Critical race theory

Critical race theory (CRT) is a cross-disciplinary intellectual and social movement of civil-rights scholars and activists who seek to examine the intersection of race, society, and law in the United States and to challenge mainstream American liberal approaches to racial justice.

As a person committed to antiracism, I would prefer it if opponents of racial equality hadn't chosen to attack research aimed at diagnosing and healing racial inequality. It's not coincidental that the conservative think tanks promoting the anti-critical race theory hysteria tend to support policies that strike at the heart of civil rights victories- making it harder for people of color to vote, undermining public education, and promoting nativist and anti-immigration policies such as militarizing the border. ~ Victor Ray

For the most part, in recent years, education debates at the national level and in communities across this country have been proxy wars for right-wing strategists who see schools as vehicles to advance their divide-and-conquer agenda. Cynical Republicans like Florida governor Ron DeSantis want to argue about whether students and teachers should be required to wear masks during a pandemic, about whether LGBTQ kids should be treated with respect, about whether educators should be allowed to teach the actual history of the United States—as opposed to a truncated version in which fundamental issues are ignored and critical thinking is disregarded. ~ Bernie Sanders

For CRT advocates, counter-speech, more speech, and the marketplace of ideas are all poisoned by white dominance and privilege. ~ Mark Levin

Quotes

• Conservatives have got the culture-war act down. Trump was a culture-war president with almost no policy arm attached. The question conservatives at the conference were asking was how to move beyond owning the libs to effecting actual change.
  Christopher Rufo, the architect of this year’s school-board-meeting protests against critical race theory, argued that conservatives had erred when they tried to slowly gain power in elite cultural institutions. Conservatives were never going to make headway in the Ivy League or the corporate media. Instead, Rufo argued, they should rally the masses to get state legislatures to pass laws embracing their values. That’s essentially what’s now happening across red America.
  • David Brooks, as quoted in The Terrifying Future of the American Right (18 November 2021), The Atlantic

• It has been reported that Malcolm X once said that if you have no critics, you'll likely have no success. If indeed having critics is the key to success, then critical race theorists have every reason to be wildly optimistic.
  • Kimberlé Crenshaw, "Twenty Years of Critical Race Theory: Looking Back to Move Forward," Connecticut Law Review (2010), Volume 43, 1253-1352, as quoted by Victor Ray, On Critical Race Theory: Why It Matters and Why You Should Care (New York: Random House, 2022), p. ix

• [P]rogressives on the left have shown themselves willing to abandon liberal values in pursuit of social justice objectives. There has been a sustained intellectual attack on liberal principles over the past three decades coming out of academic pursuits like gender studies, critical race theory, postcolonial studies, and queer theory, that deny the universalistic premises underlying modern liberalism. The challenge is not simply one of intolerance of other views or “cancel culture” in the academy or the arts. Rather, the challenge is to basic principles that all human beings were born equal in a fundamental sense, or that a liberal society should strive to be color-blind.
  • Francis Fukuyama, "Liberalism and its Discontents: The challenges from the left and the right" (5 October 2020), American Purpose

• With the public rise of the COVID-(16)19 effect, the Left in America has mounted a sinister defense: nothing to see here. Rank-and-file Democrats like former Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe say criticisms of critical race theory are "conspiracy theories." So-called Squad member Ilhan Omar tweeted in June 2021, "Republicans love to create outrage over things that aren't actually happening. People should be asking them, what elementary, middle and high school is teaching Critical Race Theory and why they are spinning false narratives." Nikole Hannah-Jones, the chief author and proponent of the critical race theory-based 1619 Project, says her newly formed black liberation schools are "not teaching critical race theory." Even the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, repeatedly dismissed claims that elements of critical race theory are being taught at West Point and throughout the military. He's focused on "white rage" instead.
  • Pete Hegseth, Battle for the American Mind: Uprooting a Century of Miseducation (New York: Broadside Books, 2022), p. 28

• More specific to the classroom, the two largest teachers unions in America- the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA) deny outright that critical race theory is being taught, even while AFT invites Ibram X. Kendi- the author of How to Be an Antiracist- to be a featured speaker at their 2021 national conference. Moreover, while denying the teaching of racial and gender theories in the classrooms, both unions have multimillion dollar legal funds dedicated to defending teachers who run afoul of local or state laws that ban the teaching of critical race theory. Like corporate America, higher education, mass media, and our military, these unions call their efforts "diversity, equity, and inclusion" (DEI)- obfuscating their Marxist aims in cozy language. Note to self: when the left denies something, they are usually just confirming it.
  • Pete Hegseth, Battle for the American Mind: Uprooting a Century of Miseducation (New York: Broadside Books, 2022), p. 28-29

• These unions and fellow-traveler Leftists have good reason to deny the existence of radical left-wing theories. The curriculum, and teachers, almost never come out and state what they are teaching is "critical race theory." They don't have to. Instead, they hide behind coded language that is designed to confuse parents and hide the real goal. The preferred language of the Left is ever changing, which- as the authors of the fantastic book Cynical Theories point out- is because "they stem from a very particular view of the world- one that even speaks its own language in a way. Within the English-speaking world, they speak English, but they use everyday words differently from the rest of us."
  A key part of the Left's CRT denial is the way in which they hide the difference between curriculum and pedagogy- a distinction that has recently risen to the forefront in public debates. Pedagogy refers to the methods, practices, and purposes of teaching; curriculum is what is specifically being taught. Curriculum is what kids are taught; pedagogy is how they're taught. Some today believe education is primarily an information and skill transfer, so they tend to talk only about what skills or information are taught- what content is on the curriculum. The hidden secret, used effectively by Progressives, is pedagogy- method of teaching. They deny CRT is in the curriculum, instead embedding their entire CRT methodology into their teaching pedagogy.
  • Pete Hegseth, Battle for the American Mind: Uprooting a Century of Miseducation (New York: Broadside Books, 2022), p. 29

• In an interview with CNN in 2020, Crenshaw described Critical Race Theory as "a practice. It's an approach to grappling with a history of White supremacy that rejects the belief that what's in the past is in the past, and that the laws and systems that grow from the past are detahced from it." "Critical race theory attends not only to law's transformative role which is often celebrated," claimed Crenshaw, "but also to its role in establishing the very rights and privileges that legal reform was set to dismantle. Like American history itself, a proper understanding of the ground upon which we stand requires a balanced assessment, not a simplistic commitment to jingoistic accounts of our nation's past and current dynamics."
  In other words, CRT undermines and exploits America's unique and very successful fusion of diversity and cultural assimilation, and considers all issues in the context of past societal imperfections- regardless of enormous struggles and efforts in creating a more perfect society, including a civil war, massive economic redistribution, and groundbreaking legal changes. Even more, it incorporates and advances an increasing list of causes as new or additional reasons for eradicating society and transforming the country. Indeed, CRT repositions what is the most tolerant and beneficient society on earth as a miserably dark and impoverished nation, from its beginning to today.
  • Mark Levin, American Marxism (New York: Threshold Editions, 2021), p. 90-91

• For CRT advocates, counter-speech, more speech, and the marketplace of ideas are all poisoned by white dominance and privilege.
  • Mark Levin, American Marxism (New York: Threshold Editions, 2021), p. 101

• As should be clear, the Critical Theory movement, born and developed by German Marxists, chief among them the late Herbert Marcuse, is more influential in the Oval Office, the halls of Congress, university and college classrooms, public schools, corporate boardrooms, the media, Big Tech, and the entertainment industry than the genius and works of Aristotle, Cicero, John Locke, Montesquieu, Adam Smith, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and so many others who contributed mightily to a civil and humane world. It is increasingly influential throughout the culture, too often at the cost of Judeo-Christian values and the lessons of the Age of the Enlightenment, which undergird the most tolerant, free, and beneficient societies- especially the United States. Instead, the intersectional network of a seemingly endless list of oppressed individuals and groups are obsessively committed to transforming and overthrowing the American republic and society- that is, the dominant culture and its supposedly repressive institutions- and are tearing this country apart. Of course, this is not to say that every individual or group associated with these movements or their professed purposes is knowingly part of such a rebellion or revolution. No doubt many are unfamiliar with the ultimate objectives and motivations of the fanatical leaders, organizers, and activists among them. Nonetheless, they are contributing to CT's extremely destructive and revolutionary purposes and ends.
  • Mark Levin, American Marxism (New York: Threshold Editions, 2021), p. 137-138

• As a person committed to antiracism, I would prefer it if opponents of racial equality hadn't chosen to attack research aimed at diagnosing and healing racial inequality. It's not coincidental that the conservative think tanks promoting the anti-critical race theory hysteria tend to support policies that strike at the heart of civil rights victories- making it harder for people of color to vote, undermining public education, and promoting nativist and anti-immigration policies such as militarizing the border. These conservative think tanks, by and large, also supported a would-be authoritarian president whose political rise was facilitated by the slander of birtherism, an unhinged conspiracy theory questioning President Barack Obama's citizenship. Like former president Donald Trump, the groups promoting the anti-critical race theory moral panic aren't interested in solving racial inequality; they are manipulating racism for political advantage.
  • Victor Ray, On Critical Race Theory: Why It Matters and Why You Should Care (2022), New York: Random House, p. xv

• Critical race theory is an intellectual bulwark against the propaganda of history. Multiracial democracy is a recent and fragile innovation in American history. Those who think this fact has no place in our schools would- intentionally or not- hasten a return to unquestioned white dominance. We should never forget that it took National Guard soldiers to get black and white kids seated together in American schools, that abstract notions of a colorblind Constitution weren't a shield against slavery's horrors or the savagery of lynching, that Jim Crow was a legal regime codifying racial subordination, and that civil rights wrested from white supremacy's stingy fingers could be wrested back.
  • Victor Ray, On Critical Race Theory: Why It Matters and Why You Should Care (2022), New York: Random House, p. 129

• The trouble with debates about public education in the United States is that they rarely have anything to do with education—let alone establishing the habits of analytical thinking and civic engagement that give us the freedom to be more than just cogs in the machinery of corporate America. For the most part, in recent years, education debates at the national level and in communities across this country have been proxy wars for right-wing strategists who see schools as vehicles to advance their divide-and-conquer agenda. Cynical Republicans like Florida governor Ron DeSantis want to argue about whether students and teachers should be required to wear masks during a pandemic, about whether LGBTQ kids should be treated with respect, about whether educators should be allowed to teach the actual history of the United States—as opposed to a truncated version in which fundamental issues are ignored and critical thinking is disregarded. Amid all the political infighting over mask mandates and Critical Race Theory, about test scores and funding mechanisms, we've losing our focus on what matters most in education; the encouragement of students to explore big ideas, to learn how to assess what makes sense and what does not, to become engaged and active citizens who live happy and fulfilling lives. For education to get focused on the real needs, and the real possibilities for students in the twenty-first century, we have to break out the mentality that considers our elementary and secondary schools merely training grounds for workers.
  • Bernie Sanders, It's Okay to be Angry About Capitalism (2023), New York: Crown, 1st edition hardcover, p. 211-212