Critical Race Theory Isn't What You Think It Is

People hold up signs during a rally against "critical race theory" in schools at the Loudoun County Government center in Virginia. [AFP / Andrew Caballero-Reynolds]

After the uprisings against police brutality last summer, some state-level Republicans have been focused on demonizing “critical race theory,” or CRT – an academic theory used to analyze racism in law and policy. They essentially want to stop schools from teaching about the pervasive effects of racism.

At least six states, among them Arkansas, Idaho, Iowa, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Texas, have passed bills regarding critical race theory, and there have been a number of other efforts at the local level. Tennessee's law bans schools from teaching that “this state or the United States is fundamentally or irredeemably racist or sexist.”

This idea is quite different from Columbia Law professor Kendall Thomas’ idea that critical race theory can help the United States become the “more perfect union” that its founders intended it to be.

Thomas is the co-founder and director of the Center for the Study of Law and Culture at Columbia Law School, and co-editor of the 1995 book Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement. Over Zoom, we spoke about the theory that these bill authors claim they’re trying to eradicate from schools, and the potential long-term effects. Here’s what he had to say (these responses have been edited for length and clarity):

Critical race theory is the answer to “colorblind racism”

“Critical race theory is a set of questions raised by American law professors and legal scholars, who wanted to understand why it is that America still faced a problem of entrenched racial inequality and disparity that excluded people of color from full, equal participation in American life, even after the Civil Rights revolution.

“Legal scholars looked at the ways the law and policy about race weave racial power into institutions, in ways that exacerbate racial unfairness and racial inequity. Critical race theory tries to give an account of the systemic and structural harm that we call ‘colorblind racism,’ laws and policies that don't explicitly mention race, but nonetheless reproduce racial disadvantage, disparities and discrimination.

“Critical race theory offers us a body of ideas that we can use to stop playing the personal blame game, and have a productive national conversation about racial inequality that looks at how institutions and social structures and social systems work.”

Even Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia shared these ideas

“Republican politicians and the right-wing ideologues who are foaming at the mouth about what they're calling ‘critical race theory’ won't tell you that this very simple idea is not radical at all. It's been recognized even by their hero, the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, in 1987 when the Supreme Court decided a case called McCleskey v. Kemp.

“The plaintiffs wanted to introduce evidence that Georgia's death penalty law, though written race-neutral, was being administered in a racially discriminatory way. In a memo that came to light-years after it was written, Justice Scalia just straight up admitted that the American criminal justice system, juries and prosecutors are racist, and that racism pervades the system. It’s an 'ineradicable' part of our legal system. This was before most of the scholarship that has come to be associated with critical race theory was even published.”

How critical race theory can heal historical wounds

“In the book How Democracies Die, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt remind us that many of the norms that sustain our democratic system have historically rested on racial exclusion. The war being waged by the opponents of critical race theory is not going to change the fact that we cannot live up to the full promise of American idea, unless we are willing to accept that you can't have the story of 1776, what Lincoln called ‘a new birth of freedom,’ without the story of 1619, and the arrival of African people who were forcibly brought to this country in chains on the shores of the American colonies.

“A lot of that history hurts, but that same history can also heal the wounds that racial inequality and injustice have inflicted on the American body politic. Critical race theory understands that that past is a resource in the present for shaping a different future that will bring us closer to the more perfect union that the founders of this country spoke of in the Preamble to the Constitution – but which they themselves were not willing to embrace because of their fear of too much democracy.”

“If they can stoke racial fear, they can distract us from their failures”

“These folks know that it is simply unacceptable for them to publicly be anti anti-racist. So largely using the cynical and dishonest effort to make what he calls the ‘CRT brand’ toxic, [writer] Christopher Rufo and the [right-wing think tank] Manhattan Institute, in cahoots with Republican party elites, have decided to attack critical race theory.

“They are actually telegraphing what they're doing. So they say, ‘We're against divisive concepts,’ even as they're trying to sow division. ‘We're against racial scapegoating,’ even as they're scapegoating critical race theory.

“They know if they can stoke racial fear and racial distrust, they can distract us from their failures: that economic inequality in this country is as bad as it has been at any point in our history since the late 19th century era of the robber barons. That people in the United States today are less likely to rise from the bottom to the top of our economic hierarchy than people in Denmark or Canada.

“It's a short-term calculated, partisan political ploy aimed at trying to stunt the emergence of the diverse multiracial, intergenerational movement of American citizens who woke up to the ways that racism has been weaponized to wage class war and prevent people from coming together to demand that our government serve us and address the institutionalized economic injustice and social inequality that are devastating poor and working class communities.”

These laws will shape the responsibilities of the next American citizens.

“The founders of this country believed that at the heart of the American idea was a commitment to this public culture of debate, disagreement and dissent about ideas. That through this idea of popular sovereignty, the people would govern themselves by valuing a practice of politics that rested on reason and enlightened nationalism – a conception of citizenship and of our democratic Republic that didn't rest on fear, rank prejudice and pure power.

“Did they live up to that ideal completely? No. They failed in many important respects. But our history allows us to see the ways in which race and racism have distorted, degraded and deferred the full realization of the American dream.

“So if we want to take up the unfinished project of making a more perfect union, we have to support the kinds of teaching and learning that these attacks on critical race theory are trying to censor and shut down. Because the next generation of Americans are going to be living in a multicultural democracy, the most diverse America in history. And through these laws, we are imposing a host of handicaps that will deprive them of the skills, knowledge, vision and the desire to take up their responsibilities as citizens.

“These laws are not just about the way we teach and talk about race and racial inequality. They strike at the heart of how we are going to teach our children, and create the learning communities of young people who will be the next generation of American citizens.”