anti-American” (qtd in Wallace-Wells). On December 15, 2021, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis echoed this language in his defense of a new bill that would effectively ban CRT. DeSantis said, “Finally, we must protect Florida workers against the hostile work environment that is created when large corporations force their employees to endure CRT-inspired ‘training’ and indoctrination” (“Governor DeSantis Announces Legislative Proposal”).

But what is anti-American about acknowledging the history of the American legal system and assessing the implications of its future? On its face, it seems like a noble pursuit; however, not long after Rufo’s infamous appearance on Tucker Carlson’s conservative talk show Tucker Carlson Tonight, on September 1, 2020 and swift endorsement by then President Trump on September 2, 2020, the idea of studying the past became seen as a threat to the present. Rufo, who has since become senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute touted his victory on Twitter, stating: “We have successfully frozen their brand—‘critical race theory’—into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category” (@realchrisrufo).

Fact vs. Myth

In the years since former President Trump declared CRT a threat to the American education system, various legislative figures have responded with bans against teaching CRT in schools, applying strict oversight of educators including monitoring of course material, and denouncing “wokeness” in all political and public discourse. According to the article “New Critical Race Theory Laws Have Teachers Scared, Confused and Self-Censoring,” published in The Washington Post,

A Utah student group was called “Black and Proud.” The principal had it renamed. A New Hampshire history teacher used to discuss current events in a unit about race and economics. No more. And Florida school officials canceled a lecture for teachers on the history of the civil rights movement while they considered whether it would violate state rules. (Meckler and Natanson)

All of this just to placate worried parents who have been persuaded to believe that CRT is somehow radicalizing students of color and has a detrimental effect on the self-esteem of white students. But exactly how can you discuss Ralph Ellison’s groundbreaking novel The Invisible Man without explaining the historical context of pre–Civil Rights America? Will students understand Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye without knowing the divisive slavery-era practice of separating field negroes from house negroes? The solution, it seems, is to ban books that would warrant such discussions. The President of the American Library Association, Lessa Kananiʻopua Pelayo-Lozada declared, “The unprecedented number of challenges we’re seeing already this year reflects coordinated, national efforts to silence marginalized or historically underrepresented voices and deprive all of us—young people, in particular—of the chance to explore a world beyond the confines of personal experience” (“American Library Association Releases Preliminary Data on 2022 Book Bans”).

For all the controversy surrounding this theory, when pressed, few have been able to define exactly what CRT is, as many political pundits and dissenters alike have struggled with the concept.  Here are a few facts and myths about CRT: