Proposals to teach Critical Race Theory (CRT) in America’s public schools are sharply dividing public opinion across the nation. A conservative backlash, based on beliefs that CRT is “unpatriotic”, divisive, and leads to unwarranted collective guilt among white people, has prompted vociferous opposition from concerned parents, Republican politicians, conservative think tanks, legal firms, and, inevitably, the right-wing media. As of June 2021, legislation aimed at limiting the teaching of CRT has already been enacted in six American states, with others likely to follow.
CRT originated in the aftermath of the civil rights legislation of the 1960s, arising from disenchantment at the slow pace of implementation, and the occasional reversal, of new laws upholding racial equality. From the 1970s onwards, progressive lawyers and legal scholars, mainly African Americans to begin with, became increasingly cynical about supposedly “colour-blind” conceptions of racial equality and the neutrality of constitutional law. They claimed instead that America’s foundational documents, courts and legislatures were inherently biased against blacks and other “people of colour”. Derrick Bell, the first tenured African American professor at Harvard Law School, is widely regarded as the progenitor of CRT. In his 1970 book, titled ‘Race, Racism, and American Law’, he introduced the concept of “interest convergence”, according to which white people only ever granted rights to blacks when it was in their self-interest to do so. The first-ever Critical Race Theory workshop was held in the summer of 1989, at the St Benedict Center in Madison, Wisconsin, to be followed by a succession of conferences and meetings all devoted to CRT.
According to CRT, race is merely a social construct. Physical attributes that define race, such as skin colour, physique, and hair, cannot be linked to differences in intelligence and moral behaviour between people. Racism that is based upon these superficial racial distinctions is, however, permanently embedded in American society, pervasive, and has come to be accepted as “normal”. Racist beliefs and actions have shaped the nation’s history, and directly contribute to disparities in wealth, power and social status. Racism underpins all interactions in American society, thereby justifying the use of such terms as “systemic” and “structural” racism. Through a process of “intersectionality”, racial discrimination is further compounded by the overlapping of race, gender identity, sexual orientation, and social class, in multiple layers of oppression.
CRT is not just an analytical tool but actually advocates social action to redress the problems of racism. Activists believe that merely proclaiming equality in legal terms is not enough to overcome racial inequality. If anything, a power imbalance has resulted in the subjugation of oppressed blacks by dominant whites. While racist attitudes have declined, and there is increased public discourse and cross-cultural fertilisation between whites and blacks, white people are still apparently unable to acknowledge and then address the wider advantages of “white privilege”.
CRT encourages “race consciousness” among African Americans, based upon their life experiences. This new appreciation of racial identity is, however, being framed as a threat to “white supremacy”, and appears to be contributing to “white fragility”, “white panic”, and even reinforcing fears of “white extinction”. CRT is a relatively recent participant in the battleground of cultural warfare, which is increasingly dominating America’s political landscape. It is also another manifestation of a growing lack of public faith in legal and political institutions, which is not confined to minority peoples alone. CRT may have heated up the debate, but it remains unclear that it has the solutions to the seemingly intractable racial divide in the US. If America’s historical record is anything to go by, the quest for racial equality has many obstacles to overcome before it finally reaches the finish line.
Ashis Banerjee