Education Week - June 2, 2021 - 4

EDWEEK EXPLAINS
What Is Critical Race Theory, and Why Is It Under
Attack?
By Stephen Sawchuk
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.
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.
In truth, the divides are not nearly
as neat as they may seem. 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. But there is much less
consensus on what the government's
role should be in righting these past
wrongs. Add children and schooling
into the mix and the debate becomes
especially volatile.
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. This explainer is
meant only as a starting point to help
educators grasp core aspects of the
current debate.
Just what is critical race theory
anyway?
Critical race theory is an academic
concept that is more than 40 years
old. The core idea is that racism is
a social construct, and that it is not
merely the product of individual bias
or prejudice, but also something embedded
in legal systems and policies.
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.
A 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.
Banks subsequently refused to offer
mortgages to Black people in those
areas.
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.
CRT 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. And its
ideas have since informed other fields,
like the humanities, the social sciences,
and teacher education.
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. 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.
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.
To an extent, the term " critical
race theory " is now cited by critics
as the basis of all diversity and inclusion
efforts regardless of how much
it's actually informed those programs.
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
4 | EDUCATION WEEK | June 2, 2021 | www.edweek.org
to exclusionary discipline-such as
the Promise program in Broward
County, Fla., that some parents
blame for the Parkland school shootings.
" When followed to its logical
conclusion, CRT is destructive and
rejects the fundamental ideas on
which our constitutional republic is
based, " the organization claimed.
(A good parallel here is how popular
ideas of the common core learning
standards grew to encompass far
more than what those standards said
on paper.)
Does critical race theory say all
white people are racist? Isn't that
racist, too?
The theory says that racism is part
of everyday life, so people-white or
nonwhite-who don't intend to be
racist can nevertheless make choices
that fuel racism.
Some critics claim that the theory
advocates discriminating against
white people in order to achieve equity.
They mainly aim those accusations
at theorists who advocate for
policies that explicitly take race into
account. (The writer Ibram X. Kendi,
whose recent popular book How to Be
An Antiracist suggests that discrimination
that creates equity can be considered
anti-racist, is often cited in this
context.)
Fundamentally, though, the disagreement
springs from different
conceptions of racism. CRT thus puts
an emphasis on outcomes, not merely
on individuals' own beliefs, and it
calls on these outcomes to be examined
and rectified. Among lawyers,
teachers, policymakers, and the general
public, there are many disagreements
about how precisely to do those
things, and to what extent race should
be explicitly appealed to or referred to
in the process.
Here's a helpful illustration to keep
in mind in understanding this complex
idea. In a 2007 U.S. Supreme Court
school-assignment case on whether
race could be a factor in maintaining
diversity in K-12 schools, Chief Justice
John Roberts' opinion famously concluded:
" The way to stop discrimination
on the basis of race is to stop discriminating
on the basis of race. " But
during oral arguments, then-justice
Ruth Bader Ginsburg said: " It's very
hard for me to see how you can have a
racial objective but a nonracial means
to get there. "
All these different ideas grow out of
longstanding, tenacious intellectual
debates. Critical race theory emerged
out of postmodernist thought, which
tends to be skeptical of the idea of universal
values, objective knowledge,
individual merit, Enlightenment rationalism,
and liberalism-tenets that
conservatives tend to hold dear.
What does any of this have to do
with K-12 education?
Scholars who study critical race
theory in education look at how policies
and practices in K-12 education
contribute to persistent racial inequalities
in education, and advocate
for ways to change them. Among the
topics they've studied: racially segregated
schools, the underfunding of
majority-Black and Latino school districts,
disproportionate disciplining of
Black students, barriers to gifted programs
and selective-admission high
schools, and curricula that reinforce
racist ideas.
Critical race theory is not a synonym
for culturally relevant teaching,
which emerged in the 1990s. This
teaching approach seeks to affirm students'
ethnic and racial backgrounds
and is intellectually rigorous. But it's
related in that one of its aims is to
help students identify and critique
the causes of social inequality in their
own lives.
Many educators support, to one
degree or another, culturally relevant
teaching and other strategies
to make schools feel safe and supportive
for Black students and other
underserved populations. (Students
of color make up the majority of
school-aged children.) But they don't
necessarily identify these activities
as CRT-related.
As one teacher-educator put it:
" The way we usually see any of this
in a classroom is: 'Have I thought
about how my Black kids feel? And
made a space for them, so that they
can be successful?' That is the level
I think it stays at, for most teachers. "
Like others interviewed for this explainer,
the teacher-educator did not
Mary Hassdyk for Education Week
http://www.edweek.org
Education Week - June 2, 2021

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