BY JENNIFER RUTH
The far right has made critical race theory (CRT) one of the most polarizing issues in a deeply polarized country. And this is precisely what the architect of the anti-CRT media campaign Christopher Rufo intended. In March, he tweeted:
We have successfully frozen their brand—’critical race theory’—into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various insanities under that brand category.
He also tweeted:
The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory.’ We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.
Rufo has indeed succeeded in making “critical race theory” stand for an “entire range of cultural constructions” that bear little resemblance to the body of work that carries its name. According to “Many Americans Embrace Falsehoods about Critical Race Theory,” a report released by Reuters last Thursday:
Among respondents who said they were familiar with CRT, only 5% correctly answered all seven true-false questions that the poll asked about the history and teachings of critical race theory. Only 32% correctly answered more than four of the seven questions.
Last fall and winter, for a book Michael Bérubé and I recently finished on academic freedom and before CRT had blown up in the media, I steeped myself in work from the late 70s, 80s, and early 90s by Kimberlé Crenshaw, Derrick Bell, Marie Matsuda, and others. I had read Patricia J. Williams’ wonderful The Alchemy of Race and Rights soon after it came out in 1991 while in graduate school but I hadn’t read these other authors. I had read plenty of theory that addressed race (bell hooks, Frantz Fanon, Stuart Hall, etc.) but not many of the texts specifically called “critical race theory”– not, that is, until then, a mere minute before the whole country became obsessed with it or, rather, with a straw-person version of it.
The most upsetting thing to learn from the Reuters report is that “thirty-three percent believe [CRT] ‘says that white people are inherently bad or evil.’” There is no way you can read the central texts and think this. One of the most moving original CRT essays I read is one that was published in the Stanford Law Review in 1987. In it, Charles Lawrence III uses disparate impact theory to analyze Washington v. Davis, a 1976 case. Like a great deal of feminist theory at the time and for the same reason, CRT eschewed the universalist pretensions of the omniscient voice and emphasized the social situatedness of the author. To that end, Lawrence began his essay by relaying an anecdote from his childhood: it is story time in a predominantly white kindergarten class and the white teacher is reading Little Black Sambo. Lawrence writes:
I do not have the words to articulate my feelings – words like ‘stereotype’ and ‘stigma’ that might help cathart the shame and place it outside of me where it began. But I am slowly realizing that, as the only black child in the circle, I have some kinship with the tragic and ugly hero of this story.
The essay that follows expertly breaks down the court case, which deals with police exams that have acted as a barrier to increasing Black recruits to the force, and then ends poignantly back where it began, with the racist children’s book but a few decades later. This time it is his daughter who is going to have it read to her by her white teacher. “Culture” gets passed on, generation to generation, and impressions and presumptions are absorbed as if by osmosis, unconsciously. And this is Lawrence’s point because he is quick to stress that the teachers reciting this cultural artifact are not evil. He doesn’t even consider them racist. Lawrence writes:
I am certain that my kindergarten teacher was not intentionally racist in choosing Little Black Sambo. I knew even then, from a child’s intuitive sense, that she was a good, well-meaning person.
And this is my point. The works of CRT often go out of their way to stress that white people are not inherently bad or evil. This is not because the writers are eager to appease white fragility but because this fact, it turns out, is at the very center of their arguments–which is that racism is often unconscious and structural. It is not (white) DNA that racism is baked into but rather mainstream culture and institutions — both of which can be changed.
The idea that CRT asserts that white people are evil is a blatant falsehood, a fear-mongering attempt to rally a dangerous base and recruit moderates. It is reminiscent of the lies that were spread in Colfax, Louisiana in 1873 or Wilmington, North Carolina in 1898 before white mobs massacred an estimated 150 and 300 Black people respectively.
What responsibility do “we” — by which I mean people teaching in universities, people who are trained to think, read and write carefully — have to CRT? It doesn’t matter if we teach chemistry or American history, don’t we have an obligation as educators to correct falsehoods? If something is a blatant misrepresentation and we know it, don’t we have a responsibility to say so? I am not arguing that all faculty, from all over the political spectrum, need to espouse anything they don’t believe. You don’t have to share, for example, my sense that CRT’s critique of structural racism is as relevant today as it was when it was formulated over three decades ago. Maybe you believe that you live in a post-racial, colorblind world in which the only threat of racism comes from talking about racism. But you cannot pretend that CRT is something it’s not or says something it doesn’t. As an educator, you must tell the truth and call out blatant falsehoods when you see them.
Jennifer Ruth, Professor of Film Studies at Portland State University, is a contributing editor to the blog and was the faculty editor of the Journal of Academic Freedom from 2016 to 2017. She is the author of Novel Professions (Ohio State University Press, 2006) and, with Michael Bérubé, The Humanities, Higher Education, and Academic Freedom: Three Necessary Arguments (Palgrave, 2015).
Here’s an interesting historical perspective from today’s Washington Post on the current anti-CRT hype: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/07/20/when-opponents-decry-critical-race-theory-theyre-really-fighting-against-change/.
The right has been wildly successful in their idiot anti-crt campaign, but I find a lot of the left discourse around it bewildering as well. Various analyses of racism as a structural phenomenon far predate CRT, which is a very specific and historically located set of texts, theories, and debates. Which is to say that I don’t get the juxtaposition between people who believe “that you live in a post-racial, colorblind world in which the only threat of racism comes from talking about racism” and CRT as though all rejections of the ludicrous post-racial claim are CRT. How did CRT come to stand in not just on the grossly uninformed right but also on the should-know-better left for “any discussion about race as a structural phenomenon”? CRT is an actual (smallish) subfield, not an unimpeachable doctrine about the structure of race and racism. Maybe none of this matters when people are actually passing anti-crt laws. But at some point shouldn’t we have to critically engage with the work, its arguments and internal disputes, and its actual critics (marxists, liberals, etc) instead of allowing the broad idea of “critical race theory” to stand in for all meaningful discussion about race?
I agree that we on the left should not take the bait and equate CRT with “any discussion about race as a structural phenomenon,” as some of us are tempted to do in order to sound edgy and hip. However, I don’t see that in this post. Jennifer clearly claims that she had read several texts addressing racism as a structural problem before, but then “steeped” herself in the works of critical race theorists like Crenshaw, Bell, Matsuda, and others.
The goal of this post is to demonstrate that conflating critical race theory with EVERY criticism of structural racism and then demonizing all of it is deliberate and intentional, and it has an actual instigator: Christopher Rufo. It’s not a dog-whistle, it’s the blast of a train whistle.
Hi Emily, I take your point but the right has largely succeeded in making CRT stand for systemic or structural racism and anyone who takes their bait does end up espousing a colorblind view of the world, as I’ve seen over and over in countless trollish tweets by Rufo’s army. In one sense, my post isn’t about CRT, really, but about the right’s straw version of it and the need for all educators to fight the lies. I can certainly say more about what I take to actually be the ideas that these original texts forwarded in future posts — and I encourage you (and others) to write a few for the blog. In another sense, though, the right’s strategic decision to make a smallish field that is only a drop in the ocean of critiques of structural racism stand for all critiques of structural racism is manipulative and cynical but it is not completely illogical insofar as CRT did take stock of the way that the Civil Rights Acts had supposedly ushered in a colorblind world and yet very little had actually changed. As I understand it, many of these writings were looking closely at the way laws that were supposed to correct for racism weren’t making much difference and that was because they were correcting for conscious, explicit racism and couldn’t get at the systemic racism that had already been baked into so many of our institutions. The readership for this blog is very broad and, if the comments are any indication, it skews right. My hope here was not that some of these readers actually go read CRT work but that they at least take seriously their responsibility as educators to not swallow the lies and call those lies out when they see them.
Jennifer, yeah, I totally agree that its imperative to respond somehow to the rightist nonsense. It really is a clever gambit. It just seems tricky inasmuch as 1) most educators don’t know much about CRT themselves and 2) actual CRT has its own internal debates, things that we might find more persuasive or less, etc. So I totally understanding needing to respond to the rightist things, but it seems hard to do without also giving a plausible account of what CRT is, and that seems to be tripping people up (not you, just generally). We feel compelled to defend it even if we have substantial critiques and its hard to summarize without giving the impression that it IS kind of all discourses about structures of racism. And that’s even apart from the question of whether some school kids could actually be said to be studying CRT in schools (for better or worse). I can’t quite think myself out of the discursive tangle.
Hi Emily and Jennifer,
To say that not all critiques of structural racism are CRT, and that CRT scholars debate the effects of structural racism on law and institutions rather than individuals should be enough to suggest that CRT is complicated, nuanced, and even contested in places. Those who want to know (logos) what the fuss is all about will readily be directed to CRT scholars like Crenshaw, Bell, and others, including our own Committee A colleague, Emily Houh.
This is not Rufo’s audience. Rufo’s audience already believes (pathos) that every criticism of structural racism is CRT and that CRT claims that “White people are inherently racist and evil.” They are just looking for an authority figure (ethos) to confirm that all paths — whether they be Marxist, liberal, or whatever — lead to this straw-man version of CRT. This gives them the permission to dismiss any and all arguments touching on systemic racism out of hand.
At least that’s how I see it.
Emily and Mark, I see it that way too, Mark. Emily, I like what you say about the frustrating discursive triangle the right has imposed on the left. Thanks for clarifying and developing your original comment. I’m serious about suggesting you submit a guest post. We could use more nuanced and engaged discussion here on the site!
*discursive tangle [not triangle]
And I think I misread you, Mark — maybe you were saying the readership of this blog is not Rufo’s audience. I certainly hope not! My point, though, is to ask all educators — whether they think they have a dog in this fight or not — to correct the lies being spread by Rufo.
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No, you didn’t misread me, Jennifer. I do believe there are members of Rufo’s target audience who read AcademeBlog and post here. There is no other way to explain the emphatic commitment to the right of scholars and teachers to expect that students will master the fundamental assumptions and basic concepts of their disciplines, thereby gaining a better sense of where these experts agree and where they disagree, until it comes to structural racism. Despite the fact that many of us have first-hand experience with structural racism (including exchanges on this blog), and, more damningly, despite the fact that our expertise on this and related topics have been confirmed by our academic mentors, colleagues, and even higher education itself by the granting of terminal degrees and tenure-track positions (though still much too few), there is an odd willingness, an eagerness even, to encourage students to presume to know as much about these topics as we do and to resist our demand that they will master the fundamental assumptions and basic concepts of our fields in order to make sense of our scholarly debates. These defenders of academic freedom will defend our right to say what we want in class, but despite the fact that we have been recognized as experts by higher education itself, they imply that our viewpoints have no more legitimacy than any other. Students suddenly have the free speech right to say things that are demonstrably false, and it is indoctrination, not education, for us to insist that they demonstrate, if even just for the purpose of passing our classes, a basic understanding of what terms like “structural racism” actually mean.