By: Alyce Love
Image: Fair Fight Initiative
Though Critical Race Theory (CRT) has become part of our national dialogue, much of the discussion focuses on facets that are simply non-existent. No evidence exists that CRT is taught in any of our K-12 schools, yet some politicians and some news organizations have fueled controversy around it and used it as a wedge to continue to divide us.
CRT first emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, when law school professors wanted to know how race and racism have shaped American law and society. The catalyzing factor behind this research was the mixed results of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which was designed to remedy historical racial inequities by ending Jim Crow, desegregating schools, and ensuring voting rights for Black people. When these goals remained unfulfilled decades later, it was clear some questions needed answers.
At its base, CRT is a legal theory, one that views race as a social construct and explores the relationship between racial inequality and the law. The core idea is that racism is not merely the product of individual bias or prejudice, but something institutionalized within the structures and policies of our legal system.
There were several law professors who collaborated on CRT, including Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Cheryl Harris, Richard Delgado, Patricia Williams, Gloria Ladson-Billings, Tara Yosso, and others.
CRT began in the legal academy in the 1970s and grew in the 1980s and 1990s and continues as a field of inquiry in the legal field and now it is discussed in other areas of scholarship.
Perhaps it is true that CRT is the work of progressive legal scholars who are seeking to address the role of racism in the law and the work done to eliminate racism and other configurations of subordination .
CRT transcends the Black/white racial thinking and recognizes that racism has impacted the experiences of various people of color, including Latinx, Native Americans, and Asian Americans.
All of these different groups are now seeking to examine their specific experiences of oppression. CRT does challenge white privilege and exposes deficit-informed research that ignores, and often omits, the scholarship of people of color.
CRT is a theoretical framework, an approach to learning that helps us understand how racial and structural disparities endure despite laws designed to discourage them. Its teaching so far is only in law schools and some universities, and it is not taught in any K-12 school.
The aim is to help all people learn from the mistakes of our past as it demonstrates how racism and prejudice informed the creation of U.S. laws. The idea is to get people to think systemically. As opposed to viewing racism as simply a conflict between individuals based on race, CRT makes the case that racial bias is perpetuated and inflamed by the very structure of our society.
As a legal theory, CRT explores and illustrates how the law can make it more evident and give support to racial disparities. As a social theory, CRT recognizes that racism is a social problem. With its dual focus, CRT has a focus on institutions, structures, systems, processes, assumptions, discourses, narratives, and large macro processes that to date fosters racial inequality.
So CRT is a framework developed to help us understand how it is that structural and racial disparities endure in our society and how this racism is engendered in some of our laws and policies. The theory rests on the premise that racial bias – intentional or not – is baked into U.S. laws and institutions. Black Americans, for example, are incarcerated at much higher rates than any other racial group. How else can this be explained when scrutinized?
CRT looks at the criminal legal system’s role in creating and fostering the disparity. CRT invites this scrutiny of the criminal legal system’s role in that disparity and points to the fact that U.S. laws fall far short of the ideals under which they were created to represent.
Although CRT began as a movement in the law, it has rapidly spread beyond that discipline. Today, many in the field of education consider themselves critical race theorists who use CRT’s ideas to understand issues of school discipline and hierarchy, tracking, affirmative action, high-stakes testing, controversies over curriculum and history, and alternative and charter schools.”
Fundamentally, CRT is an approach to holistically studying U.S. policies and institutions, with a wide focus encompassing such subjects as criminal legal, employment, housing, health care, and education, and many others.
In plain terms, CRT suggests that racism is part of a broader pattern in America. At the highest level, CRT makes the case that racism is implicitly woven into our laws, including the nature of policing and law enforcement in our communities. Drilling down to everyday life, this systemic racism impacts everything from hiring practices to home loans.
Teaching CRT: The Popular Misconceptions
It may also be helpful to explain what CRT is not. First, CRT does not vilify white people and does not cast the non-white population as perpetual victims. CRT is not a study in placing blame. It neither vilifies nor victimizes any group, Black or white. CRT instead, focuses on the larger forces at play in our society, forces that maintain a strict stratification between the races.
Another misconception is that CRT is, in and of itself, inherently racist. Critics of CRT claim it presents a strictly negative picture of the United States, one designed to make young people feel ashamed of their country and of themselves. This is a dangerous oversimplification. CRT merely encourages a clear-eyed view of this country’s history and the racial prejudice that has informed our legal structures. This clear-eyed view is essential to helping America to live up to its ideals of equal justice under the law.
Some politicians and news pundits claim that CRT furthers racial division, but the reality is that CRT does just the opposite. It’s an unfortunate side effect of our society’s growth that we have already separated ourselves along racial lines. CRT's ultimate aim is to fix that divide. The goal is to heal those divisions and make this country live up to the lofty promises of freedom and equality enshrined in the U.S. Constitution and all of our post-Civil War amendments and laws intended to bring about equality.