A Primer on Critical Race Theory
updated JUNE 2024
Below are quotes related to Critical Race Theory from news articles, opinion pieces, books, and scholarly articles. Including a quote does not constitute an endorsement of the article or the views of the person being quoted. Check the source for context. The bolded text serves as a summary statement. Stephen Goforth
Click on a term to go to that section:
Definition
History of Critical Race Theory
Critical Race Theory Scholarship
Critical Race Theory & Education
Social Construction of Race
Structural Racism
White Privilege, Guilt & White Supremacy
Colorblindness
Critical Race Theory & US History
Critical Race Theory & Free Speech
Critical Race Theory & Human Rights
Critical Race Theory & Health
Critical Race Theory Remedies
Reverse Racism
Critical Race Theory & Christianity
Examples of Broader Patterns of Racism
Marxism
Intersectionality
A Few Bad Actors
Quotes about Critical Race Theory
CRT Definition
Critical Race Theory is a decades-old framework for looking at systemic racism that emerged among legal scholars. Critical Race Theory suggests that racism is not only seen in individuals’ prejudices and acts of bigotry but is embedded in policies and enabled by the law. Critical Race Theory considers how even seemingly neutral laws, regulations, and social norms can have different impacts on particular racial and ethnic groups. Racism has a role in the structure of our society, Critical Race Theory tells us, and is revealed within disparities in wealth, health, education, and criminal justice systems. Educators use Critical Race Theory as a lens through which students can examine the role of race and racism in American society.
A decades-old legal framework for examining how race and racism shaped U.S. history and how laws and systems in place today perpetuate racism. source: Journalists Resources
Critical race theory holds that racism is baked into the formation of the nation and is ingrained in the legal, financial, and education systems. source: Axios
CRT is an academic framework for looking at systemic racism. source: Washington Post
An academic movement that systematically considers how even seemingly neutral laws, regulations and social norms can have different impacts on particular racial and ethnic groups -Ronald J. Krotoszynski Jr. source: Poynter
Critical race theory challenges the idea that racism exists only in silos like the Ku Klux Klan or individual acts of bigotry. Instead, the theory argues, racism is embedded in the system and enabled by the law. source: Snopes
Critical race theory is an academic idea in which the tenets of society — politics, history, science, laws, art, etc. — are analyzed for context and contributions in an attempt to uncover how race and racism affect our society. -Scott Woods. source: Level
Critical race theory emerged among lawyers and legal scholars who recognized that despite being in this post–civil rights America racial inequity and disparity still existed and persisted. source: Slate
Critical race theory is a catchall for the study of American history and institutions as extensions of racial injustice that influence law, the economy and culture. source: NC Policy Watch
CRT developed as scholars sought to understand and explain how the systemic racism that has coursed through American laws and history continued to reverberate in the form of disparities in wealth, health, education and criminal justice. source: Washington Post
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. source: Ed Week
A broad set of ideas about systemic bias and privilege (with) roots in legal academia. Critical race theory holds that racism is part of a broader pattern in America: It is woven into laws, and it shows up in who gets a job interview, the sort of home loans people are offered, how they are treated by police, and other facets of daily life large and small. -Jon Greenberg and Amy Sherman. source: Washington Post
It is an approach or lens through which an educator can help students examine the role of race and racism in American society. CRT is a valuable framework for helping students identify how law and policy can either entrench or eradicate historic racial inequities in education. It acknowledges how that social construction of race has shaped America and how systems and institutions can do the bulk of replicating racial inequality. Critical race theory helps us recognize how many contemporary policies that perpetuate racial inequality can seem innocuous or even logical. -Janel George, Georgetown U. source: Ed Week
A concept that racism is a social construct embedded in policies and legal systems, and which goes beyond individuals’ prejudices. source: Ed Week
It (broadly) emphasizes the importance of examining and attempting to understand the socio-cultural forces that shape how we and others perceive, experience, and respond to racism. source: Purdue Writing Lab
CRT recognizes that science (as demonstrated in the Human Genome Project) refutes the idea of biological racial differences. source: American Bar Association
Kimberlé Crenshaw—who coined the term “CRT”—notes that CRT is not a noun, but a verb. It cannot be confined to a static and narrow definition but is considered to be an evolving and malleable practice. source: American Bar Association
Different branches, including LatCrit, TribalCrit, and AsianCRT have emerged from CRT. These different branches seek to examine specific experiences of oppression. CRT challenges white privilege and exposes deficit-informed research that ignores, and often omits, the scholarship of people of color. source: American Bar Association
A movement that is “a collection of activists and scholars interested in studying and transforming the relationship among race, racism, and power.” source: Heritage Foundation
Critical race theory is a way of thinking about America's past and present by looking at the role of systemic racism. Often a graduate-level framework examining how the legacy of slavery and segregation in America is embedded in its legal systems and policies. source: PBS
An academic school of thought pioneered by Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Mari Matsuda, and Richard Delgado (among others) that holds that social problems, structures, and art should be examined for their racial elements and impact on race, even when they are race-neutral on their face. source: The Fire
(CRT is) an analytical framework used by legal scholars to study systemic, institutional racism. source: Mashable
It's an academic framework that legal scholars use to critically examine the legal history of the United States, including everything from the U.S. Constitution to the Mayflower Compact, as well as legislation from the Supreme Court or lower courts, through a lens of racism. source: How Stuff Works
Critical race theory is a field of intellectual inquiry that demonstrates the legal codification of racism in America. source: The Conversation
Critical race theory is not so much a thing, it's a way of looking at a thing. -Kimberlé Crenshaw source: How Stuff Works
Critical race theory is a field of intellectual inquiry that demonstrates the legal codification of racism in America. -David Miguel Gray source: The Conversation
The critical race theory movement is a collection of activists and scholars interested in studying and transforming the relationship among race, racism, and power. The movement considers many of the same issues that conventional civil rights and ethnic studies discourses take up, but places them in a broader perspective that includes economics, history, context, group- and self-interest, and even feelings and the unconscious. -Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic source: Critical Race Theory: An Introduction
Most scholars define critical race theory (CRT) as a legal movement examining how racism impacts laws, customs, and practices in the United States, despite the gains of the civil rights movement. -Esau McCaulley source: Christianity Today
An analytical framework originally developed by legal scholars that has been adopted by conservative activists as a catchall term for various teachings about race. -Jennifer Schuessler source: The New York Times
History of CRT
Critical Race Theory, a term coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw, grew out of legal scholarship in the early 1980s. Harvard Law School professor Derrick Bell was frustrated in the mid-1970s at the limited impact of civil rights laws. Crenshaw and others (Cheryl Harris, Richard Delgado, Patricia Williams, Gloria Ladson-Billings, Tara Yosso) helped to develop the concepts in their teaching and writing.
Although it is difficult to pinpoint the birth of the movement precisely, the name ‘critical race theory’ was first used at a workshop in 1989. It was around the mid-1990s when CRT entered educational theory in the United States. -Sean Walton source: Journal of Power & Education
CRT is a theory that originated in the field of legal scholarship in the early 1980s with scholars such as Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Patricia Williams and others. source: Justin Hart Twitter
Critical race theory holds that racism is baked into the formation of the nation and ingrained in our legal, financial, and education systems. source: Axios
The originators of CRT include Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Cheryl Harris, Richard Delgado, Patricia Williams, Gloria Ladson-Billings, Tara Yosso, among others. source: American Bar Association
Legal scholars, such as Kimberlé Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller and Kendall Thomas, developed Bell’s ideas further. In a 1995 book, they wrote that critical race theory is rooted in the desire “to understand how a regime of white supremacy and its subordination of people of color have been created and maintained in America.” source: Tampa Bay Times
The grandfather of the movement was Harvard Law School professor Derrick Bell, who in the mid-1970s voiced frustration at the limited impact of landmark civil rights laws and U.S. Supreme Court rulings of the previous decade. While those changes aimed to broaden access to high-quality education, jobs and housing, they fell short, he said. Laws remained embedded in a set of values and practices that discriminated against people of color, Bell said. source: Tampa Bay Times
Horkheimer first defined “critical theory” in a 1937 essay contrasting it with what he called “traditional theory.” source: National Review
Critical theory emerged out of the Marxist tradition and was developed by a group of sociologists at the University of Frankfurt in Germany who referred to themselves as The Frankfurt School. Over the years, many social scientists and philosophers who rose to prominence after the Frankfurt School have adopted the goals and tenets of critical theory. We can recognize critical theory today in many feminist theories and approaches to conducting social science. It is also found in critical race theory, cultural theory, gender, and queer theory, as well as in media theory and media studies. source: ThoughtCo
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. source: Ed Week
A theory devised by legal scholars in the 1970s, CRT initially was taught in law schools but eventually was adopted in other fields such as education and sociology, says attorney Janel George. “Because critical race theory has the word ‘race’ in it, perhaps [people] are intentionally equating critical race theory with anything having to do with race or the teaching of racism.” source: Journalists Resources
To insist that “CRT” must properly refer only to the contents of obscure law review articles from decades ago is a debate team stunt, not serious engagement with a dynamic and distressing reality. source: John McWhorter on Substack
Scholarship
Most Critical Race Theory scholarship attempts to demonstrate not only how racism continues to be a pervasive component throughout dominant society but argues that ignoring race is not showing “neutrality” but adherence to the existing racial hierarchy.
CRT scholars attempt to understand how victims of systemic racism are affected by cultural perceptions of race and how they are able to represent themselves to counter prejudice. Source: Purdue Online Writing Lab
It draws from work by writers like Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King, Jr., CRT developed into its current form during the mid-1970s with scholars like Derrick Bell, Alan Freeman, and Richard Delgado, who responded to what they identified as dangerously slow progress following Civil Rights in the 1960s. Prominent CRT scholars like Kimberlé Crenshaw, Mari Matsuda, and Patricia Williams. Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic. Source: Purdue Online Writing Lab
Most CRT scholarship attempts to demonstrate not only how racism continues to be a pervasive component throughout dominant society, but also why this persistent racism problematically denies individuals many of the constitutional freedoms they are otherwise promised in the United States’ governing documents. Source: Purdue Online Writing Lab
CRT observes that scholarship that ignores race is not demonstrating “neutrality” but adherence to the existing racial hierarchy. Source: American Bar Association
Law professor Khiara Bridges stresses that there are plenty of disagreements among critical race theorists — for example, whether to focus on "institutions, structures, and macro level processes" (which she does) rather than on, say, implicit bias, which "directs us to interrogate individuals." Source: Mashable
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CRT & Education
Some people are mixing Critical Race Theory together with multicultural education (curriculum about diversity, equity, and inclusion). Multicultural education is designed to help kids confront racism, sexism, classism, religious intolerance, and other types of bias. On the other hand, Critical Race Theory suggests there are systematic biases—that is, even when no single individual is acting in a racist or biased manner, the system (housing, education, etc.) will produce bias because of the way it was set up. Educators insist Critical Race Theory is not a part of the K-12 curriculum—although some Critical Race Theory ideas may inform idea presented to students.
The First Amendment certainly protects the right of a state-sponsored college or university to address issues of race, class and inequality in its curriculum. Educators cannot do their job if state governments attempt to ban the teaching of ideas they fear. -Ronald J. Krotoszynski Jr. Source: Washington Post
Some people might be conflating CRT and multicultural education, which aims to help kids confront issues of racism, sexism, classism, religious intolerance and other types of bias. While there are some similarities between CRT and antiracist education, they are different, attorney Janel George says. Antiracist education, among other things, “addresses how racist beliefs and ideologies structure one-on-one interactions and personal relationships,” according to the National Museum of African American History and Culture, which offers resources to help guide educators, parents and others in conversations about race. “It also examines and challenges how institutions support and maintain disadvantages and advantages along racial lines.” Source: Journalists Resources
Young children should not be taught that the American story is mainly one of oppression and racism. Not because it’s unpleasant and because sinister characters want to “hide” it, but because it’s dumb. It is willfully blind to the complexity inherent to history, not to mention reality itself. Just as resonant a case could be made that America is founded on sexism, or classism – and the cases would be equally simplistic propaganda. Source: John McWhorter on Substack
Teaching about the United States’ “history of racism” is fine with 53 percent of Republicans, according to a Yahoo News/YouGov poll; teaching about its “history of slavery” is OK with even more of them (84 percent). But teaching that racism is still embedded in U.S. legal systems and policies even today — and that all Americans are part of that system, regardless of how they treat others — is not. Source: Yahoo News
The huge advantage of liberal democracy over other political systems is that its leadership constantly adjusts and changes, shifting to absorb new people and ideas. To maintain that flexibility, a liberal-democratic society absolutely requires that its citizens experience a liberal education, one that teaches students, scholars, readers, and voters to keep looking at books, history, society, and politics from different points of view. -Anne Applebaum source: The Atlantic
If people are worried about how complex content is taught, they might start by investing resources in teachers and schools rather than banning the content outright. -Casey Fleming source: Houston Chronicle
The late critical race theorist and Harvard law professor Bell asserted that the Brown v. Board of Education (1954) Supreme Court ruling, which legally determined racial segregation of children in public schools unconstitutional, was based on improving the international image of the United States during the Cold War. Furthermore, the ruling was effectually limited "and the persistence of racial inequality following the civil rights era implicates the law in maintaining racial inequality." This is an example of the relationship between CRT and education; the theory is used to critically analyze the history and present state of education in the United States. source: How Stuff Works
CRT has become a catch-all phrase among legislators attempting to ban a wide array of teaching practices concerning race. -David Miguel Gray source: The Conversation
If you’re getting mad at an equity or antiracism idea gone wrong, make sure it’s either an actual policy or part of a curriculum or a training program. This means not getting worked up over singular examples in which a teacher says something in a classroom and then suddenly every woke teacher in America has to answer for it. -Jay Caspian Kang source: The New York Times
Some white people in US history were slave owners and other white people were abolitionists. Parents who think teaching about America’s history of racism shames white kids should reflect on why they think white kids will associate more with slave owner guilt than with abolitionist pride. -Qasim Rashid source: Twitter
In their review of the literature on the topic (of teaching race in schools), psychologist Sylvia Perry and her colleagues noted that teaching children about racism can actually increase the empathy they have for members of other groups, as well as their concerns about systemic racism. They point to studies showing, for example, that when white children learn about racism they are more likely to value racial fairness and show more positive attitudes and empathy toward Black people. -Neil Lewis Jr. source: FiveThirtyEight
Social construction of Race
There are a few beliefs commonly held by most critical race theorists. One of these is that race is not fundamentally a matter of biology but rather a social construct. There is more genetic variation within a group than across groups.
In an article published in the journal Science four scholars say racial categories are weak proxies for genetic diversity and need to be phased out. Race is a poorly defined marker of diversity and an imprecise proxy for the relationship between ancestry and genetics. source: Scientific American
What the study of complete genomes from different parts of the world has shown is that even between Africa and Europe, for example, there is not a single absolute genetic difference, meaning no single variant where all Africans have one variant and all Europeans another one, even when recent migration is disregarded. It is all a question of differences in how frequent different variants are on different continents and in different regions. -Svante Pääbo source: Live Science
If you make clinical predictions based on somebody's race, you're going to be wrong a good chunk of the time. -Michael Yudell source: Live Science
The notion that race is a social construct essentially means that race has no scientific basis or biological reality. Instead, race as a way to differentiate human beings is a social concept. Of course, this does not mean that there are no physical or phenotypical differences between people from different regions of the world. However, these differences make up a fraction of our genetic endowment and do not tell us anything about a person's intelligence, behavior, or moral capacity. In other words, there is no behavior or personality that is inherent to white, Black, or Asian people. source: ThoughtCo
Humans are a single species and the meanings we give to race are social and political, not biological). source: Washington Post
In the context of CRT, “social construction” refers to the notion that race is a product of social thought and relations. It suggests that race is a product of neither biology nor genetics, but is rather a social invention. source: Purdue Writing Lab
One key concept in critical race theory is racial formation. Developed by sociologists Michael Omi and Howard Winant, the theory rejects the idea that race — Black, white, Asian — is a fixed category that has always meant the same thing. Instead, it traces the way that race has been defined, understood and constructed in different ways throughout history. Omi and Winant define race as an “unstable and ‘decentered’ complex of social meanings constantly being transformed by political struggle.” source: Texas Tribune
While race is a social construct, this does not mean that it hasn't had real, tangible effects on people. Ideas about racial difference were used by Europeans during the colonial period to subjugate non-white people and force them into subservient roles. This socially constructed notion of race, which was used to exercise and reinforce white supremacy, was the backbone of Jim Crow legislation in the South. Race as an idea continues to have a wide range of effects with respect to educational outcomes, criminal justice, and within other institutions. source: ThoughtCo
In 1972, Richard Lewontin took his interest in genetic diversity in an explicitly political direction when he published a paper demonstrating that only about 6 percent of human genetic variation exists between conventionally defined racial groups; the rest can be found within those groups…he was able to figure out just how much genetic overlap exists among racial groups…there was more variation within a group than across groups. The paper was seminal—according to Google Scholar, it has been cited more than 3,000 times—and constitutes a major pillar of support for the aphorism “race is a social construct.” source: Wired
Race was constructed to serve different social needs. Therefore, not all “races” were historically constructed along the same lines, nor imbued with the same set of characteristics, nor are these constructions particularly stable through time. -Brad Mason source: Also a Carpenter blog
Structural Racism
Critical Race Theory considers the impact of decisions made long ago that built racism into the American system, perpetuating discrimination social, political, and legal structures.
Critical race theory looks for systemic problems that perpetuate disparities even when no one in power intends them. These structural policies could be legacies of decisions made long ago that had racist intent behind them, or they could simply be the unintended consequences of rules people thought were neutral. source: The Dispatch
Proponents argue that learning the history of racism is crucial to addressing the inequities that result from it, while critics say it singles out white people as the bad guys and within schools, teaches white guilt. source: Yahoo News
Structural racism ceased to exist in the U.S. with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This idea that there is still systemic racism fails to acknowledge all of the sacrifice and thought and struggle that went into making the Civil Rights Act possible. -Jonathan Butcher source: Inside Higher Ed
The central argument of systemic racism is that statistical disparities among races are always and incontrovertibly the result of racial discrimination. This is the assertion upon which critical race theory and anti-racism stands or falls. The question that is rarely asked is whether there’s any evidence to support it … Does anyone really think that black athletes got their jobs because of discrimination? Critical race theory fails because its central argument, that statistical disparities are the result of discrimination, isn’t supported by evidence. What accounts for differential achievement results isn’t discrimination, but disparities in family organization. source: Minding the Campus
(The goal is) not to cast anyone as an 'oppressor' or a 'victim' but to demonstrate how these past inequities inform contemporary ones. -Janel George source: Ed Week
The structural racism that they have identified is real, just as the class divisions once identified by the Marxists were real. But racism is not everywhere, in every institution, or in every person’s heart at all times. More to the point, any analysis of American history or American society that sees only structural racism will misunderstand the country, and badly. It will not be able to explain why the U.S. did in fact have an Emancipation Proclamation, a Civil Rights Act, a Black president. -Anne Applebaum source: The Atlantic
I define racial equity as a state “when two or more racial groups are standing on a relatively equal footing.” I proposed that an example of racial equity would be “if there were relatively equitable percentages” of racial groups “living in owner-occupied homes in the forties, seventies, or, better, nineties.” By contrast, in 2014, 71 percent of white families lived in owner-occupied homes, compared with 45 percent of Latino families and 41 percent of Black families. That’s racial inequity. -Ibram X. Kendi source: The Atlantic
To some, systemic racism means that discrimination exists in different social, political, and legal structures to varying degrees and intensities. Others think of systemic racism as the idea that all of society is irredeemably racist. -Esau McCaulley source: Christianity Today
White Privilege, Guilt & White Supremacy
According to proponents, Critical Race Theory is about understanding the structures that support racism rather than suggesting that anyone in particular is inherently racist or that we should focus on identifying racists.
CRT shows how white supremacy — the belief that some people are more valuable than other people because of their skin color — is not just a personal prejudice but a structural and societal practice in America. -Jim Wallis source: Sojourners
It’s a foundational assertion of critical race theory and “anti-racism” that all whites are racist. source: Minding the Campus
You might not know any bigots. You feel like, ‘well, I don’t hate black people, so I’m not a racist.’ But you benefit from racism just by the merit of the colour of your skin. There’s opportunities that you have — you’re privileged in ways that you may not even realize because you haven’t been deprived in certain ways. We need to talk about these things in order for them to change” -Dave Chappelle source: Inside the Actors Studio
CRT “actually says, no, we shouldn't be preoccupied with trying to discern ‘who is the racist here,’ because that moves the attention away from the structures,” Yale professor Daniel HoSang said. “One of its premises is that those are not actually helpful places to examine. It's taking us out of racism as a psychological and emotional question, and is focusing much more on the structures, the policies that people create that govern our lives.” source: Texas Tribune
(There is a) misconception that critical race theory is a theory that seeks to attack white people, as opposed to it is a theory and an intellectual tradition that seeks to attack structural racism. Critical race theorists are focused on challenging structural racism. - Ibram X. Kendi source: Slate
I heard someone say, ‘We can’t teach white guilt, we don’t want to teach white kids that they’re the oppressor.’ But that’s not what we do — we are educating students about what happened, and we’re not sugarcoating it. source: Yahoo News
The current, longstanding way of teaching Texas history already teaches that one race is superior. “Look at how it teaches the history of the Texas revolution — that people like Stephen F. Austin are racially superior to the treacherous Mexican, like Santa Anna,” Monica Martinez, a history professor at the University of Texas at Austin, said. “Texas history has been taught in a way that celebrates people who were fighting for the institution of slavery, that were espousing publicly that Mexicans were an inferior race.” source: Texas Tribune
Discussed by Lipsitz, Lee, Harris, McIntosh, and other CRT scholars, white privilege refers to the various social, political, and economic advantages white individuals experience in contrast to non-white citizens based on their racial membership. source: Purdue Writing Lab
Critical race theory doesn’t, for example, argue that anyone is “inherently privileged, racist, sexist, or oppressive.” In fact, critical race theorists generally acknowledge that race itself is socially constructed, and that even though there are no “inherent” attributes based on race, white people are statistically more likely to do better in society than similarly-situated people of color. Critical race theory interrogates why that is the case. source: Snopes
“Critical race theory is not an ideology or a political orientation that assumes white people are bad; it assumes white supremacy is bad in all of its forms,” Dorinda Carter Andrews, chairperson for the Department of Teacher Education at Michigan State University. source: Journalists Resources
Robin DiAngelo, writes in her book, White Fragility: White supremacy in this context does not refer to individual white people and their individual intentions or actions but to an overarching political, economic, and social system of domination. source: Heritage Foundation
By ‘White supremacy’ I do not mean to allude only to the self-conscious racism of white supremacist hate groups. I refer instead to a political, economic, and cultural system in which whites overwhelmingly control power and material resources, conscious and unconscious ideas of white superiority and entitlement are widespread, and relations of white dominance and non-white subordination are daily re-enacted across a broad array of institutions and social settings. -Frances Lee Ansley source: Cornell Law Review
Prejudice says: ”My culture reflects the image of God more than yours, my people are better because your people are ‘criminals, rapists, drug dealers, and uneducated.’ Racism says: “Because my people are culturally superior to yours, I will create laws and policies, and structure society, in such a way that privileges ‘my people.’ I will make sure that ‘your people’ have little to no access to these same privileges and benefits because you are culturally inferior and don’t really belong.” -Robert Chao Romero source: Missio Alliance
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Colorblindness
The we-don’t-see-color idea, where one's racial identity no longer has an effect on one's social or economic status, emerged from the 1960s to maintain segregation. Racists began supporting race-neutral governmental policies, according to Critical Race Theory advocates, as a convenient fig leaf to cover their continued advocacy of white privilege.
“The racial narrative that underlies these [critical race theory] initiatives poses a grave threat to the ideal of colorblind justice under the law enshrined in the American constitutional system.” -Christopher Rufo source: City-Journal
The term “colorblind” comes to us from Justice John Marshall Harlan’s lone dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 case that announced the “separate but equal” standard that sanctioned racial segregation throughout society. source: Salon
They don’t want equality of opportunity, they want equality of outcomes. That is problematic because then you have no ability to ever live in a colorblind society. And it’s the rejection of a colorblind society that we find so problematic. -Russ Vought source: Washington Post
Harlan's dissent declared that “Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.” But Harlan's dissent is racist and not colorblind at all. Harlan's dissent explicitly praised white supremacy “the dominant race in this country” and he warned “there is a race so different from our own that we do not permit those belonging to it to become citizens of the United States. Persons belonging to it are, with few exceptions, absolutely excluded from our country. I allude to the Chinese race.” source: Cornell Law
As Justice Kennedy wrote in a SCOTUS decision: In the real world, it is regrettable to say, it (colorblind justice) cannot be a universal constitutional principle. source: Cornell Law
In sociology, scholars have shown how a new — but plausibly deniable — language of colorblind racism evolved in response to the civil rights movement. source: Washington Post
Conservative white evangelicals like (Jerry) Falwell found it easy to exchange overt segregationist thinking for color-blind conservatism because they never really changed their racist views, and they found color-blind ideology a convenient fig leaf to cover their continued advocacy of white privilege. source: Current
If you understand the genesis of this colorblind argument as being in this moment of warding off integration (in the 1960s), colorblindness was not a good faith argument. It was a defensive posturing that said, “We don’t want you to force integration on us. Instead, we’re just going to be colorblind and pretend as if race doesn’t matter.” This was a move that segregationists were deploying to maintain segregation in their society. source: Religion & Politics
CRT as a school of thought is designed to highlight the ways that supposedly color-blind laws have allowed racial oppression and inequality to continue despite the outlawing of segregation. source: ThoughtCo
Texts by legal scholars like Derrick Bell or Kimberlé Crenshaw may not be on the syllabus ... but some of its basic tenets — for example, that colorblind laws can strengthen structural racism — are broadly influential in many lessons and training materials, where they are sometimes stated as axiomatic truths. . -Jennifer Schuessler source: The New York Times
What I found in my research were Christians who adopted the language and tools of colorblindness as a strategy of maintaining segregation rather than a response to integration. Colorblindness for these white Christians wasn’t so much about making sense of a new reality. Instead, it was using a particular kind of rhetorical device to maintain the segregation they had been practicing in their institutions all along (or since emancipation in the case of churches). -J. Russell Hawkins source: Righting America
US History
The architects of the theory say federal law has preserved the unequal treatment of people on the basis of race. They believe this should be included in the telling of US history in an effort, not to distort history, but to better reflect the past in light of what is known in the present.
Any telling of American history cannot fairly ignore that 177 of the country's 245 years -- 72% of its existence, all but roughly three generations -- played out under slavery or Jim Crow. source: CNN
The argument is that you can’t understand American economic ascendancy without slavery. source: Ed Week
Race relations are better than they were in 1776, or in 1976, but that's not the point. source: CNN
The Constitution, that great founding document, was the original basis for slavery in the United States, dictating slaves were three-fifths of a person, that escaped slaves must be returned to their owners and forbidding any prohibition on slavery until 1808 (all of which, while long invalidated, remain in the Constitution.) Slavery was not abolished until the 13th Amendment was passed in 1865. source: CNN
There's little more supremacist than outlawing the "mixing of races" to maintain the "purity" of one race. There were at least three attempts to add a miscegenation ban to the US Constitution, the last introduced by Sen. Coleman Blease in 1928. Alabama finally overturned its interracial marriage ban in 2000. source: CNN
Congress has never passed an anti-lynching law. source: CNN
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. source: Ed Week
Tell them you teach about the history of slavery, about the history of segregation, about the history of racism, about the lives of African Americans. That you also teach about women, about Latinos, Native Americans, Asian Americans, etc. That you believe it's important to tell everyone's stories. Say that you believe that historians have an obligation to tell the truth about history. The good, the bad, and the ugly. And that you don't need any theory to tell you that you should be honest in teaching US history. source: Justin Hart on Twitter
We should be teaching American history. We should not be teaching that people are somehow unequal. - Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) source: Washington Post
It’s based on false history when they try to look back and denigrate the Founding Fathers, denigrate the American Revolution. -Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) source: Washington Post
(Critical race theorists) have argued that our country is largely founded upon doctrines that are in direct opposition with what we normally hear our country is all about … ideas like liberty and equality. And in addition to just studying these discrepancies, critical race theorists also aim to change them. -David Miguel Gray source: How Stuff Works
When the present changes, the good historian may rewrite the past— not to distort or conceal the truth, but to find one that better reflects the past in light of what is known in the present and what can be reasonably anticipated about the future. -Dan McAdams source: The Stories We Live By
The architects of the theory argue that the United States was founded on the theft of land and labor and that federal law has preserved the unequal treatment of people on the basis of race. -Bryan Anderson source: Associated Press
Many Republicans view the concepts underlying critical race theory as an effort to rewrite American history and convince white people that they are inherently racist and should feel guilty because of their advantages. -Bryan Anderson source: Associated Press
Historians must come to grips with the fact that they will never be able to provide a complete or thorough account of what happened in the past. Even the best accounts of the past are open to change based on new evidence or the work of historians who approach a subject with a different lens of interpretation. -John Fea source: Current
Symbols and names and iconography aren’t just symbols. They are reflective of the stories that people tell and those stories shape the narratives that communities carry and those narratives shape public policy and public policy shapes the material conditions of people’s lives. That’s not to say that taking down a 60 foot tall statue of Robert E. Lee is going to suddenly erase the racial wealth gap, but all of these things are part of an ecosystem of ideas and stories that help shape the story that we tell about this country's history. -Clint Smith source: GQ magazine
White privilege is often misunderstood as to what it actually is. White privilege does not mean that because you're white you don't have any struggles or hardships. Far from it. White privilege simply means that the struggles or hardships you go through are unrelated to the color of your skin. This has very real implications. I’ll give you one example. A 2016 Harvard business study found that when white people and black people sent resumes to businesses, white people were called back 2.5 times more often than black people. White people were called back twice as often as Asians. When the black and Asian applicants whitened their resumes by changing their name or making themselves look more white, they increased their call back as well. -Qasim Rashid source: TikTok
Those who believe “revisionism” is a negative term often misunderstand the way it is used by historians. Revisionists are not in the business of changing the facts of history. Any good revisionist interpretation of history will be based on evidence–documents or other artifacts that people in the past left behind. This type of reconstruction of the past always takes place in community. We know whether a particular revision of the past is good because it is vetted by a community of historians ... Revisionism is the lifeblood of history. -John Fea source: Current
There’s no such thing as white history. There’s no such thing as white culture. There is Irish culture. There is Polish culture. There is British culture. But there’s no pan-european per se. White people can trace their lineage back to a particular European country. There’s nothing wrong with celebrating your British heritage or your Irish heritage. Black people don’t have that luxury. Black history and Black pride recognizes the one unifying factor that these previously diverse cultures have in common. So while there is no such thing as white pride outside of the white supremacy construct, Black pride is a reflection of the struggle that Black people have gone through for centuries. -Qasim Rashid source: TikTok
Only two of the 1619 Project’s twelve feature essays were written by historians, and neither of them are specialists in the crucial period between 1776-1865, when slavery was at its peak. The controversial parts of the 1619 Project were all written by opinion journalists such as Hannah-Jones, or non-experts writing well outside of their own competencies. -Phillip W. Magness source: American Institute of Economic Research
Throughout the early 1930s, the years of the making of the Nuremberg Laws, Nazi policymakers looked to US law for inspiration. Hitler himself, in Mein Kampf (1925), described the US as ‘the one state’ that had made progress toward the creation of a healthy racist society, and after the Nazis seized power in 1933 they continued to cite and ponder US models regularly. Hitler and other Nazis envied the US, and wanted to learn how the Americans did it; it’s no great surprise that they believed that what had made America great was American racism. -James Whitman source: Aeon
In the 1700s and 1800s, states across the country passed laws to keep guns out of the hands of slaves, free Black people, Native Americans and Catholics. Such discriminatory gun restrictions would be unconstitutional today. An 1833 Florida law, enacted in the aftermath of Nat Turner’s bloody slave rebellion, that authorized white citizen patrols to “search negro houses” for firearms. Anyone found in possession could be summarily whipped. -Jacob Gershman source: Wall Street Journal
A young Nazi lawyer named Heinrich Krieger who had studied at the University of Arkansas as an exchange student, did diligent research on US race law which formed the basis for the work of the Nazi Ministry of Justice in Germany. -James Whitman source: Aeon
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CRT & Free Speech
Freedom of speech is also in CRT’s sights. Derrick Bell said, “Being committed to ‘free speech’ may seem like a neutral principle, but it is not. Thus, proclaiming that ‘I am committed equally to allowing free speech for the KKK and 2LiveCrew’ is a non-neutral value judgment, one that asserts that the freedom to say hateful things is more important than the freedom to be free from the victimization, stigma, and humiliation that free speech entails.” (from Derrick Bell, Who’s afraid of Critical Race Theory) source: Heritage Foundation
CRT & Human Rights
(Richard Delgado says) rights are “alienating. They separate people from each other—‘stay away, I’ve got my rights’—rather than encouraging to form close, respectful communities.” Classical liberalism is “overly caught up in the search for universals,” writes Delgado. What CRT proponents want is “individualized treatment—‘context’—that pays attention to minorities’ lives.” source: Heritage Foundation
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CRT & Health
20 years ago, a landmark report found people of color were less likely to receive the medical care and procedures they needed even when controlling for factors like insurance status. It showed that Black and Hispanic patients tended to receive lower-quality care for a number of diseases even when clinical factors like comorbidities, age, and severity of disease were taken into account. The disparities were found across a range of clinical settings, including public, private, and teaching hospitals. source: Stat News
CRT Remedies
Critical Race Theory is useful for diagnosing what’s happening, but it is not so good at offering remedies for the problems it identifies. Critical Race Theory can end up playing the same game of dominance as a capitalist perspective, where the goal is to come out on top.
CRT is really good at diagnosing what’s happening, the plight of the oppressed. I don’t think it is good at offering remedies. It ends up playing the same game as the capitalist perspective—it’s about coming out on top. “You are the oppressed right now, but through revolution, you can get to the top. It ends up play the same game of dominance. -Matt Barrios source: Reality San Francisco podcast
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. source: EdWeek
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. source: EdWeek
Some critics claim that the theory advocates discriminating against white people in order to achieve equity. source: EdWeek
An emerging subtext among some critics is that curricular excellence can’t coexist alongside culturally responsive teaching or anti-racist work. Their argument goes that efforts to change grading practices or make the curriculum less Eurocentric will ultimately harm Black students, or hold them to a less high standard. source: EdWeek
Much of the current debate appears to spring not from the academic texts, but from fear among critics that students—especially white students—will be exposed to supposedly damaging or self-demoralizing ideas. source: EdWeek
Critical race theory is a philosophy, it's a worldview that believes that the perspective that we should take on for everything around us is about race and ethnic identity. source: Inside Higher Ed
Critical race theory is a call to action, to ask people to apply the idea that this world is divided between people who are victimizers and people who are victims, and that goes back to your ethnicity. And so the consequences of that -- and sometimes it's simply stated this way -- are that you should be treated differently based on the color of your skin. source: Inside Higher Ed
Reverse Racism
Reverse racism is prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against a person or people based on their membership in a dominant or privileged racial or ethnic group. According to Critical Race Theory advocates, reverse racism is a myth because it ignores the power/privilege dynamic between the individuals/groups involved. False assumptions and stereotypes about white people is racial prejudice, not racism because of the systemic relationship to power. Thus, while racial prejudice can be directed at white people, racism cannot be experienced by white individuals because of the power factor. Racism is racial prejudice plus power.
What do people really mean by reverse racism? It's almost as if they are saying we are being unjust in seeking some kind of remedies for long-term injury out of racist policy. So when people say, “Things are better” it diminishes that the knife is not all the way out of our back and no bandage has been applied to cause healing. So I’m not healed when you only pull the knife halfway out. -Gloria Pervis source: American Magazine
Part of the problem is I think a lot of white people in this country have no idea or have been willfully blind to the true reality and the experience of being black in this country. Something I often hear from some white friends is, I will tell them a story of something that happened in my family and they will usually say, “Well, that happened a long time ago. Things are better now.” This is part of our daily experience. This is part of our lived experience as a family. -Vince Rougeau source: American Magazine
I tell the story often of my father-in-law who was one of the first black engineers at Bell Labs in the early 1960s. They dumped garbage on his desk every day. They hung him in effigy on his desk lamp. Now don't you think that had some impact on his progression through his career? He dealt with it but there are consequences—internally and beyond. -Vince Rougeau source: American Magazine
Many opponents of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives say critical race theory is itself racist, because it teaches people to see society and structures through the lens of race. Instead, University of Louisville Law School professor Cedric Powell says CRT is focused on how structures and institutions make life disproportionately difficult for people of color. “We’re not pointing to individuals and saying you’re white, you’re guilty. We’re pointing at how these structures evolve,” he says. source: WFPL
I learned to respond to a statement (from high school students) like “Black people can be racist too,” by saying, “Maybe. But it’s interesting that you want to start there. Can we start by looking at what the stories suggest to us about Black experience in America?” -Casey Fleming source: Houston Chronicle
It is vitally important to distinguish analytically between racism and xenophobia in this discussion. The Irish have undoubtedly historically experienced xenophobia in America and Britain. As foreigners they have been derided, scorned and faced discrimination. In competing for resources with those already inside the nation state they have faced marginalisation and had to overcome this to become part of the respective societies. This is a process that any migrant community has to go through and is distinct from racism, which works on a different set of metrics. Those groups that are not White will face the xenophobia of being a foreigner, but racism is more elemental than this. -Kehinde Andrews· source: Back to Black
In privileging “actual fact” over “narrative,” (many) proceed from the premise that history is a fixed thing; that somehow, long ago, the nation’s historians identified the relevant set of facts about our past, and it is the job of subsequent generations to simply protect and disseminate them. This conception denies history its own history — the dynamic, contested and frankly pretty thrilling process by which an understanding of the past is formed and reformed. The study of this is known as historiography, and a knowledge of American historiography, in particular the way our historical profession evolved to take fuller account of the role of slavery and racism in our past, is critical. -Jake Silverstein source: New York Times Magazine
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CRT & Christianity
1. summary statements:
Racist experiences: Pastors and church leaders are listening to the lived experience of African American sisters and brothers and are saying, “It's different than mine. How do we account for that?”
Systematic Injustice: When you reject systemic injustice, what you are rejecting is the reality that sin can get into systems. In the scripture, we see that it is possible for sin to get institutionalized. Sin can get into systems through the person, through people who then create systems that then oppress other people. The effects of sin can often outlive the person who committed the sin.
Corporate Sin: In Daniel 9:4-6, Daniel repents of the sins of Israel in the past that he was not guilty of himself. He petitioned God and said, “We have done this.”
Privilege: Philippians 2:7-8 says that Jesus set aside His heavenly position to become a man, a servant. If he did not know and acknowledge his privilege, his place with the Father, Christ could not have then knowingly chosen to disadvantage himself, to set aside his rights, for the sake of lifting others up and saving the elect.
Approaching CRT: There are differences in how CRT advocates want to lift up the low, but we can agree that a focus on the marginalized and the poor and oppressed parallels Jesus focus.
Colorblindness: White evangelical Christians have been influenced by decades of teaching that says, “Don’t talk about race, try not to see race, be colorblind” rather than seeing people for who they are—as God made them—as a means to respect them.
2. Quotes about Critical Race Theory & Christianity:
Can sin be happening, not just in an individual soul but can it be happening in a system? In a culture? In the scripture we see that it is possible for sin to get institutionalized, to be systematized. We look at Jesus when he arrives on the scene. They are living under a Roman Empire (whose) prerogative is to collect taxes, enforce a strict rule of law, to make sure the Roman way of life is the most amplified. We can see that there is a sinfulness that is pervasive to that, if people are being mistreated and outcast and marginalized. -Matt Barrios source: Reality San Francisco podcast
When you reject outright systemic injustice what you are rejecting is the reality that sin can get into systems. The Bible affirms this over and over again: From Exodus where there was systemic injustice and oppression done by Egypt toward the Hebrew people to Babylon to Roman occupation. Even more than that, when Jesus stepped into Roman occupation, he saw systemic injustice even in the religious leaders. This is why he had the harshest rebuke for the Pharisees and religious leaders. Sin can get into systems through the person, through people who then create systems that then oppress other people. -Dave Lomas. source: Reality San Francisco podcast
Let’s think through this theory, just like with anything in culture, how they align with the unchangeable nature of the gospel and the kingdom of God. Considering where there is misalignment with Scripture or speaking into them where there are ways we can channel them in ways that are lifegiving for the flourishment of society and ultimately the kingdom of God. As followers of Jesus, we should look for points of agreement and disagreement on this ideology. -Dave Lomas. source: Reality San Francisco podcast
Something that we as followers of Jesus will want to do when engaging CRT … as much as possible we will want to pivot and think: What is the Biblical version of that? What’s the Biblical language that we can use for this? -Matt Barrios. source: Reality San Francisco podcast
In Daniel 9:4-6 we are hearing this collective responsibility for sin and it’s not even sin that Daniel is doing personally. It’s the sins of Israel in the past that he is taking responsibility for and petitioning God for, saying, “We have done this.” -Matt Barrios. source: Reality San Francisco podcast
He made himself nothing by taking the very nature[a] of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death— even death on a cross! (Philippians 2:7-8). If he doesn’t even know he is privileged, then he could not have disadvantaged himself for the sake of lifting others up. -Dave Lomas. source: Reality San Francisco podcast
The movement of God is to bring the high low; that’s written all over the tower of Babel, David on his rooftop looking down at Bathsheba, this is the song of Mary where she says you have lifted up the humble, this is what John the Baptist was doing. If there is an ideological movement with a focus on the marginalized and the poor and oppressed, you should be able to go, “Oh, that sounds like the heart of God.” Now, there is a difference in how (CRT advocates) may want to go about lifting up the low but we can agree with (this part). source: Reality San Francisco podcast
You can't just say, let's not worry about these things, let's focus on evangelism, when there are predators in your midst who are preying on people sexually. -Ed Stetzer source: NPR
Pastors and leaders, have listened to the lived experience of African American sisters and brothers and say, it's different than mine. And how do we account for that? So I think Southern Baptists have to find a way to account for the reality that systemic racism does continue to exist and, simultaneously, probably to distance themselves from some ideas. -Ed Stetzer source: NPR
The idea that sin is structural as well as individual, or that ostensibly race-neutral laws and practices are in reality racially biased, is so far removed from traditional white southern evangelical theology that many white conservative evangelicals view these ideas as heretical. And so, instead of seeking further racial justice, many white conservative evangelicals find consolation in their own conversions from personal racism. source: Current
Paul’s actual treatment of the sin (of racism in Galatians 2) is brilliant. He did not simply say to Peter, “Repent of the sin of racism, you bigot!” but rather, he said, “Repent of the sin of forgetting your gracious welcome by God through the costly sacrifice of Christ.” Paul did not focus just on the behavioral sin, but also on root of the self-righteousness beneath it. This approach is far more persuasive and effective than simply ranting at someone for being a racist. When you are trying to motivate people by urging them to see their riches in Christ, then you are pointing to their value and dignity in your appeal. You are not putting them down, but lifting them up even as you critique. On the other hand, if you try to motivate people by shaming them, they will (rightly) sense a self-righteousness on your part, and this will only stimulate and enhance their self-righteousness, not diminish it. When we instead use God’s grace as a motivator, we can criticize sharply and directly, but the listeners will generally be able to perceive that we are nonetheless for them. -Tim Keller source: Gospel in Life
There are many defensive voices denying the magnitude of the problem and charging almost everyone who speaks strongly about racism in the church with being overly “woke” or “SJWs” or Marxists. On the other hand, many of the voices who are speaking out about the racial injustice are not taking cues from Paul’s approach at all. They resort to shaming and often exhibit a self-righteous manner. -Tim Keller source: Gospel in Life
The gospel must drain us of our own self-righteousness if we are going to be able to call others to abandon the destructive self-justification of racism, both active and conscious as well as implicit and hidden. -Tim Keller source: Gospel in Life
Socially institutionalized ways of life become weighted in favor of the powerful and oppressive over those with less power. Examples include criminal justice systems (Leviticus 19:15), commercial practices such as high interest loans (Exodus 22:25-27; Jeremiah 22:13) and unfairly low (James 5:4) or delayed wages (Deuteronomy 24:14-15). Once these systems are in place, they do more evil than any one individual within the system may intend or even be aware of. -Tim Keller source: Gospel in Life
White evangelical Christians have been influenced by decades’ worth of this teaching that tells them don’t talk about race, try not to see race, be colorblind. In fact, it’s to the point now that any discussion of race at the level outside the individual is increasingly seen as heretical in these white evangelical circles. source: Religion & Politics
Maybe Catholics can understand when we talk about sin we understand that the effects of sin can often outlive the person who committed the sin. There are still things outliving what the law intends to change. That’s what we mean by structural racism. -Gloria Pervis source: American Magazine
Not every conclusion that comes out of CRT is compatible with Catholicism, but how could it be the case that Catholics would not want to engage with an intellectual tool that would help to deepen understanding. -Vince Rougeau source: American Magazine
The Black church always had to figure out, “How do I be a Christian without power?” We became Christians and we were slaves, and the people who enslaved us were also Christians. Now you have segments of evangelicalism that are struggling with this—they are coming to grips with the ways in which their tradition has failed. African American biblical interpretation is an exercise in hope. What I’m trying to do is instill that practice into the bloodstream of Black people, even when everything around them feels hopeless. -Esau McCaulley source: The Atlantic
In our culture there are competing theories of justice. One sees justice as almost wholly a matter of merely giving individuals their due. The other tends to see essentially all poverty and crime as the result of systemic injustice, not personal irresponsibility. Both are secular, reductionistic and simplistic. The Bible’s account of justice includes both individual and systemic dimensions—and more. -Tim Keller source: Life in the Gospel
It’s perplexing to me that the same conservative Christian community of which I am a part — the one that decries the deleterious and nearly inescapable effects of a sexual revolution built into our national laws, culture and institutions — can deny that the racist systems upon which our nation was founded and built cannot be equally pervasive and damaging. Even if the most egregious racist laws have been overturned, that doesn’t mean their effects are erased. Don’t believe in systemic racism? Let’s talk about the sexual revolution. -Karen Swallow Prior source: Religion News Service
Texts such as Deut 23:3-8 and 2 Samuel 21:1 show that God still holds nations and peoples responsible for sins after the individual perpetrators had died … Proverbs 13:23 says “An unplowed field produces food for the poor, but injustice sweeps it away.” In short, the Bible does not reduce poverty and injustice solely to either individual actions and choices or to systemic, social structures. The Bible also denounces judicial systems weighted in favor of the rich and away from the poor, business practices that manipulate market prices, and unfair labor practices. -Tim Keller source: Life in the Gospel
Almost 28% of all Americans agreed either strongly or somewhat that the U.S. should be declared a Christian nation. And the fact that 16% of the white “nothing in particular” group, or “nones,” shared that sentiment indicates that Christian nationalism can be as much about white culture as it is about white religion. -Samuel Perry source: Baptist News Global
Just as a Christian scientist might say that all truth is God’s truth, and therefore, the scientific truths which flow from test tubes and laboratory experiments may be considered part of God’s general revelation, so does CRT offer empirical truths about how race has operated as a legal and social category throughout the past 400 years of US history. -Robert Chao Romero source: Missio Alliance
If you talk to the ordinary white evangelical, they deny being a white Christian nationalist.” For them, equating flag and faith “is just what it means to be Christian” and is as invisible to them as “the air that they breathe.” -Kristin Kobes Du Mez source: Baptist News Global
The animating spark of the religious right — with its accompanying great white Christian flight from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party in the 1970s and 1980s — was not prayer in schools or so-called family values, but the defense of racist policies at private Christian schools. -Robert P. Jones source: Religious News Service
Examples of broader patterns of racism
Critical Race Theory does not define racism as solely individual acts perpetrated by individuals. Racism is often the result of unintended (but often foreseeable) consequence of group decisions in laws, policies and what passes for normal, mainstream, or traditional. There is evidence to suggest there is a pattern of racism in education, housing, infrastructure, hiring, incarceration, policing, environmental policies, and immigration laws.
A pattern of Racism in Education
The limitations of legal interventions have led to current manifestations of racial inequality in education, including: The predominance of curriculum that excludes the history and lived experiences of Americans of color and imposes a dominant white narrative of history; School funding inequities, including the persistent underfunding of property-poor districts, many of which are composed primarily of children of color; and The persistence of racially segregated education. source: American Bar Association
Curricula that largely exclude the history and lived experiences of Americans of color are the norm. The Tulsa Massacre was shrouded in secrecy for many years. source: Ed Week
Standardized-test scores from assessments detached from what students learn in the classroom are widely used to confirm narratives about the ineducability of children of color. source: Ed Week
The public educational system in this country is based on local property taxes. Poorer communities therefore have far fewer resources and lower quality schools, which then reinforces poverty in that neighborhood, which leads to fewer resources. Since the poverty rate for African-Americans is twice that of the population as a whole, the system of school funding disproportionately traps communities of color. -Tim Keller source: Life in the Gospel
School discipline policies that prohibit the wearing of hair in locs might seem neutral, but they disproportionately impact Black students who are most likely to wear locs. source: Ed Week
Since 1944, GI Bill benefit have been offered to millions of veterans transitioning to civilian life. But due to racism and discrimination in how they were granted through local Veterans Affairs offices, many Black WWII veterans received substantially less money toward purchasing a home or continuing their education. Local VA officers there either made it difficult for Black veterans to access their benefits or lessened their value by steering them away from predominantly white four-year colleges and toward vocational and other non-degree programs. source: Associated Press
A pattern of Racism in Housing
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. source: Ed Week
Systemic racism includes things like red lining, wage discrimination, predatory lending targeting people of color, and racist policing. Critical race theory in the classroom can teach that 'laws alone don't end racism' source: San Diego Union Tribune
Redlining was a process sanctioned by federal policies that segregated access to services like banking and housing on the basis of race and sometimes income level across America. Entire communities primarily BIPOC communities were prevented from entering their conditions by being refused financial services and being denied access to wealthier and therefore often safer and less heavily police neighborhoods. source: Second Thought video
Racial gerrymandering is one example of many, she said. “You make a really funny district in order to cut out the Black part of town and make sure that a white representative will be elected. You didn't specifically say no Black people can vote here but, you know, it worked out that way.” source: Inside Higher Ed
One great example (of systemic racism) is the law around housing and the issue of intergenerational wealth creation. Up through the middle of the twentieth century there were laws in place to prevent black people from purchasing property in many areas of the country, forcing them to only purchase property in certain areas. There was active discrimination preventing black people from getting government-supported loans like the FHA and VA. Meanwhile, white families are taking advantage of this government supported tax-supported effort to allow them to become homeowners. Black people are shut out. Overtime, of course, those laws changed and active discrimination under the guise of the law was eliminated or there was less of it. But remember the black families are now one or two generations behind the white families who've had now several generations of home ownership and have built wealth through homes. Black people are still being forced to live off in highly segregated areas where they don't gain the same appreciation for their assets. I think every black family knows that if you are selling your house you want to remove all signs of blackness. I’ve heard that my whole life. Generation after generation. Don’t let anyone think that Black people lived here. -Vince Rougeau. source: American Magazine
Lenders in 2019 were more likely to deny home loans to people of color than to White people with similar financial characteristics—even when we controlled for newly available financial factors that the mortgage industry for years has said would explain racial disparities in lending. Holding 17 different factors steady in a complex statistical analysis of more than two million conventional mortgage applications for home purchases, we found that lenders were 40 percent more likely to turn down Latino applicants for loans, 50 percent more likely to deny Asian/Pacific Islander applicants, and 70 percent more likely to deny Native American applicants than similar White applicants. Lenders were 80 percent more likely to reject Black applicants than similar White applicants. These are national rates. In every case, the prospective borrowers of color looked almost exactly the same on paper as the White applicants, except for their race. source: The Markup
We found that lenders gave fewer loans to Black applicants than White applicants even when their incomes were high—$100,000 a year or more—and had the same debt ratios. In fact, high-earning Black applicants with less debt were rejected more often than high-earning White applicants who have more debt. source: The Markup
The Federal Housing Administration’s racist housing policies also impacted Black WWII veterans, undoubtedly fueling today’s racial wealth gap. Typically referred to as redlining, realtors and banks would refuse to show homes or offer mortgages to qualified homebuyers in certain neighborhoods because of their race or ethnicity. source: Associated Press
The Fair Housing Act may have made overt discrimination illegal, but one black family denied by one white landlord may tell friends and family, and their experience will ripple out into the community. source: Next City
At the center of these (redline) policies were banks who would refuse minority applicants advantageous loans opening the door for loan sharks and predatory lending practices to thrive and suck more wealth away from non-white neighborhoods. Now, to be clear, people living in red line districts were no more or less likely to default on loans and mortgages they just weren't allowed by the white establishment to take them out in the first place and the consequences of redlining were felt everywhere: Worse social services like schools and hospitals, worse and more unsafe housing closer proximity to hazardous waste sites. source: Second Thought video
An investigation found AT&T, Verizon, EarthLink, and CenturyLink disproportionately offered lower-income and least-White neighborhoods slow internet service for the same price as speedy connections they offered in other parts of town source: The Markup
Black Seattle Family Asks White Neighbor To Present Their Home To Appraiser, Valuation Then Increases By $259K source: King 5
A pattern of Racism in Credit Scores
Credit scores only nominally ignored racial characteristics. With surgical precision, the kinds of payments that are likely to demonstrate trustworthiness in households with less initial capital, which black Americans have been systematically denied, were kept out of the equation. Historical moments like the segregated application of the GI Bill exclusively allowed white service members to build equity in home ownership that could be passed down as generational wealth. And things like paying your phone bill, utilities, or rent on time are kept out of credit score calculations. The result is a self-reinforcing loop in which access to more capital, more wealth and a better life is shut off and severely impacted by your existing lack of capital. As a result, today lenders are 40% more likely to turn down Latino applicants for loans, 50% more likely to deny Asian or Pacific Islander applicants, 70% more likely to deny Native American applicants, and 80% more likely to reject black applicants than similar white ones. source: Second Thought video
What decides who gets credit is baked into the structure of credit scores by outdated and discriminatory algorithms. You don't need to check a race box to get a credit score because the machine doesn't need it to know what you would say. And for credit companies, the best part is they can turn around and tell you it has nothing to do with race. It’s all about personal responsibility. source: Second Thought video
Fifty-two percent of the money owed and not yet paid back was borrowed to pay for a medical procedure of some sort and is now lowering credit scores for millions of Americans across the country. What could that possibly have to do with personal responsibility? How is getting sick and receiving a medical procedure, one you cannot afford because American medical costs are the highest in the world, a sign that you are not a trustworthy person and should not have access to loans a mortgage, housing, a good job, or good insurance? Obviously, it isn't. source: Second Thought video
A pattern of Racism in Infrastructure
Take an injustice like the Flint Water Crisis. As Khiara Bridges, a law professor, notes in her book Critical Race Theory: A Primer, some would say that race is merely a descriptor when discussing what happened in Flint, arguing that it cannot be used to explain why those who were exposed to contaminated drinking water were predominantly Black people. A critical race theorist studying the topic, however, would analyze the historical factors that led to the crisis primarily impacting Black people, with their studies grounded in the idea that racial injustice is built into society's foundational building blocks. source: Mashable
Historian Kevin Kruse wrote about the history of using infrastructure as a tool to bolster racist policies for the New York Times in 2019. He described specific decisions to route highways through poor (and heavily non-White) neighborhoods, razing them to the ground. But it didn’t end there. “While Interstates were regularly used to destroy black neighborhoods, they were also used to keep black and white neighborhoods apart,” Kruse wrote. “Today, major roads and highways serve as stark dividing lines between black and white sections.” Philip Bump source: Washington Post
A pattern of Racism in Hiring
It is natural when you are in business to hire people that you know or who know people you know. But since most of us have our informal relational networks inside our racial and class group, that means the (generally white and privileged) people in power hire others in their race and class, while qualified people of other races and groups have no way in. -Tim Keller source: Life in the Gospel
A pattern of Racism in Incarceration
Black Americans are seven times more likely than white people to be falsely convicted of serious crimes, and spend longer in prison before exoneration, a new report shows. source: Axios
Black and white Americans use marijuana at around the same levels, but the former are almost four times as likely to be arrested for possession. When an algorithm is built out of bias-inflected data, it will perpetuate bias-inflected practices. -Hannah Fry source: The New Yorker
Psychologists have shown that judges are doing nothing more strategic than going through an ordered checklist of warning flags in their heads. If any of those flags — past convictions, community ties, prosecution's request — are raised by the defendant story, the judge will stop and deny bail. The problem is that so many of those flags are correlated with race, gender and educational level. Judges can’t help relying on intuition more than they should; and in doing so, they are unwittingly perpetuating biases in the system. -Hannah Fry source: Hello World
A pattern of Racism in Policing
Focusing police attention on certain areas might not immediately seem unfair. But not everyone has a positive relationship with the police. ‘It is legitimate for people who see a police officer walking in front of their house every day to feel oppressed by that, even if no one's doing any crimes, even if that police officer is literally just walking up and down, Toby Davies (a mathematician and crime scientist from UCL) told me. ‘You almost have a right not to be constantly under pressure under the eye of the police.’ -Hannah Fry source: Hello World
Environmental Racism
Systemic racism has long influenced where major sources of pollution are located within communities. Beginning in the early 20th century, White government planners in many municipalities drew redlining maps that identified Black and Latino neighborhoods as undesirable and unworthy of housing loans. Heavy industry was permitted to cluster in those places, adding a toxic dimension that persists today. Today, Black people are nearly four times as likely to die from exposure to pollution than White people. According to “Fumes Across the Fence-Line,” a recent study by the Clean Air Task Force, African Americans are exposed to 38 percent more polluted air than White Americans, and they are 75 percent more likely to live in communities that border a plant or factory. A 1983 federal report (said) 3 out of 4 major landfills in the South were surrounded by Black communities. source: The Washington Post
A pattern of Racism in Immigration Policies
It’s generally accepted among historians and political scientists that U.S. immigration laws of today have racist underpinnings. The Page Act of 1875 and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 effectively banned Chinese immigration. The National Origins Act of 1924 used a racial quota system consciously designed to discourage southern and eastern Europeans from entering the U.S. It was praised by Adolf Hitler. Unlawful reentry was first criminalized in 1929, as part of the inauspiciously titled Undesirable Aliens Act. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952…criminalized workers and those who help people cross the border, but included a specific exemption for employers. -Hassan Kanu source: Reuters
A Pattern of Racism in Technology
In the 1950s, when cameras were calibrated in a way that prioritized light skin tones. And even in the pre-internet era, the ripple effects of that were massive. It resulted in cameras that did a better job of photographing white people than Black people, which affected who’d actually look good on TV, on a magazine cover, or even in a family photo. Fast forward to the internet era, where facial recognition algorithms can be more likely to mistake one Black person for another. source: Pocket
Marxism
While Critical Race Theory certainly falls within the Critical tradition, it rejects some basic assumptions of Marxism. For instance, Marxists have always taught that racism is either an instrument or a byproduct of class warfare, a viewpoint rejected by Critical Race Theory.
Critics often call the theory Marxist, and there is a tie. As Kimberlé Crenshaw and others wrote in 1995, a “collection on neo-Marxist and new Left activists” in law schools were part of the movement to challenge the ways American law served “to legitimize an oppressive social order.” Far from every scholar was a Marxist, so the label is overly broad. -Jon Greenberg and Amy Sherman source: Tampa Bay Times
Any kind of theorizing that doesn’t lead ineluctably to activism and agitation is categorized as “traditional” and “bourgeois,” and certainly not “critical.” In this respect, critical theorists take their lead from Marx’s line, inscribed on his headstone in Highgate cemetery, that “philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.” (Stephen’s note: Marx isn’t the only one who said talk is cheap—Jesus said that, too.). source: National Review
“Critical race theory sort of breaks off from critical legal studies, because critical legal studies didn’t really conceptualize race,” University of Louisville Law School professor Cedric Powell said. Where critical legal theorists saw laws as primarily reflecting and sustaining class interests, critical race theorists argued that laws construct and maintain a racial power hierarchy. Critical race theorists are not calling for a violent overthrow of the government, as has been suggested by some conservatives. “Critical race theory calls for the dismantling of structural inequality,” Powell said. “Critical race theorists believe in the government. They just believe that if the government is making all of these promises, it should certainly keep them. source: WFPL
A long-running argument about ‘White supremacy’ between Marxist thinkers and CRT scholars has centred on (amongst other things) the concept being inadequate as an explanation for the persistence of racism in the Western world and as being counter-productive in motivating emancipatory action, primarily for White people. It has been suggested that the neo-Marxist concept of ‘racialisation’ provides a better way of explaining the persistent presence of racism in the Western world. -Sean Walton source: Journal of Power & Education
“If you’re a historian of the civil rights movement, that sounds eerily familiar because many civil rights activists, including Martin Luther King, were accused of being Communists because they wanted equality.” -Nikki Brown source: WFPL
The phrase widely read means that you can and should read things you disagree with. You can definitely read Marx without becoming a Marxist. You can read critical race theory without becoming a “critical race theorist,” however you define that. Doing both will help you become an educated person. -Anne Applebaum source: The Atlantic
The concept of ‘White supremacy’ employed by CRT has been repeatedly criticised from a Marxist perspective. Maisuria Cole identifies seven substantial problems with ‘White supremacy’ as utilised by CRT scholars. -Sean Walton source: Journal of Power & Education
CRT certainly falls within the Critical tradition. But CRT was likewise forged in contestation with traditional Marxism. Marxists have always taught that racism is either an instrument or a byproduct of class warfare, consistent with the basic Marxist essentialism rejected by both CLS and CRT … At its root, CRT rejects Marxist instrumentalism, the “base”/“superstructure” paradigm, and not only rejects class essentialism, but seeks to be anti-essentialist in general. And, in reality, an anti-essentialist Marxism with no “base” or “superstructure” is not much of a Marxism at all, just a long tradition of critical social theory employed by theorists from many different socio-political perspectives. -Brad Mason source: Also a Carpenter blog
Critics of CRT invoke the historical connection of CRT theorists to the Frankfurt School with the real mischief they claim being the connection to Karl Marx. You can trace psychology’s roots back to any number of unsavory characters. Regularly through my undergraduate and graduate schooling, I heard from Christians that I was wasting my time at best, and sinning at worst, by being in psychology. Freud and Skinner and Ellis and Rogers(!) were all atheists and pagans and had nothing to offer Christians. -Warren Throckmorton source: Warren Throckmorton blog
Intersectionality
Beyond coming up with the name of the field, Kimberlé Crenshaw is even more well-known for coining the now-very-fashionable term "intersectionality," meant to highlight the multiple and overlapping systems of oppression that women of color face that make their experience different from that of white women's. source: ThoughtCo
Multiple elements, such as race and gender, can lead to kinds of compounded discrimination that lack the civil rights protections given to individual, protected categories. For example, Kimberlé Crenshaw has forcibly argued that there is a lack of legal protection for Black women as a category. The courts have treated Black women as Black, or women, but not both in discrimination cases – despite the fact that they may have experienced discrimination because they were both. source: The Conversation
A Few Bad Actors
CRT is a departure from the popular idea that racism is perpetrated solely by individual “bad actors.” If we confine racism to individual bad actors, we ignore the ways that systems and institutions can replicate racial inequality. source: Ed Week
A key tenant of CRT: racism is a normal feature of society and is embedded within systems and institutions, like the legal system, that replicate racial inequality. This dismisses the idea that racist incidents are aberrations but instead are manifestations of structural and systemic racism. source: American Bar Association
Racism must be addressed not just by punishing individuals, but by shifting structures and policies. Daniel HoSang, professor of ethnicity, race and migration and American studies at Yale University said, the question is, “Even in places where civil rights and anti-discrimination laws passed, why do these forms of inequality persist?” source: Texas Tribune
Quotes about CRT
Critical Race Theory is a “crusade against American history” that is “toxic propaganda, ideological poison, that, if not removed, will dissolve the civic bonds that tie us together, will destroy our country.” -Donald Trump. source: PBS
Critical Race Theory teaches “kids to hate our country and to hate each other,” -Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis source: Slate
We tend to use the terms racism and racist interchangeably. I even did that in How to Be an Antiracist while at the same time I was trying to define them differently. It’s important to understand racism as structural, as systemic, as institutional, but the term racist is a term of individuality. So we’re really talking about an individual person, an individual idea, an individual policy, an individual nation. - Ibram X. Kendi source: Slate
A key tenant of CRT: Racism is a normal feature of society and is embedded within systems and institutions, like the legal system, that replicate racial inequality. This dismisses the idea that racist incidents are aberrations but instead are manifestations of structural and systemic racism. source: American Bar Association
CRT thus puts an emphasis on outcomes, not merely on individuals’ own beliefs, and it calls on these outcomes to be examined and rectified. source: Ed Week
Critical race theory’s only error is its name. It isn’t a theory at all. It represents the lived Black experience. -The former executive director of The Kansas African American Museum. source: NC Policy Watch
Racism is built into American law and everyday life. The law has defined who counts as White and non-White, legal documents often include information on racial identity and many laws — by design or through omission — perpetuate racial inequality and White privilege. Our schools, workplaces, neighborhoods and social interactions are influenced by historical and contemporary patterns of discrimination. Scholars disagree on the causes of the nation’s entrenched racism, but the persistence of racial inequality is an empirical fact. source: Washington Post
Bell noted that Brown was decided the way it was because of what he termed “interest convergence,” which is the recognition that the interests of Black people in achieving racial equality will be accommodated only when it converges with the interests of white people. source: American Bar Association
Many of our nation’s systems and structures—including the legal system—were created when people of color were denied full participation in American society. Therefore, as many critical race theorists have noted, CRT calls for a radical reordering of society and a reckoning with the structures and systems that intersect to perpetuate racial inequality. source: American Bar Association
You can’t find a pastor in the country with a hot take on police reform. No one asks me that. They ask me whether I am a critical race theorist. -Esau McCaulley source: The Atlantic
Those who wish to conserve racial inequity want us to focus on intent—which is hard to prove—rather than the outcome of inequity, which is rather easy to prove. -Ibram X. Kendi source: The Atlantic