In the aftermath of George Floyd’s death, American institutions, from corporations to government agencies to nonprofits, found themselves under tremendous pressure to address racism within their organizations and to publicly speak out against its prevalence throughout society. Their responses — proclamations from chief executives, anti-bias trainings, diversity initiatives, ad campaigns — were sincere and searching or self-serving and performative or some of both. But the overall effect was far more pronounced than what came during the several years before, in reaction to a rash of videotaped deaths at the hands of the police, the inflammatory rhetoric of Donald Trump and the rise of Black Lives Matter. The attention to racism was more visible and audible than anything the country had experienced in decades.
Understand the Debate Over Critical Race Theory
Understand the Debate Over Critical Race Theory
An expansive academic framework. Critical race theory, or C.R.T, argues that historical patterns of racism are ingrained in law and other modern institutions. The theory says that racism is a systemic problem, not only a matter of individual bigotry.
Understand the Debate Over Critical Race Theory
An expansive academic framework. Critical race theory, or C.R.T, argues that historical patterns of racism are ingrained in law and other modern institutions. The theory says that racism is a systemic problem, not only a matter of individual bigotry.
Understand the Debate Over Critical Race Theory
C.R.T. is not new. Derrick Bell, a pioneering legal scholar who died in 2011, spent decades exploring what it would mean to understand racism as a permanent feature of American life. He is often called the godfather of critical race theory, but the term was coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in the 1980s.
Understand the Debate Over Critical Race Theory
The theory has gained new prominence. After the protests born from the police killing of George Floyd, critical race theory resurfaced as part of a backlash among conservatives — including former President Trump — who began to use the term as a political weapon.
Understand the Debate Over Critical Race Theory
The current debate. Critics of C.R.T. argue that it accuses all white Americans of being racist and is being used to divide the country. But critical race theorists say they are mainly concerned with understanding the racial disparities that have persisted in institutions and systems.
Understand the Debate Over Critical Race Theory
A hot-button issue in schools. The debate has turned school boards into battlegrounds as some Republicans say the theory is invading classrooms. Education leaders, including the National School Boards Association, say that C.R.T. is not being taught in K-12 schools.
With the new emphasis came an emphatic backlash. In September 2020, Christopher Rufo, a Seattle-area conservative activist and writer, announced on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” that trainings given within the F.B.I. and the Treasury Department were teaching that America is “a fundamentally white supremacist nation” and asserting an oppressive “essence of whiteness.” He labeled this “critical race theory cult indoctrination,” referring to an academic movement with beginnings in the 1970s, a perspective that sees racism embedded at the core of American history, law and society. Rufo called on the Trump White House to “immediately issue an executive order abolishing critical race trainings from the federal government.” Trump was watching the show, and by late October, Rufo was at the White House, helping to draft an executive order.
Rufo soon asked his Twitter followers whether they would be most interested in learning more about the teaching of critical race theory, C.R.T., in corporations, in the military or in K-12 education. They picked education. He set about reporting on this for the right-leaning City Journal, which is published by the Manhattan Institute, and became a regular on Fox, where he raised alarms about progressive pedagogy in public schools on topics of race — and later, increasingly, on gender and sexuality. Teachers in Seattle and San Diego, he reported, were trained by an activist who maintained “that public schools are guilty of ‘the spirit murdering of Black and brown children,’” and teachers in Springfield, Mo., were told to “locate themselves” — by their racial, gender and sexual identities — on an “oppression matrix.” This mind-set, he wrote, was making its way into classrooms. He cited parent accounts of third graders’ being asked to “deconstruct their racial identities, then rank themselves according to their ‘power and privilege.’”
Parent organizations, meanwhile, sprang up to fight progressive trends in schools — one group, Moms for Liberty, has more than 200 chapters in 40 states, with more than 100,000 members — and Rufo advised politicians, in states like Florida, Michigan and Idaho, on writing bills to forestall what he cast as C.R.T.’s spreading infection of young minds. Legislation now pending in Michigan’s Republican-controlled State Senate would forbid teaching any of “the following anti-American and racist theories”: that “the United States is a fundamentally racist country,” that “an individual, by virtue of his or her race, is inherently racist or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously” and that “individuals, by virtue of sex, race, ethnicity, religion, color or national origin, are inherently responsible for actions committed in the past by other members of the same sex, race, ethnicity, religion, color or national origin.” Similar legislation passed in the state’s House of Representatives last year after Democrats refused to vote.
By last spring and summer, outrage over pedagogy — mixed with parent frustration over Covid school closings and resistance to mandatory masking — turned public meetings of school boards across the nation into eruptive events of chanting, screaming, threats and an episode of a father being hauled away in handcuffs. In Virginia, in the fall of 2021, the Republican candidate for governor, Glenn Youngkin, used accusations of C.R.T. in schools to vault himself to a come-from-behind victory, with polling suggesting that the claims played well even in counties that voted heavily for Biden a year earlier. A prominent Republican strategist told me that the party’s candidates would highlight C.R.T. in schools as a way not only to mobilize Republicans but also to win over independents and moderate Democrats in this year’s midterms.
The left countered loudly that the C.R.T. label amounted to political opportunism, a cynical branding, a racist “dog whistle” and a “boogeyman,” that the theory was limited to corners of high-level academia and was a figment of bigoted imaginations when it came to K-12 education. I talked with more than two dozen teachers, administrators, superintendents and education consultants in over a dozen districts in 10 states as I tried to understand what had become, so swiftly, a ferocious debate. Were schools around the country adopting a progressive lens on race? And if so, to what extent? It was a quixotic task. There are some 13,500 school districts in the United States, operating under varying arrangements of local and state governance, and all consist, finally, of individual schools filled with individual classrooms run by individual teachers being guided, to differing degrees, by principals and district superintendents. Yet two things emerged clearly from my conversations: that many schools were inching or lurching toward reform, and that district leaders were leery of letting me observe their classrooms, for fear of the all-consuming rancor that attention could bring.
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