“When followed to its logical conclusion, CRT is destructive and rejects the fundamental ideas on which our constitutional republic is based,” the organization claimed. One conservative organization, the Heritage Foundation, recently attributed a whole host of issues to CRT, including the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, LGBTQ clubs in schools, diversity training in federal agencies and organizations, California’s recent ethnic studies model curriculum, the free-speech debate on college campuses, and alternatives to exclusionary discipline-such as the Promise program in Broward County, Fla., that some parents blame for the Parkland school shootings. To an extent, the term “critical race theory” is now cited as the basis of all diversity and inclusion efforts regardless of how much it’s actually informed those programs.
Thus, there is a good deal of confusion over what CRT means, as well as its relationship to other terms, like “anti-racism” and “social justice,” with which it is often conflated.
Critics charge that the theory leads to negative dynamics, such as a focus on group identity over universal, shared traits divides people into “oppressed” and “oppressor” groups and urges intolerance. This academic understanding of critical race theory differs from representation in recent popular books and, especially, from its portrayal by critics-often, though not exclusively, conservative Republicans. And its ideas have since informed other fields, like the humanities, the social sciences, and teacher education. Today, those same patterns of discrimination live on through facially race-blind policies, like single-family zoning that prevents the building of affordable housing in advantaged, majority-white neighborhoods and, thus, stymies racial desegregation efforts.ĬRT also has ties to other intellectual currents, including the work of sociologists and literary theorists who studied links between political power, social organization, and language. Banks subsequently refused to offer mortgages to Black people in those areas. The basic tenets of critical race theory, or CRT, emerged out of a framework for legal analysis in the late 1970s and early 1980s created by legal scholars Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Richard Delgado, among others.Ī good example is when, in the 1930s, government officials literally drew lines around areas deemed poor financial risks, often explicitly due to the racial composition of inhabitants. The core idea is that race is a social construct, and that racism is not merely the product of individual bias or prejudice, but also something embedded in legal systems and policies. Just what is critical race theory anyway?Ĭritical race theory is an academic concept that is more than 40 years old. This explainer is meant only as a starting point to help educators grasp core aspects of the current debate. School boards, superintendents, even principals and teachers are already facing questions about critical race theory, and there are significant disagreements even among experts about its precise definition as well as how its tenets should inform K-12 policy and practice. Add children and schooling into the mix and the debate becomes especially volatile.
But there is much less consensus on what the government’s role should be in righting these past wrongs. The events of the last decade have increased public awareness about things like housing segregation, the impacts of criminal justice policy in the 1990s, and the legacy of enslavement on Black Americans. In truth, the divides are not nearly as neat as they may seem. The topic has exploded in the public arena this spring-especially in K-12, where numerous state legislatures are debating bills seeking to ban its use in the classroom. Is “critical race theory” a way of understanding how American racism has shaped public policy, or a divisive discourse that pits people of color against white people? Liberals and conservatives are in sharp disagreement.
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