A Defense of Critical Race Theory
Prologue
In the choppy sea of contemporary American civic life, the issue of race is a riptide.
The controversy about racism in America extends to how we think about it, talk about it, study it, teach it, chronicle it, and whose voices should be centered in the discussion.
I’m a white woman, socialized in white settings, who came to the realization in recent years with the ascendance of the social justice movement, that I had only a superficial understanding of racism in the U.S. I was naive about race.
I’ve consumed a lot of media in the effort to correct that — books, articles, and audio presentations — from Black and white voices, and from liberal and conservative sources. I found it necessary to confront my personal attitudes as a white person about racism, including my implicit bias and recognition of my unearned advantages as a white person.
Personal bias and white privilege are but two expressions of racism. No aspect of racism has been featured more prominently in the media or generated more contention in recent weeks than critical race theory, or CRT. Conservatives, from pundits to parents, claim that CRT distorts and racializes history in order to assign undeserved guilt today for wrongs committed in a distant past. Liberals profess it to be a revelatory paradigm shift in recounting our history that elevates the Black experience and provides important context to the American saga.
I began to focus on coverage of critical race theory in the media and on finding background material. Ironically, as I narrowed my scope, my understanding expanded exponentially. It turns out that critical race theory reveals the astonishing amount of racism in our nation’s institutions, and its crushing effect on the lives of people of color.
Introduction
It’s not “just a few bad apples.” The orchard is sick.
The rural farming community in which I live provides a convenient analogy for the extent of racism in our country, as well as a response to the “it’s just a few bad apples” (in this case, peaches) crowd.
I bought a large quantity of peaches recently from my favorite local farm stand. The grower admitted to me with a worried look that I should use them quickly because she was battling a rot that had struck the crop this year. I might find a few unusable pieces and the fruit was more perishable than usual.
I appreciated her candor and noted her concern. The problem was not a few spoiled pieces of fruit, but the pathogen that had infiltrated the entire field. That I would be able to use most of the peaches belied the fact that the orchard had been weakened by disease. If she didn’t address that, she risked losing her whole crop and blighting the orchard for years to come.
And so it is with racism. Personal prejudice and intrinsic bias are discrete instances, but there’s a more insidious problem attacking the nation systemically.
We are weaker as a society because we allow people of color to suffer the effects of racist policies infiltrating our institutions.
Disparity marks every aspect of Black life.
My white family has never been shut out of opportunities to advance economically or educationally because of our skin color. My immigrant ancestors belonged to marginalized groups when they arrived in this country and struggled through that. But, in spite of having to overcome widely held prejudice in their early years here (“no Irish need apply”), they were able to access the systems in which we live and work — the legal, educational, residential, commercial, and healthcare structures that undergird our society.
That’s not the case for Black families. Historically, despite the Emancipation Proclamation, amendments to the Constitution, and the vital Civil Rights Movement, Black families in pursuit of jobs, housing, education, and healthcare have faced not just prejudicial attitudes, but overwhelming obstacles in the form of discriminatory laws and policies.
As a result, significant social and economic inequities between Black people and white people persist in present day America:
- The racial wealth gap: According to the Federal Reserve, from data collected in 2019, a typical white family has eight times the wealth of a typical Black family.
- School segregation: Black children are disproportionately segregated in underfunded city schools, while suburban schools are generally majority white and fully resourced.
- The criminal justice system: According to the ACLU, one out of every three Black boys born today can expect to be incarcerated in his lifetime, compared to one of every 17 white boys.
- Health: The Kaiser Family Foundation 2018 data indicate that people of color fared worse than white people across a range of health measures, including maternal/infant mortality, incidence of chronic conditions, and overall physical and mental health status. Life expectancy as of 2018 among Black people was four years lower than white people, with the lowest expectancy among Black men.
A Defense of Critical Race Theory
Racism: past is present
Many academics at the graduate and professional level, particularly in law and education, use critical race theory, a specific approach to studying the dynamics that have historically marginalized Black people and people of color in the U.S.
Although the current furor surrounding it is new, CRT is not. It’s been in use since the 1970’s. It’s a way of thinking deeply and comprehensively about our country’s past in the search for root causes for the socio-economic inequities that persist in the United States today.
CRT exposes the throughline of racism from the Atlantic slave trade in the colonial era, to institutionalized slavery in the pre-Civil War United States, to Reconstruction, the Jim Crow era, and the Civil Rights Movement, and ultimately to the racial divide in our country today. It demonstrates the deliberate, systemic, discriminatory attitudes, policies, and practices, both implicit and explicit, that have led to contemporary negative outcomes for Black people.
Kimberlé Crenshaw, a critical race theory founder and law professor, describes CRT in an interview for the September 2021 issue of Vanity Fair magazine: “It was how to think, how to see, how to read, how to grapple with how law has created and sustained race — our particular kind of race and racism — in American society.”
Critical race theory is a broad, evolving methodology. Experts in several branches of scholarship beyond legal studies and education, including gender studies, women’s studies, Latino critical theory, Asian studies, political science, sociology, and theology, have capitalized on its malleability to adapt it, with different emphases, for use within their fields.
The following list is not exhaustive or comprehensive, but includes some major points posited by CRT:
- Racism is present and active in America today, in individual attitudes and practices as well as in policies embedded in our institutions.
- The concept of “race” and the resultant racial hierarchy were created to justify the enslavement of African people to exploit their labor in driving the economy of our nascent nation.
- The power to create the racial disparities we see today could not come solely from individual attitudes, although they contribute. Discriminatory power of such magnitude that it impedes the socio-economic progress of an entire demographic group could only come from racist policies ingrained in our legal, financial, educational, and healthcare systems.
- The lived experiences and narratives of people of color give important, valid witness to our nation’s true history.
Recent examples of federally-sanctioned discrimination and its consequential, wide-ranging negative outcomes.
During the New Deal years of the 1930’s, The Federal Housing Administration (FHA) redlined Black neighborhoods, as did the Veterans Administration after World War II. Banks followed their lead and African Americans were frozen out of the home mortgage market. At the same time, the FHA subsidized developers who were building entire communities of single family homes in suburban areas, while stipulating that none could be sold to African-Americans. Black families could not integrate white communities and were trapped in increasingly crowded urban neighborhoods.
With residential integration effectively stalled by the government, metropolitan areas grew in the 1930’s through the 1960’s according to the model that federally-mandated segregation forced on them: Black families living in densely-populated urban neighborhoods of multifamily housing, ringed by whites-only suburbs comprised of single family homes. Black families suffered higher rates of poverty, and were unable to generate wealth through home equity to see them through hard times, to help pay for the higher education that would lead to better jobs, and to bequeath to the next generation. That wealth gap remains to this day, even after the Fair Housing Act of 1968 ostensibly stopped race-based housing discrimination.
Metropolitan areas burgeoned in the mid-twentieth century, and public schools soon reflected their segregated residential patterns. In 1970, the NAACP began a litigative effort to oblige Michigan state officials to integrate racially-segregated metropolitan Detroit schools. That years-long endeavor failed in 1974 when the Supreme Court, in the landmark decision Milliken v. Bradley, allowed suburban school districts to opt out of urban/suburban desegregation efforts, unless it could be proven that school district lines were drawn with explicitly racist intent. As a result, though more than half a century has passed since the 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education declared “separate but equal” schools to be unconstitutional, Black children today are five times as likely as white children to attend a racially segregated school, and more than twice as likely to attend a high-poverty school.
Inexplicably, many of the race-blind mandates enacted to mitigate past injustices have only worsened them. This is particularly evident in the criminal justice system. The mandatory minimum sentences and sentencing enhancements enacted during the “war on drugs” initiated during the Nixon administration overwhelmingly ensnared Black people in the carceral system. The result is today’s conjoined problems of mass incarceration and fracturing of Black families.
How do we know these things? Critical race theory.
How will we know how not to do these things in the future? Critical race theory.
While researching CRT I waded through a deluge of misinformation.
Contrary to what many sources maintain, CRT is not the same as anti-racism training. It’s not an ideology or policy. It’s not taught in K-12 schools. It’s not designed to shame anyone or to divide Americans along racial lines. It’s not as concerned with individuals harboring racist attitudes as it is with racism embedded in our institutions.
The most vocal opponent of critical race theory is conservative activist and culture warrior Christopher Rufo, who has a broad media platform, and who tweeted in March that his goal “is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory.’”
In the ongoing culture wars, conservatives have turned the weapons of deceit and white grievance against critical race theory. A number of state legislatures and school districts, hoping to capitalize on the wedge issue that CRT has become, have enacted laws and policies that purport to ban CRT in K-12 school curricula. (A reminder here that CRT is currently not taught in K-12 classrooms.) The definitions they give of CRT, and the reasons given for its proscription, are muddled, mendacious, and politically self-serving.
Their efforts are supported by, often fueled by, conservative media, in which everything from anti-racist education, gender ideology, and cancel culture has been ascribed to CRT in hyperbolic, overheated rhetoric.
It’s clear that legislative and school district curricular bans based on bad faith arguments and far-right propaganda like Rufo’s will do nothing to protect students from an imaginary evil and will instead squelch thoughtful discussion about our country’s history. Students whose learning is stifled under these bans may never be exposed to the most significant writings of great Americans, including those of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Conclusion
In contrast to the simplistic, white-centric, triumphalist history conservatives embrace, critical race theory’s lens spotlights the way today’s inequalities link to past injustices. It connects the dots, providing a fuller picture of our country’s history and the work that needs to be done to rectify the disparities in opportunity and power, so that all can participate fully in civic life.
In a July 2021 interview for the New York Times, Nikole Hannah-Jones, the Pulitzer-Prize winning investigative journalist for The New York Times Magazine, and creator of the 1619 Project, captured the spirit of critical race theory and provided a vision for America going forward.
“None of us are responsible for what our ancestors did. But we are responsible for what we do now. And we do have the ability to build a country that is different, that is not held hostage to the past. But we won’t do that by denying that upon which we were built. Because that past is shaping us. It is shaping our country, our politics, our culture, our economics, whether we acknowledge it or not. And all I’m saying is let us acknowledge that upon which we were built so that we can try to actually become the country of these majestic ideals. And I do believe the ideals are majestic, we just have failed to live up to them.”
The totality of the evidence in defense of critical race theory shows it to be a credible, valuable academic approach. Opponents are resigned to misrepresentation, straw man arguments, and provocative appeals to white grievance in their attempts to discredit it.
Importantly, CRT reveals that the negative consequences of race-based laws and practices in the past are borne by Black people today. Race-blind policies are often ineffectual in overcoming the inequities, and in some cases worsen them. Critical race theory looks to effect positive change by recognizing the systemic racism in all sectors of national life and working to undo it.
Our nation’s history will not cohere until we recognize all the voices, Black and white, who share in it. Achieving equality for all in the United States is a matter of individual commitment as well as community action.
We can all be involved by learning about racism and civil rights from credible sources, developing social and political empathy toward people of different cultures, supporting efforts to bring about equitable communities, and voting for representatives who work for social justice.
It is incumbent upon white people to take on the responsibility to fight racism.
It’s important for white people to recognize that while righting the system will take a united effort by all Americans, the responsibility for white people becoming educated about racism belongs to white people, not Black people.
There are countless Black people down the centuries who have communicated the realities of racism and what is needed to overcome it. And there are those who have dedicated themselves to conveying those concepts specifically to white people, as frustrating, exhausting, and often futile as that effort is for them. That is a grace that is unearned and often unrecognized by white people.
In the research for this piece, I encountered James Baldwin’s powerful 1964 essay, The White Problem. In the piece Baldwin discussed the disparate Black versus white perceptions of America, and expressed his hope nonetheless, that we can remake our society together. One sentence essentializes for me the gift of Black people furthering whites to a better understanding of race:
Black people will have to do something very hard, too, which is to allow the white citizen his first awkward steps toward maturity.
I’m grateful to the Black people whose relationships with me or whose written or spoken words influenced this endeavor, my “first awkward steps” on a journey to maturity. They continue to help this white citizen expand a limited perception, past the blindspots and naivete, to a fuller realization of our shared history and a reconciliation with the truth.
Resources
I linked to several articles in the body of the essay that provide evidence for points of fact cited. In addition, I recommend two good descriptive articles included in professional publications: Janel George’s A Lesson on Critical Race Theory in the American Bar Association’s January 2021 Human Rights Publication; and Stephen Sawchuk’s What Is Critical Race Theory, and Why Is It Under Attack?, from the May 18, 2021 EducationWeek.
The following books, listed in random order, were instrumental in helping me learn about racism and about critical race theory in particular.
- Between The World And Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates
- The Essential Martin Luther King, Jr, edited by Clayborne Carlson
- The White Problem, essay by James Baldwin in The Cross of Redemption, Uncollected Writings, by James Baldwin, edited by Randall Kenan
- The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, by Richard Rothstein
- The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together, by Heather McGee
- Critical Race Theory, Third Edition, by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic;
- How To Be An Antiracist, by Ibram X. Kendi;
- Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, by Isabel Wilkerson
- The Spiritual Work of Racial Justice, by Patrick Saint-Jean, SJ, PsyD
- A White Catholic’s Guide to Racism and Privilege, by Dan Horan, OFM
- Stop Being Afraid, and other resources by Dr. Amanda Kemp
- White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism, by Robin DiAngleo
- So You Want To Talk About Race, by Ijeoma Oluo
- Uncomfortable Conversations With A Black Man, by Emmanuel Acho
- How to Fight Racism: Courageous Christianity and the Journey Toward Racial Justice, by Jemar Tisby
