Holder to strike down the preclearance protections in the Voting Rights Act, gutted the legislation of its enforcement mechanism and swung open the gates for the GOP to institute a slew of voter-suppression laws that have reached their apex in 2021. Just look at the national tug-of-war over voting rights - it’s the clearest evidence around that the law is not always on the side of “equal protection.” Don’t think of it as a theoretical exercise - many conservative white people fear CRT precisely because it is not theoretical at all. As the Critical Race Theory editors argued, “Legal scholarship about race in America can never be written from a distance of detachment or with an attitude of objectivity,” because “racial power is exercised legally and ideologically.” Simply put, the law is not some neutral force for social good. In fact, critical race theory is the sort of vital truth-telling that is necessary if American democracy is meant to survive the 21st century. If anything needs defending - not that it would work, of course, as this assault from the right is not being waged in good faith - it’s the continued teaching of American racial myths about Indigenous “savagery,” benevolent slavery, and the “war of Northern aggression.” Children deserve to be taught real, factual history, and to have good analytic frameworks for understanding how racism impacts all our lives. In the 1995 book Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement, the editors argue that the first tenet of CRT is to “understand how a regime of white supremacy and its subordination of people of color have been created and maintained in America, and, in particular, to examine the relationship between that social structure and the professed ideals such as ‘the rule of law’ and ‘equal protection.’” Critical race theory, as Bell and his colleagues and students conceived it, is a highly specialized branch of legal study that attempts to make sense of how America’s entrenched relationship with racism affects American jurisprudence.īut when left-wing voices doggedly insist, in a push for accuracy, as I just did, that CRT isn’t being taught to children, we may be inadvertently conceding that doing so would be a bad thing. Critical race theory is not an indoctrination it is an education - an inquiry, contestation, and clarification about the stakes and politics of knowledge. It’s been said before (so many times), but here we go again: There is no mass campaign on behalf of the political left in this country to infiltrate public schools and indoctrinate young people with the tenets of CRT. As the left-wing rushes to course correct, they end up getting in their own way. Thing is, that blur works on liberals, too. Fear-mongering is of course the weapon of choice for conservatives waging culture wars - they wield it to distract from truth and logic, and do it so often it becomes a blur. Bell had come under fire for protesting Harvard Law’s refusal to tenure any women of color professors, and Obama’s presence in the video served as alleged evidence of his collusion with a radical left-wing racial agenda.
When President Barack Obama was running for his second term in 2012, Andrew Breitbart’s infamous and eponymous disinformation machine released a video of Obama at a 1990 Harvard Law School rally, defending (and hugging) his former professor Derrick Bell, a.k.a. Given all that hysteria, you’d be forgiven for not remembering that this particular line of attack is a decade old.
CRITICAL RACE THEORY TENETS WHITENESS AS SERIES
And more than a dozen states have passed a series of local and state bans on the teaching of CRT or related concepts on race, racism, and American history. It’s really a war about race, history, power, and institutions like our public schools, which are tasked with enforcing our cultural values. For months now, we’ve been treated to a media montage of politically stoked parental outrage at school board meetings across the country over the supposed infiltration of critical race theory into public education.
And the latest battleground in the ongoing cultural proxy war waged by the right continues to be critical race theory. They manufacture crises with the regularity and efficiency of a Ford automobile plant. There is nothing like the right-wing’s long game.
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