A progressives nuanced take on the “CRT” controversy

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A Republican won Virginia’s governorship last week after campaigning on a vow to “ban critical race theory in our schools.”

On one level, this was an odd campaign promise. Properly defined, critical race theory (or CRT) is a body of legal scholarship concerned with the ways that formally colorblind laws can camouflage racial discrimination and reproduce inequality. While taught in many graduate law programs, the works of leading CRT scholars such as Kimberlé Crenshaw and Derrick Bell do not feature in the official curricula of Virginia’s K-12 schools. And no Democrat in the state was trying to change that.

Yet it wouldn’t be right to say that Governor-elect Glenn Youngkin invented the CRT controversy out of whole cloth. Critical race theory has enjoyed influence beyond its immediate discipline, and theorists of pedagogy have applied its analysis to the pursuit of racial equity in public education. The resulting scholarship has informed proposals for curricular reform and teaching training sessions in some states and municipalities. None of this stuff is as radical or widespread as right-wing agitprop would lead one to believe.

No one should pretend that such proposals are nonexistent or self-evidently wise. But their prevalence and ambitions shouldn’t be exaggerated. Public education in the United States remains highly decentralized. While deep-blue cities debate how to minimize racial gaps in educational attainment, many students in the South are still being subjected to “Lost Cause” historiography (which casts the Civil War as a conflict over “states’ rights,” and Reconstruction as a campaign of northern tyranny). There is no campaign of crypto-communistic indoctrination in American schools. There are just efforts to modestly reform curricula and pedagogical training in some school districts.

Alas, there is also a conservative media apparatus hellbent on eliding the distinctions between those two things. Thanks to the right-wing activist Christopher Rufo, “critical race theory” has become a catchall term for just about any form of racial discourse, historical scholarship, or pedagogy that discomfits white conservatives. During the gubernatorial campaign in Virginia, CRT was variously invoked to describe history teachers “putting down Andrew Jackson” for his forays into genocide, English faculty assigning the novels of Toni Morrison, and “equity coaches” informing Loudoun County public-school teachers that nonwhite people are collectivists.

If this multiplicity of meanings renders “CRT” unintelligible as a concept, such ambiguity serves it well as a campaign prop.

The actual political impact of all this is likely overhyped. The GOP’s gubernatorial candidate in New Jersey did not center his campaign on CRT. And he improved on Donald Trump’s 2020 performance in the Garden State by more than Youngkin did in Old Dominion.

In Virginia, the right used “CRT” to collapse the distinctions between three very different propositions: (1) that public-school curricula shouldn’t elide the centrality of white supremacy to U.S. history, (2) that public policy should proactively redress harms wrought by centuries of racial injustice, and (3) that public-school districts should spend tens of thousands of dollars on equity coaches who promote weird racial stereotypes.

That last idea has nothing to do with the preceding ones. And yet, it isn’t just conservatives who act as though they are all of a piece. When progressives withhold, deflect, or stigmatize criticism of ostensibly left-wing — but objectively inane and/or racist — discourse, we do the same.

A key flashpoint in Virginia’s CRT brouhaha came in July, when Loudoun County’s public schools revealed the contents of a training on “culturally responsive teaching” that its faculty had undergone. That training included a slide outlining the distinctions between the supposed individualism of white culture, and collectivism of “color group” culture:

It’s important to put this PowerPoint in context. Contrary to the insinuations of some anti-CRT agitators, this was not used as an instruction material for children. Nor was it meant to teach “that some races are morally superior to others.” Rather, it is a reductive summation of research on the ways that cultural insensitivity can impair educational outcomes for immigrant children.

It is also, by all appearances, racist. The notion that expecting one’s children “to form and express opinions” and “questions elders” is a definitionally white parenting style, while expecting children to “show respect by quiet listening” is a “color group” one, is a racial caricature. As is the broader idea that white families prize individualism over communal obligation. Positing fundamental cultural distinctions between people with different pigmentations — not different class, regional, national, or religious backgrounds, but merely different concentrations of melanin — is a task better left to white supremacists than equity coaches.

To the extent that the “Bridging Cultures” framework describes anything real, it sketches the two poles of a cultural continuum that runs between global capitalism’s periphery and its center.

I can’t speak to the validity or utility of this pedagogy. Its characterization of rural Latin American culture seems crude. Whether it nevertheless improves understanding between U.S.-born teachers and their immigrant students is beyond my purview.

What is pertinent, however, is that the framework describes a cultural divide rooted in disparate social systems and familial histories, not in different races. If this poorly labeled slide were an aberration, it would scarcely merit critique. So, some well-intentioned equity consultants described the divide between certain immigrant cultures and America’s dominant one using problematic shorthand. Why nitpick? But a similar tendency towards racial essentialism crops up regularly in the progressive firmament. Last year, The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture infamously published (and then retracted) a graphic that described “rational linear thinking,” the valorization of “hard work,” “respect for authority,” and an inclination to “plan for the future” as values and traits peculiar to white culture — sentiments that would hardly be out of place in a Steve King speech, or Stormfront thread.

As with the “Bridging Cultures” framework, there were kernels of half-truth in the Smithsonian’s graphic. But to suggest that Americans’ cultural tendency to follow rigid schedules derives, in the first instance, from whiteness — rather than from specific historical developments — is to treat “the white race” as a fundamental reality, rather than a malign fiction invented to rationalize the exploitation of nonwhite people.

The Smithsonian’s graphic took inspiration from the work of Tema Okun, a co-leader of the Teaching for Equity Fellows Program at Duke University, and a popular consultant in progressive circles. In Okun’s account, “objectivity,” “a sense of urgency,” and thinking in binaries like “good or bad” and “right or wrong” are defining characteristics of “white supremacy culture.” She therefore advises progressive organizations to rid themselves of those “damaging” tendencies.

Nevertheless, as Matt Yglesias notes, Okun’s work has been used in trainings for school administrators in New York City, and recommended by the National Education Association, the Minnesota Public Health Association, the Los Angeles chapter of Democratic Socialists of America, and the Society of Conservation Biologists, among many other left-wing institutions.

The notion that there is something inherently white supremacist about believing in a binary between “right and wrong” reads like a parody of progressive doctrine.

None of this validates the right’s panic over “critical race theory.” America’s schoolchildren are not being indoctrinated into Tema Okun thought. But a decent number of progressive groups and well-intentioned school districts do seem to be hiring quack consultants to dispense laughable race malarkey and recipes for organizational self-sabotage. Which is bad.

And progressives shouldn’t hesitate to say so. Our institutions should not be patronizing the dissemination of bizarre racial stereotypes, or modes of ostensibly anti-racist discourse that credit “white culture” for “the scientific method.” This would be true even if this stuff came with no political downside. But it is even more true now that the right is exploiting slideshows on “color group collectivism” to discredit the progressive movement’s broader agenda for racial justice.

The prevalence of laughable race malarkey in progressive spaces isn’t one of the left’s biggest problems. But it is among its most readily solvable ones. Liberal-minded public-school systems could simply not pay for teacher trainings that reify racist fictions. Progressive organizations could start handing out copies of Racecraft instead of Tema Okun’s pamphlets. House Democrats could not hire Robin DiAngelo to brief them on “white fragility.”

But none of that will happen (or stop happening) if progressives honor a taboo against criticizing any left-adjacent inanity that enters the right’s crosshairs. The abolition of “Lost Cause” historiography from public schools is an endeavor worth defending. The elimination of racial inequities in American schooling is too. But the bankrolling of accidentally racist equity consultants just isn’t. There is no inherent connection between acknowledging the inconvenient truths of U.S. history, using public policy to reduce racial inequality, and rebranding a bunch of broadly popular cultural values as “white” or “white supremacist.” Yet when proponents of those first two causes withhold criticism from the latter, we give the impression that they’re all inextricably linked.

That’s good for the conservative movement. And it’s also good for accidentally racist equity consultants. But it’s hard to see how it serves our society’s most disadvantaged. So, let’s just call the malarkey what it is and cease paying for it.

Over the past few months, I have engaged in countless debates with colleagues over whether critical race theory is in our school district. Teachers deny critical race theory’s existence because they do not truly know what it is and hence cannot recognize its influence on their practices. Critical race theory rests on two presuppositions: The first is that racism in America is not aberrational but normative, and the second that America’s social, legal and political institutions are inherently racist as a consequence of our admittedly shameful racial past. In other words, racism permeates our modern sociopolitical fabric.

Critical race theory is the practice of interrogating race and racism in American institutions and society using the aforementioned presuppositions. It is a critical analytic lens for understanding the racial disparities in our country and an activist imperative for action. Unlike social science theories constructed on empirical evidence, critical race theory uses a new epistemology in which truth is subjectively determined by “lived experiences” rather than what can be impartially observed, quantified or falsified.

If one expects to find critical race theory to be listed in school district training manuals or curriculum maps, they’re going to be disappointed. However, one mustn’t allow oneself to become pigeonholed into this idea that to identify critical race theory’s influence and application, it must be explicitly named. It does not exist in education as a course of student studies but as praxis (the practice of theory).

Think of critical race theory like the scientific method, which is both a theoretical framework and tool. The study of and training in the scientific method takes place in institutions of higher learning, which is then applied in professional practice. That your doctor does not mention it during their work does not mean it is not embedded in the field. It is entirely possible, even likely, that the scientific method is seldom named or discussed as a topic of conversation in most medical practices. Would anyone use that as evidence that the scientific method does not exist in medicine? Of course not. Therefore, knowing the distinction between theory and praxis, we must look for applicational evidence of critical race theory in education.

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Thanks to the right-wing activist Christopher Rufo, “critical race theory” has become a catchall term for just about any form of racial discourse, historical scholarship, or pedagogy that discomfits white conservatives. During the gubernatorial campaign in Virginia, CRT was variously invoked to describe history teachers “putting down Andrew Jackson” for his forays into genocide, .

in texas it seems it is now acceptable for schools to deny the enormity of the holocaust and to say slavery was good for the slaves. there doesn't seem to be any significant blowback for those people down there.
https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watc ... books-with
https://qz.com/1273998/for-10-years-stu ... e-unhappy/

It's funny when right wingers claim they hate communism/marxism but do exactly the same crap in erasing "inconvenient" history

What percentage of "Right-wingers" do you think do this?

Personally, I believe there is another dimension to the issue of CRT.
I.E.
Parents don't want political activists in skools brainwashing their kids.
They don't want CRT being used as a propaganda tool of the left.

I think it ironic that some on the left are using the Nazi model of child indoctrination.

Strange that you should say that...

i continue to be amazed that there is not a mass migration of POC out of the south.

i knew a biracial couple who told me they made sure they were armed when they moved down there.

Isn't violence a problem in many parts of America?