Here We Go Again
Can Anyone Tell Me What CRT Really is? Anyone?
I have a new goal: I want to attend all of the school council meetings around the country that are being inundated with cries of “this is Critical Race Theory!” and ask each person to define it. Show your work. I want them to get into the real nitty gritty of the subject. Do you think they could?
My hypothesis would be no. It seems like every few years, the national talking points turn something relatively obscure or mundane into a terrifying subject that causes everyone to react viscerally when they hear the right words. It’s like Pavlov’s dogs with a new phrase (“CRT!”) instead of a bell.
We have seen it over and over again in our history. Once something has been deemed “bad”, it is hard to rehab that something. There is a demonization and coopting that takes place in bad faith; the real meaning or intention doesn’t matter.
Critical Race Theory is just another in a long line of issues. As a professor in sociology, I often intertwine race and other variables into my presentations; it’s socially constructed, but that doesn’t make it any less important. By ignoring it, we leave out a major topic with far-reaching implications. However, I don’t teach Critical Race Theory in my classes. Is it because I’m afraid my students will get upset? No. It is because it is a very complicated theory, and, frankly, I only have so much time to cover the topics. I have to get them to grasp the Big Three sociological theories; any offshoots will come later in graduate school.
Critical Race Theory is a nuanced examination of our social institutions and history through a lens of race; it has been around since the 1970s. I learned about it briefly in graduate school, but it was part of a long list of theories that were covered. I know law students often take classes that include it because our criminal justice system and race are intertwined. The theory itself has some roots in one of the Big Three sociological theories: Conflict Theory. So, if I mention CRT at all in my undergraduate classes, it is alongside Feminist Theory as an extension of Conflict Theory that goes beyond pointing out inequality and moves into critical examination of those inequalities.
It is not, however, something that K-12 students will likely be exposed to; as I said, it’s complicated and even graduate students struggle with all of its tenets. We couldn’t possibly expect young kids to understand it, and I doubt there is a teacher out there that wants to try. Theories that relate to people are inherently, well, human, and so that makes them challenging.
The more likely scenario is that many public schools have started to implement diversity and inclusion as goals in their teaching. From history to English and beyond, schools are trying to make sure that students receive a well-rounded overview, and that includes diverse points of view. It doesn’t mean CRT, but that’s exactly what conservatives have turned this effort into; they have commandeered “diversity” to mean “Critical Race Theory”, and there’s no putting that genie back in the bottle.
Many prominent conservatives have fully admitted that this was the plan all along. Poison the well, and everything that comes out of it is poison too. Lessons that even have a whiff of discussion related to systemic racism cause outrage. Anything that doesn’t praise the United States and its history is somehow bad. Conflicts are playing out at school board and council meetings from Maine to California. There is spectacle in hijacking a school board meeting to complain about this issue. The term Critical Race Theory is used to mean anything that deals with race. It’s interesting to look at the big picture because there is definitely an astroturfed movement with common strategies and messaging. These spectacles get a lot of attention, and they have the backing of prominent Republican politicians. There are laws being discussed in many states to outlaw Critical Race Theory.
Major conservative media outlets have taken up the cause, and there has been a tremendous uptick in the number of news stories and articles that include the term Critical Race Theory. It is the big talking point right now even as most of the school districts have no CRT in their curriculum, nor do they plan to do so any time soon.
If any of this sounds familiar, it’s because it’s very similar to what happened in 1996 when Oakland, California passed a resolution that recognized that Black students could be helped by the use of African American Language (or, as it was referred to then, Ebonics (short for Ebony Phonics)). One resolution in one city led to one of the biggest news stories of the decade. The news media and conservative pundits presented the story as if children would be learning “Ebonics” instead of standard English. That wasn’t what was happening at all, but as the saying goes, “A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth has time to put its pants on”.
There was no depth to the story at all, and it was taken at face-value without any of the metrics that showed that Black schoolchildren *could* be helped if the dialect was simply recognized. Instead of treating the language as “bad”, it was supposed to be seen as another dialect that was used in certain situations and could be used as a bridge for Standard English. The research showed that children were helped by this methodology, but, by then, the national panic had started, and the program was all but scrapped.
The story is seen today as a panic over something that most people didn’t grasp, but, at the time, the intersection of children and race and lack of understanding allowed the story to burn like wildfire. Laws were passed. Funding was threatened. The program was quietly discontinued and not picked up by any other school districts, even as it showed a lot of promise.
The CRT panic is Ebonics on steroids; with social media, things spread so fast that we can’t keep up. Hot takes get views and clicks and likes, and the nuance is lost in the heat. Will we look at the panic over CRT differently in 20 years? I imagine we will. History shows that we often do, as long as we get the full story. But what damage will be done before that full story is shared?
