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What Is Critical Race Theory, and Why Is It Under Attack?

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Is “critical race theory” a way of understanding how American racism has shaped public policy, or a divisive discourse that pits people of color against white people? Liberals and conservatives are in sharp disagreement.

The topic has exploded in the public arena this spring—especially in K-12, where numerous state legislatures are debating bills seeking to ban its use in the classroom.

In truth, the divides are not nearly as neat as they may seem. The events of the last decade have increased public awareness about things like housing segregation, the impacts of criminal justice policy in the 1990s, and the legacy of enslavement on Black Americans. But there is much less consensus on what the government’s role should be in righting these past wrongs. Add children and schooling into the mix and the debate becomes especially volatile.

School boards, superintendents, even principals and teachers are already facing questions about critical race theory, and there are significant disagreements even among experts about its precise definition as well as how its tenets should inform K-12 policy and practice. This explainer is meant only as a starting point to help educators grasp core aspects of the current debate.

Just what is critical race theory anyway?

Critical race theory is an academic concept that is more than 40 years old. The core idea is that race is a social construct, and that racism is not merely the product of individual bias or prejudice, but also something embedded in legal systems and policies.

The basic tenets of critical race theory, or CRT, emerged out of a framework for legal analysis in the late 1970s and early 1980s created by legal scholars Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Richard Delgado, among others.

A good example is when, in the 1930s, government officials literally drew lines around areas deemed poor financial risks, often explicitly due to the racial composition of inhabitants. Banks subsequently refused to offer mortgages to Black people in those areas.

Today, those same patterns of discrimination live on through facially race-blind policies, like single-family zoning that prevents the building of affordable housing in advantaged, majority-white neighborhoods and, thus, stymies racial desegregation efforts.

CRT also has ties to other intellectual currents, including the work of sociologists and literary theorists who studied links between political power, social organization, and language. And its ideas have since informed other fields, like the humanities, the social sciences, and teacher education.

This academic understanding of critical race theory differs from representation in recent popular books and, especially, from its portrayal by critics—often, though not exclusively, conservative Republicans. Critics charge that the theory leads to negative dynamics, such as a focus on group identity over universal, shared traits; divides people into “oppressed” and “oppressor” groups; and urges intolerance.

Thus, there is a good deal of confusion over what CRT means, as well as its relationship to other terms, like “anti-racism” and “social justice,” with which it is often conflated.

To an extent, the term “critical race theory” is now cited as the basis of all diversity and inclusion efforts regardless of how much it’s actually informed those programs.

One conservative organization, the Heritage Foundation, recently attributed a whole host of issues to CRT , including the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, LGBTQ clubs in schools, diversity training in federal agencies and organizations, California’s recent ethnic studies model curriculum, the free-speech debate on college campuses, and alternatives to exclusionary discipline—such as the Promise program in Broward County, Fla., that some parents blame for the Parkland school shootings. “When followed to its logical conclusion, CRT is destructive and rejects the fundamental ideas on which our constitutional republic is based,” the organization claimed.

(A good parallel here is how popular ideas of the common core learning standards grew to encompass far more than what those standards said on paper.)

Does critical race theory say all white people are racist? Isn’t that racist, too?

The theory says that racism is part of everyday life, so people—white or nonwhite—who don’t intend to be racist can nevertheless make choices that fuel racism.

Some critics claim that the theory advocates discriminating against white people in order to achieve equity. They mainly aim those accusations at theorists who advocate for policies that explicitly take race into account. (The writer Ibram X. Kendi, whose recent popular book How to Be An Antiracist suggests that discrimination that creates equity can be considered anti-racist, is often cited in this context.)

Fundamentally, though, the disagreement springs from different conceptions of racism. CRT puts an emphasis on outcomes, not merely on individuals’ own beliefs, and it calls on these outcomes to be examined and rectified. Among lawyers, teachers, policymakers, and the general public, there are many disagreements about how precisely to do those things, and to what extent race should be explicitly appealed to or referred to in the process.

Here’s a helpful illustration to keep in mind in understanding this complex idea. In a 2007 U.S. Supreme Court school-assignment case on whether race could be a factor in maintaining diversity in K-12 schools, Chief Justice John Roberts’ opinion famously concluded: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” But during oral arguments, then-justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said: “It’s very hard for me to see how you can have a racial objective but a nonracial means to get there.”

All these different ideas grow out of longstanding, tenacious intellectual debates. Critical race theory emerged out of postmodernist thought, which tends to be skeptical of the idea of universal values, objective knowledge, individual merit, Enlightenment rationalism, and liberalism—tenets that conservatives tend to hold dear.

What does any of this have to do with K-12 education?

Scholars who study critical race theory in education look at how policies and practices in K-12 education contribute to persistent racial inequalities in education, and advocate for ways to change them. Among the topics they’ve studied: racially segregated schools, the underfunding of majority-Black and Latino school districts, disproportionate disciplining of Black students, barriers to gifted programs and selective-admission high schools, and curricula that reinforce racist ideas.

Critical race theory is not a synonym for culturally relevant teaching, which emerged in the 1990s. This teaching approach seeks to affirm students’ ethnic and racial backgrounds and is intellectually rigorous. But it’s related in that one of its aims is to help students identify and critique the causes of social inequality in their own lives.

Many educators support, to one degree or another, culturally relevant teaching and other strategies to make schools feel safe and supportive for Black students and other underserved populations. (Students of color make up the majority of school-aged children.) But they don’t necessarily identify these activities as CRT-related.

As one teacher-educator put it: “The way we usually see any of this in a classroom is: ‘Have I thought about how my Black kids feel? And made a space for them, so that they can be successful?’ That is the level I think it stays at, for most teachers.” Like others interviewed for this explainer, the teacher-educator did not want to be named out of fear of online harassment.

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 practice s or make the curriculum less Eurocentric will ultimately harm Black students, or hold them to a less high standard.

As with CRT in general, its popular representation in schools has been far less nuanced. A recent poll by the advocacy group Parents Defending Education claimed some schools were teaching that “white people are inherently privileged, while Black and other people of color are inherently oppressed and victimized”; that “achieving racial justice and equality between racial groups requires discriminating against people based on their whiteness”; and that “the United States was founded on racism.”

Thus 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.

While some district officials have issued mission statements, resolutions, or spoken about changes in their policies using some of the discourse of CRT, it’s not clear to what degree educators are explicitly teaching the concepts, or even using curriculum materials or other methods that implicitly draw on them. For one thing, scholars say, much scholarship on CRT is written in academic language or published in journals not easily accessible to K-12 teachers.

What is going on with these proposals to ban critical race theory in schools?

As of mid-May, legislation purporting to outlaw CRT in schools has passed in Idaho, Iowa, Oklahoma, and Tennessee and have been proposed in various other statehouses.

The bills are so vaguely written that it’s unclear what they will affirmatively cover.

Could a teacher who wants to talk about a factual instance of state-sponsored racism—like the establishment of Jim Crow, the series of laws that prevented Black Americans from voting or holding office and separated them from white people in public spaces—be considered in violation of these laws?

It’s also unclear whether these new bills are constitutional, or whether they impermissibly restrict free speech.

It would be extremely difficult, in any case, to police what goes on inside hundreds of thousands of classrooms. But social studies educators fear that such laws could have a chilling effect on teachers who might self-censor their own lessons out of concern for parent or administrator complaints.

As English teacher Mike Stein told Chalkbeat Tennessee about the new law : “History teachers can not adequately teach about the Trail of Tears, the Civil War, and the civil rights movement. English teachers will have to avoid teaching almost any text by an African American author because many of them mention racism to various extents.”

The laws could also become a tool to attack other pieces of the curriculum, including ethnic studies and “action civics”—an approach to civics education that asks students to research local civic problems and propose solutions.

How is this related to other debates over what’s taught in the classroom amid K-12 culture wars?

The charge that schools are indoctrinating students in a harmful theory or political mindset is a longstanding one, historians note. CRT appears to be the latest salvo in this ongoing debate.

In the early and mid-20th century, the concern was about socialism or Marxism . The conservative American Legion, beginning in the 1930s, sought to rid schools of progressive-minded textbooks that encouraged students to consider economic inequality; two decades later the John Birch Society raised similar criticisms about school materials. As with CRT criticisms, the fear was that students would be somehow harmed by exposure to these ideas.

As the school-aged population became more diverse, these debates have been inflected through the lens of race and ethnic representation, including disagreements over multiculturalism and ethnic studies, the ongoing “canon wars” over which texts should make up the English curriculum, and the so-called “ebonics” debates over the status of Black vernacular English in schools.

In history, the debates have focused on the balance among patriotism and American exceptionalism, on one hand, and the country’s history of exclusion and violence towards Indigenous people and the enslavement of African Americans on the other—between its ideals and its practices. Those tensions led to the implosion of a 1994 attempt to set national history standards.

A current example that has fueled much of the recent round of CRT criticism is the New York Times’ 1619 Project, which sought to put the history and effects of enslavement—as well as Black Americans’ contributions to democratic reforms—at the center of American history.

The culture wars are always, at some level, battled out within schools, historians say.

“It’s because they’re nervous about broad social things, but they’re talking in the language of school and school curriculum,” said one historian of education. “That’s the vocabulary, but the actual grammar is anxiety about shifting social power relations.”

Education Issues, Explained

The literature on critical race theory is vast. Here are some starting points to learn more about it, culturally relevant teaching, and the conservative backlash to CRT.

Brittany Aronson & Judson Laughter. “The Theory and Practice of Culturally Relevant Education: A Synthesis of Research Across Content Areas.” Review of Educational Research March 2016, Vol. 86 No. 1. (2016); Kimberlé Crenshaw, ed. Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement. The New Press. (1996); Gloria Ladson-Billings, “Toward a Theory of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy,” American Educational Research Journal Vol. 32 No. 3. (1995); Gloria Ladson-Billings, “Just what is critical race theory and what’s it doing in a nice field like education?” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education Vol 11. No. 1. (1998); Jonathan Butcher and Mike Gonzalez. “Critical Race Theory, the New Intolerance, and Its Grip on America.” Heritage Foundation. (2020); Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic. Critical Race Theory: An Introduction. 3rd ed. New York, NY: New York University Press. (2017); Shelly Brown-Jeffy & Jewell E. Cooper, “Toward a Conceptual Framework of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy: An Overview of the Conceptual and Theoretical Literature.” Teacher Education Quarterly, Winter 2011.

A version of this article appeared in the June 02, 2021 edition of Education Week as What Is Critical Race Theory, and Why Is It Under Attack?

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Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement

What is Critical Race Theory and why is it under fire from the political right? This foundational essay collection, which defines key terms and includes case studies, is the essential work to understand the intellectual movement

Why did the president of the United States, in the midst of a pandemic and an economic crisis, take it upon himself to attack Critical Race Theory? Perhaps Donald Trump appreciated the power of this groundbreaking intellectual movement to change the world.

In recent years, Critical Race Theory has vaulted out of the academy and into courtrooms, newsrooms, and onto the streets. And no wonder: as intersectionality theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw recently told Time magazine, "It's an approach to grappling with a history of white supremacy that rejects the belief that what's in the past is in the past, and that the laws and systems that grow from that past are detached from it." The panicked denunciations from the right notwithstanding, CRT has changed the way millions of people interpret our troubled world.

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Christina Wyman

What Is Critical Race Theory? Start Here

When my father called recently and asked me to explain critical race theory (CRT) to him, I initially balked. He voted for Donald Trump in both 2016 and 2020, a choice that caused a rift between us. I’ve since tried hard to reconcile Dad’s politics with what I know of him as a person.

He is a loving man and always supported my intellectual pursuits. He also knew that I’d studied race and racism in graduate school and that the issues were foundational to my dissertation and teaching at the college level. Finally, he knows that I make no apologies about my anti-racist and social justice-oriented identity, something he seems to simultaneously admire and abhor. Still, I couldn’t tell whether Dad was making an honest effort to learn about CRT, a field of study that I knew he’d never heard of until it became politicized. Was Dad truly on a path to learn, or was he just antagonizing me?

“Is this question in good faith?” I asked him. He’d said yes and explained that he wanted to help teach the concepts to a friend of his—someone I didn’t know and who, according to Dad, held extreme and unyielding views about race.

Dad next asked me to educate his friend about CRT, an invitation I politely declined in the name of self-preservation. “I’m going to have to pass on this opportunity,” I’d told him, “but your friend is free to locate the many resources that exist on the topic.” I forwarded him an article I’d written on CRT and told him to start there if he was serious about understanding my perspective.

Dad respected my decision to bow out of the discussion, but I still felt unsettled. As a white person, I firmly believe it is my responsibility to engage other white people in these discussions— especially when their politics diverge from mine. After this exchange, I began a quest for resources in the spirit of working through a dilemma that I believe a lot of allies, activists, and teachers can relate to: wanting to protect ourselves from engaging in those circular and fruitless discussions with bad-faith questions about why CRT and anti-racist goals matter, but also feeling a responsibility to guide people toward useful tools in the event that they are genuinely interested in learning about causes that have been weaponized and distorted in political discourse.

In considering my own education, I found it useful to start from the ground up.

Based on recent reports, those most opposed to critical race theory seem to know the least about it . But as writer and activist Scott Woods points out, “Students in K-12 classes aren’t being taught critical race theory … They aren’t being given any textbooks with such theories. They aren’t hiring guest speakers to come in and talk about how to use critical race theory in their science fair projects, even during Black History Month.” (You can follow him here .)

According to Georgetown Law professor Janel George , in writing for the American Bar Association , “CRT is not a diversity and inclusion ‘training’ but a practice of interrogating the role of race and racism in society that emerged in the legal academy and spread to other fields of scholarship.” In other words, CRT is more accurately a way of thinking and being than a series of lessons. To borrow from legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw , “ CRT is not a noun, but a verb .”

Brendan I. Koerner

Jared Keller

Lauren Goode

Reece Rogers

So what is critical race theory and why is it under attack? This Education Week explainer offers a definitional perspective on CRT and would be one place to start. In addition to helpful definitions, the piece covers the history of the debate and is an accessible primer for laypeople and experts alike.

When I want to learn more about something—anything—I never begin with politicians or tabloid news (unless I’m morbidly curious about how they’re spinning an issue to their own advantage). I begin with carefully vetted nonprofits, activists, teachers, and educational institutions that have demonstrated a clear investment in studying, understanding, and teaching about the issues I’m interested in—in this case, critical race theory and anti-racism.

Learn & Unlearn: Anti-racism resource guide is a resource published by the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. This outlet offers multimedia lessons, complete with video lectures by scholars like Keith Stanley Brooks and Gloria Ladson-Billings , and concludes with such thought-provoking reflection questions as “Racism and racial hierarchy have continued unchallenged. Why haven’t things changed?”

Finally, with Critical Race Theory: an introduction , Purdue Online Writing Lab offers an accessible discussion of the history of CRT and includes an extensive reference list for those interested in books on the topic.

After arriving at a definition, it always helps to learn more about how to productively discuss issues that have been scapegoated and spun for political gain. In my own work as an educator, I’ve often turned to Racial Equity Tools to enhance my thinking and teaching. This nonprofit offers a curriculum of fundamental and theoretical discussions about race, categorized under Anti-racism, Critical Race Theory, Racial Capitalism, Racial Identity Development, and Targeted Universalism.

Back when I taught a course on race, racism, and racial identity, one of my students discovered the University of Virginia’s  Racial Dot Map , a tool that allows users to visually assess the racial demographics of a given location, including  the racial and ethnic disparities of state prisons . This interactive resource was created by the University of Virginia’s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service and added a great deal to our understanding of the racialization of geography.

For those who prefer film, The Power of An Illusion is a three-part PBS documentary that challenges people's understanding of race. According to John Powell, a professor of law at UC Berkeley, “While race, as a biological concept, is an illusion, racism is a sociological fact … the film helps people see that it’s not just an idea; it’s inscribed in our schools, in our churches, in our neighborhoods and housing. And it’s inscribed in the way we see each other" (as quoted in an interview with PBS ).

Finally, Code Switch is a wildly popular podcast published by NPR that deals candidly with race and racism. Code Switch is my personal favorite source for smart and current takes about how to talk about race, but also for keeping up with ever-evolving language around race, as with senior producer and cohost Shereen Marisol Meraji ’s discussion of outdated labels, words, and phrases that continue to be assigned to people who do not identify as white .

As I’ve taught my students, learning about critical race theory, race, racism, and how we are all situated in this nation’s racist past is not quite enough. Action is often called for, and I encourage students to donate and contribute to causes that align with themselves and their goals.

The Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History & Culture is a tremendous resource for those who want to learn more about race and current conversations, but also for anyone ready to take action. According to the museum's website, it is “the only national museum devoted exclusively to the documentation of African American life, history, and culture.” Curators have compiled a comprehensive multimodal curriculum titled Talking About Race that is conveniently divided into discussions about individual, interpersonal, and institutional forms of racism and how to work toward anti-racist change at all levels of society. This resource encourages a “questioning frame of mind” and includes such provocative questions as “Why do you want to be anti-racist? Considering the breadth and depth of racism, committing to being anti-racist may feel overwhelming, yet small choices made daily can add up to big changes. Reflect on choices you make in your daily life (i.e., who you build relationships with, what media you follow, where you shop). How do these choices reflect being antiracist?” This resource features the work of heavyweights such as Ibram X. Kendi , author of the groundbreaking and wildly popular book How to Be an Antiracist , and activist and speaker Verna Myers .

Finally, there are plenty of organizations that would welcome contributions and activist support. From the aforementioned resources, there's the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture donations page and the Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research (founded by Kendi). And I've pointed my students toward myriad other ways to contribute to social change in the name of racial justice. 

The New Jim Crow : Mass Incarceration In the Age of Colorblindness , for example, is a documentary based on the groundbreaking work of Michelle Alexander and both the film and written work are essential for anyone interested in learning about what have become central tenets of critical race theory.

According to the work's website, royalties from the 10th anniversary edition of  The New Jim Crow  will be donated to the MOSAIC Fund for Justice. The MOSAIC fund seeks to end mass incarceration, an issue that disproportionately affects Black populations.

In How to Be an Antiracist , Kendi writes that “to be antiracist is a radical choice in the face of history, requiring a radical reorientation of our consciousness.” This sentiment, to my mind, is the “verb” of CRT and the action I hope these resources inspire. 

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What Is Critical Race Theory?

And how to learn more about the issue dividing school districts across the country.

By Lauren Jackson

We had a shorter holiday week on The Daily, but we covered a lot of ground, traveling from Afghanistan to Haiti . Along the way, many of you wrote in to share your thoughts and feelings about our episode on critical race theory .

It’s a complicated subject with a lot of history and nuance to unpack, and some of you were interested in learning more. So we reached out to Trip Gabriel , a national correspondent and our guest, to answer some of your questions.

What is critical race theory (C.R.T.)?

Critical race theory is a concept , once the domain of graduate schools, that some observers say is now influencing American K-12 curriculums. The theory argues that historical patterns of racism are ingrained in law and other modern institutions, and that the legacies of slavery, segregation and Jim Crow still create an uneven playing field for Black people and other people of color. The idea is that racism is not a matter of individual bigotry but is systemic in America. Recently critics have made C.R.T. a catchall target for opposition to equity efforts, affirmative action and “wokeness” in general.

Conservatives object that critical race theory is a gauntlet thrown down to accuse all white Americans of being racist, of dividing people by race into oppressors and oppressed. Democrats are conflicted. Some worry that arguing that America is racist to the root — a view that is conventional wisdom among elements of the party’s progressive wing — contradicts the opinion of most Americans and is handing Republicans a political cudgel for the 2022 midterm elections.

Do you have any examples of how C.R.T. is being taught in schools?

You’d have to look long and hard to find any K-12 classroom where the term “critical race theory” comes up. Instead, what critics tend to target is the influence of concepts derived from C.R.T. that infuse the equity training field (some examples include acknowledging and subverting white privilege, or labeling people as oppressors or oppressed based on identity). This kind of training has been offered by various school districts to teachers in the name of combating implicit bias.

While the anti-C.R.T. activist Christoper F. Rufo lists 11 examples of “critical race theory in education,” most are examples of schools offering teachers diversity training. He also cites a lesson planned for third graders in Cupertino, Calif., in which students were asked to draw an “identity map” listing their race, class and gender, and the teacher was asked to identify some characteristics as part of the “dominant culture.” But according to The Washington Post , the lesson was canceled after one use when parents complained.

Meanwhile, some schools have recommended to young readers the book “Not My Idea: A Book About Whiteness,’’ which, in discussing the police shooting of a person of color, makes the point that white supremacy is embedded in American society.

The show covered criticisms of C.R.T. from the right. Is there criticism of the theory from the left?

Some classical liberals have argued that critical race theory rejects concepts like meritocracy, individualism and unbridled free speech, which it deems products of a white dominant culture. Taking a different angle, John McWhorter, an author who teaches at Columbia University, argues that C.R.T. as interpreted by the anti-racism training field “diminishes Black people in the name of dignifying us.”

What should listeners read if they want to learn more about C.R.T.?

A seminal book by some of the founding scholars of the academic movement is “Words That Wound’’ (1993). The introductory chapters of “Critical Race Theory: An Introduction” (2001) lay out the movement’s genesis and principal views.

In recent months, there have been good explainers in the press about how America’s reckoning over systemic racism in policing brought new prominence to critical race theory — and provoked a backlash. I found this piece by Fabiola Cineas in Vox helpful, along with this column by Michelle Goldberg of The Times. A deep dive into the related topic of anti-bias training — inspired partly by C.R.T. — can be found in a Times Magazine profile of Robin DiAngelo, author of “White Fragility,” by Daniel Bergner. Adam Harris in The Atlantic took a look at bills in state legislatures seeking to ban “divisive concepts” in education and elsewhere. And Wikipedia (insert usual caveats) has a quite comprehensive look.

Talk to Trip on Twitter: @tripgabriel .

Holding Onto Hope

Pam Belluck , a health and science writer, reflects on her recent reporting on Aduhelm, a controversial new Alzheimer’s drug, through one family’s experience with it:

By the time I had interviewed Debby Rosenkrantz and Susan Woskie for The Daily, I had been covering Alzheimer’s and dementia for more than a decade.

I’ve traveled to Colombia to report about the world’s largest family with genetic early-onset Alzheimer’s; went to South Korea to write about children being trained to assist people with dementia; and spent time in a California men’s prison to observe how convicted murderers were helping fellow prisoners with dementia with activities like showering, shaving and eating. I’ve written about how dementia might affect the ability to give sexual consent . And this past year I’ve written about Covid and dementia .

I’ve become well aware of the complexities and cruelties of this condition, and I’ve followed the roller-coaster ride of the search for answers — from discoveries of a gene mutation that might protect against Alzheimer’s to out-of-the-box therapeutic approaches like using flickering light and sound.

As I’ve been talking with patients and family members for my recent reporting on the new drug, Aduhelm, what has struck me most is how thoughtful and insightful they’ve been about the difficult situation they find themselves in. Several people I’ve interviewed are clear-eyed and candid about their poignant reality, including Debby and her wife, Susan.

The couple knows that so far Debby, who participated in the clinical trial of Aduhelm and began receiving monthly infusions of it again about 10 months ago, has experienced no discernible benefit from the drug. “It just feels like there’s a blank in places where there shouldn’t be a blank in my brain,” Debby told me.

They understand the drug can cause brain swelling or brain bleeding, and Debby undergoes regular brain scans to check for such effects. And Susan, a retired professor of public health, told me before the F.D.A. decision that the data about the drug was “squishy stuff” and that if the F.D.A. decided not to approve it, “that wouldn’t surprise me, and it might make sense.”

And yet they have decided to continue giving the drug a try. They are doing so because they realize there is nothing else out there for them yet. Maybe doing something, whether it’s taking an unproven drug or exercising or changing one’s diet, can give some people a sense of hope that might be therapeutic in itself. In a devastating, unpredictable disease that little by little steals away part of one’s mind, hope may actually be the best medicine available right now.

Talk to Pam on Twitter: @PamBelluck .

On The Daily this week

Tuesday: What we know about the Delta variant.

Wednesday: Inside the lived reality of a contentious Alzheimer’s treatment .

Thursday: The American withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Friday: A presidential assassination in Haiti.

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The State of Critical Race Theory in Education

• Posted February 23, 2022
• By Jill Anderson
• Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
• Moral, Civic, and Ethical Education

When Gloria Ladson-Billings set out in the 1990s to adapt critical race theory from law to education, she couldn’t have predicted that it would become the focus of heated school debates today.

Over the past couple years, the scrutiny of critical race theory — a theory she pioneered to help explain racial inequities in education — has become heavily politicized in school communities and by legislators. Along the way, it has also been grossly misunderstood and used as a lump term about many things that are not actually critical race theory, Ladson-Billings says. 

“It's like if I hate it, it must be critical race theory,” Ladson-Billings says. “You know, that could be anything from any discussions about diversity or equity. And now it's spread into LGBTQA things. Talk about gender, then that's critical race theory. Social-emotional learning has now gotten lumped into it. And so it is fascinating to me how the term has been literally sucked of all of its meaning and has now become 'anything I don't like.'”

In this week’s Harvard EdCast, Ladson-Billings discusses how she pioneered critical race theory, the current politicization and tension around teaching about race in the classroom, and offers a path forward for educators eager to engage in work that deals with the truth about America’s history. 

TRANSCRIPT:

Jill Anderson:   I'm Jill Anderson. This is the Harvard EdCast.

Gloria Ladson-Billings never imagined a day when the words critical race theory would make the daily news, be argued over at school board meetings, or targeted by legislators. She pioneered an adaptation of critical race theory from law to education back in the 1990s. She's an educational researcher focused on theory and pedagogy who at the time was looking for a better way to explain racial disparities in education.

Today the theory is widely misunderstood and being used as an umbrella term for anything tied to race and education. I wondered what Gloria sees as a path forward from here. First, I wanted to know what she was thinking in this moment of increased tension and politicization around critical race theory and education.

Well, if I go back and look at the strategy that's been employed to attack critical race theory, it actually is pretty brilliant from a strategic point of view. The first time that I think that general public really hears this is in September of '20 when then president and candidate Donald Trump, who incidentally is behind in the polls, says that we're not going to have it because it's going to destroy democracy. It's going to tear the country apart. I'm not going to fund any training that even mentions critical race theory.

And what's interesting, he says, "And anti-racism." Now he's now paired two things together that were not really paired together in the literature and in practice. But if you dig a little deeper, you will find on the Twitter feed of Christopher Rufo, who is from the Manhattan Institute, two really I think powerful tweets. One in which he says, "We're going to render this brand toxic." Essentially what we're going to do is make you think, whenever you hear anything negative, you will think critical race theory. And it will destroy all of the, quote, cultural insanities. I think that's his term that Americans despise. There's a lot to be unpacked there, which Americans? Who is he talking about? What are these cultural insanities? And then there's another tweet in which he says, "We have effectively frozen the brand." So anytime you think of anything crazy, you think critical race theory. So he's done this very effective job of rendering the term, in some ways without meaning. It's like if I hate it, it must be critical race theory.

You know, that could be anything from any discussions about diversity or equity. And now it's spread into LGBTQA things. Talk about gender, then that's critical race theory. Social emotional learning has now got lumped into it. And so it is fascinating to me how the term has been literally sucked of all of its meaning and has now become anything I don't like.

Jill Anderson:  Can you break it down? What is critical race theory? What isn't it?

Gloria Ladson-Billings: Let me be pretty elemental here. Critical race theory is a theoretical tool that began in legal studies, in law schools, in an attempt to explain racial inequity. It serves the same function in education. How do you explain the inequity of achievement, the racial inequity of achievement in our schools?

Now let's be clear. The nation has always had an explanation for inequity. Since 1619, it's always had a explanation. And indeed from 1619 to the mid 20th century, that explanation was biogenetic. Those people are just not smart enough. Those people are just not worthy enough. Those people are not moral enough.

In fact across the country, we had on college and university campuses, programs and departments in eugenics. If you went to the World's Fair or the World Expositions back in the turn of the 20th century, you could see exhibits with, quote, groups of people from the best group who was always white and typically blonde and blue eyed, to the worst group, which is typically a group of Africans, generally pygmies. So the idea is you can rank people. So we've always had an explanation for why we thought inequity exists.

Somewhere around the mid 20th century, 1950s, you'll get a switch that says, well, no, it's really not genetic it's that some groups haven't had an equal opportunity. That was a powerful explanation. So one of the things that you begin to see around mid 1950s is legislation and court decisions, Brown versus Board of Education. You start to see the Voters Rights Act. You see the Civil Rights Act. You see affirmative action going into the 1960s. And yeah, I think that's a pretty good, powerful explanatory model.

Except they all get rolled back. 1954, Brown v. Board of Education . How many of our kids are still in segregated schools in 2022? So that didn't hold. Affirmative action. The court's about to hear that, right? Because of actually the case that's coming out of Harvard. Voters rights. How many of our states have rolled back voters rights? You can't give a person a bottle of water who was waiting in line in Georgia. We're shrinking the window for when people can vote.

So all of the things that were a part of the equality of opportunity explanation have rolled away. Critical race theory's explanation for racial inequality is that it is baked into the way we have organized the society. It is not aberrant. It's not one of those things that we all clutch our pearls and say, "Oh my God, I can't believe that happened." It happens on a regular basis all the time. And so that's really one of the tenets that people are uncomfortable hearing. That it's not abnormal behavior in our society for people to react in racist ways.

Jill Anderson: My understanding is that critical race theory is not something that is taught in schools. This is an older, like graduate school level, understanding and learning in education, not something for K–12 kids, not something my kid's going to learn in elementary school.

Gloria Ladson-Billings: You're exactly right. It is not. First of all, kids in K12 don't need theory. They need some very practical hands-on experiences. So no, it's not taught in K12 schools. I never even taught it as a professor at the University of Wisconsin. I didn't even teach it to my undergraduates. They had no use for it. My undergraduates were going to be teachers. So what would they do with it? I only taught it in graduate courses. And I have students who will tell you, "I talked with Professor Ladson-billings about using critical race theory for my research," and she looked at what I was doing and said, "It doesn't apply. Don't use it."

So I haven't been this sort of proselytizer. I've said to students, if what you're looking at needs an explanation for the inequality, you have a lot of theories that you can choose from. You can choose from feminist theory. That often looks at inequality across gender. You could look at Marx's theory. That looks at inequality across class. There are lots of theories to explain inequality. Critical race theory is trying to explain it across race and its intersections.

Jill Anderson:  We're seeing this lump definition falling under critical race theory, where it could be anything. It could be anti-racism, diversity and equity, multicultural education, anti-racism, cultural [inaudible 00:09:15]. All of it's being lumped together. It's not all the same thing.

Gloria Ladson-Billings: Well, and in some ways it's proving the point of the critical race theorists, right? That it's kind normal. It's going to keep coming up because that's the way you see the world. I mean, here's an interesting lumping together that I think people have just bought whole cloth. That somehow Nikole Hannah-Jones' 1619 is critical race theory. No, it's not.

No. It. Is. Not. It is a journalist's attempt to pull together strands of a date that we tend to gloss over and say, here are all the things were happening and how the things that happened at this time influenced who we became. It's really interesting that people have jumped on that. And there is another book that came out, and it also came out of a newspaper special from the Hartford Courant years ago called Complicity. That book is set in New England and it talks about how the North essentially kept slavery going.

And when it was published by the Hartford Courant, Connecticut, and particularly Hartford said, we want a copy of this in every one of our middle and high schools to look out at what our role has been. Because the way we typically tell you our history is to say, the noble and good North and then the backward and racist South. Well, no, the entire country was engaged in the slave trade. And it benefited folks across the nation.

That particular special issue, which got turned into a book hasn't raised an eyebrow. But here comes Nikole Hannah-Jones. And initially, of course, she won a Pulitzer for it and people were celebrating her. But it's gotten lumped into this discussion that essentially says you cannot have a conversation about race.

What I find the most egregious about this situation is we are taking books out of classrooms, which is very anti-democratic. It is not, quote, the American way. And so you're saying that kids can't read the story of Ruby Bridges. It's okay for Ruby Bridges at six years old to have to have been escorted by federal marshals and have racial epithets spewed at her. It's just not okay for a six year old today to know that happened to her. I mean, one of the rationales for not talking about race, I don't even say critical race theory, but not talking about race in the classroom is we don't want white children to feel bad.

My response is, well great, but what were you guys in the 1950s and sixties when I was in school. Because I had to sit there in a mostly white classroom in Philadelphia and read Huckleberry Finn , with Mark Twain with a very liberal use of the n-word. And most of my classmates just snickering. I'd take it. I'd read it. It didn't make me feel good. I had to read Robinson Crusoe . I had to read Margaret Mitchell's Gone With The Wind . I had to read Heart Of Darkness .

All of these books which we have canonized, are books of their time. And they often make us feel a particular kind way about who we are in this society. But all of a sudden one group is protected. We can't let white children feel bad about what they read.

Jill Anderson: I was reading your most recent book, Critical Race Theory in Education, a Scholars Journey , and I was struck by when you started to do this work and this research, and adapt it from law back in the early 1990s. You talked about presenting this for the first time, or one of the first times. And there was obviously a group excited by it, a group annoyed by it. I look at what's happening now and I see parents and educators. Some are excited by a movement to teach children more openly and honestly about race. And then there's going to be those who are annoyed by it. You've been navigating these two sides your whole life, your whole career. So what do you tell educators who are eager, and open, and want to do this work, but they're afraid of the opposition?

Gloria Ladson-Billings:  Well, I think there's a difference between essentially forcing one's ideas and agenda on students, and having kids develop the criticality that they will need to participate in democracy. And whenever we have pitched battles, we've been talking about race, but we've had the same kind of conversation around the environment, right? That you cannot be in coal country telling people that coal is bad, because people are making their living off of that coal. So we've been down this road before.

What I suggest to teachers is, number one, they have to have good relationships with the parents and community that they are serving, and they need to be transparent. I've taught US History for eighth graders and 11th graders before going into academe, and we've had to deal with hard questions. But there's a degree to which the community has always trusted that I had their students' best interests at heart, that I want them to be successful, that I want them to be able to make good decisions as citizens.

That's the bigger mission, I think, of education. That we are not just preparing people to go into the workplace. We are preparing people to go into voting booths, and to participate in healthy debate. The problem I'm having with critical race theory is I'm having a debate with people who don't know what we're debating. You know, I told one interview, I said, "It's like debating a toddler over bedtime. That's not a good debate." You can't win that debate. The toddler doesn't understand the concept. It's just that I don't want to do it.

I will say following the news coverage that I don't believe that all of these people out there are parents. I believe that there is a large number of operatives whose job it is to gin up sentiment against any forward movement and progress around racial equality, and equity, and diversity.

You know, to me, what should be incensing people was what they saw in Charlottesville, with those people, with those Tiki torches. What should be incensing people is what they saw January 6th. People lost their lives in both of those incidents. Nobody's lost their lives in a critical race theory discussion. You know?

I'm someone who believes that debate is healthy. And in fact debate is the only thing that you can have in a true democracy. The minute you start shutting off debate, the minute you say that's not even discussable, then you're moving towards totalitarianism. You know? That's what happened in the former Soviet Union and probably now in Russia. That's what has happened in regimes that say, no other idea is permitted, is discussable. And that's not a road that I think we should be walking here.

Jill Anderson: I feel like we're getting lost in the terminology, which we've talked about. And for school leaders, I wonder if the conversation needs to start with local districts in their communities debunking, or demystifying, or telling the truth about what critical race theory is, that kids aren't learning it in the schools. That that's not what it's about. Does it not even matter at this point because people are always going to be resistant to the things that you just even mentioned?

Gloria Ladson-Billings:  I'm a bit of a sports junkie, so I'll use a sports metaphor here. I'm just someone who would rather play offense than defense. I think if you get into this debate, you are on the defensive from the start. For me, I want to be on the offense. I want to say, as a school district, here are our core values. Here's what we stand for. Many, many years ago when I began my academic career, I started it at Santa Clara University, which is a private Catholic Jesuit university. And students would sometimes bristle at the discussions we would have about race and ethnicity, and diversity and equality.

And I'd always pull out the university's mission statement. And I'd say, "You see these words right here around social justice? That's where I am with this work. I don't know what they're doing at the business school on social justice, but I can tell you that the university has essentially made a commitment it to this particular issue. Now we can debate whether or not you agree with me, but I haven't pulled this out of thin air."

So if I'm a school superintendent, I want to say, "Here are core values that we have." I'm reminded of many years ago. I was supervising a student teacher. It was a second grade. And she had a little boy in a classroom and they were doing something for Martin Luther King. It might have been just coloring in a picture of him with some iconic statement. And this one little boy put a big X on it. And she said, "Why did you do that?" And his response was, "We don't believe in Martin Luther King in my house." So she said, "Wow, okay, well, why not?" And he really couldn't articulate. She says, "Well, tell me, who's your friend in this classroom?" And one of the first names out of his mouth was a little Black boy.

And she said, "Do you know that he's a lot like Martin Luther King? You know, he's a little boy. He's Black." She was worried about where this was headed and didn't know what to do as a student teacher, because she's not officially licensed to teach at this point. And I shared with her our strategy. I said, "Why don't you talk with your cooperating teacher about what happens and see what she says. If she doesn't seem to want to do anything, casually mention, don't go marching to the principal's office. But when you have a chance to interact with the principal, you might say something I had the strangest encounter the other day and then share it." Well, she did that.

The principal called the parents in and said, "Your child is not in trouble, but here's what you need to know about who we are and what we stand for."

Jill Anderson:  Wow.

Gloria Ladson-Billings:  You know? And so again, it wasn't like let's have a big school board meeting. Let's string up somebody for saying something. It wasn't tearing this child down. But it was reiterating, here are our core values. I think schools can stand on this. They can say, "This is what we stand for. This is who we are." They don't ever have to mention the word critical race theory.

The retrenchment we are seeing in some states, I think it was a textbook that they were going to use in Texas that essentially described enslaved people as workers. That's just wrong. That's absolutely wrong. And I can tell you that if we don't teach our children the truth, what happens when they show up in classes at the college level and they are exposed to the truth, they are incensed. They are angry and they cannot understand, why are we telling these lies?

We don't have to make up lies about the American story. It is a story of both triumph and defeat. It is a story of both valor and, some cases, shame. Slavery actually happened. We trafficked with human beings, and there's a consequence to that. But it doesn't mean we didn't get past it. It doesn't mean we didn't fight a war over it, and decide that's not who we want to be.

Jill Anderson:  What's the path forward? What can we do to make sure that students are supported and learning about their own history so that they are prepared to go out into a diverse global society?

Gloria Ladson-Billings:  I'm perhaps an unrepentant optimist, because I think that these young people are not fooled by this. You know, when they started, quote, passing bans and saying, "We can't have this and we won't have this," I said, "Nobody who's doing this understands anything about child and adolescent development." Because how do you get kids to do something? You tell them they can't do.

So I have had more outreach from young people asking me, tell me about this. What is this? These young people are burning up Google looking for what is this they're trying to keep from us? So I have a lot of faith in our youth that they are not going to allow us to censor that. Everything you tell them, they can't read, those are the books they go look for. You know, I have not seen a spate in reading like this in a very long time.

So I think it's interesting that people don't even understand something as basic as child development and adolescent development. But I do think that the engagement of young people, which we literally saw in the midst of the pandemic and the post George Floyd, the incredible access to information that young people have will save us. You know, it's almost like people feel like this is their last bastion and they're not going to let people take whatever privilege they see themselves having away from them. It's not sustainable. Young people will not stand for it.

Jill Anderson:  Well, I love that. And it's such a great note to end on because it feels good to think that there is a path forward, because right now things are looking very scary. Thank you so much.

Gloria Ladson-Billings:  Well, you're quite welcome. And I will tell you, again sports metaphor, I'm an, again, unrepentant 76ers fan. I realize you're in Massachusetts with those Celtics. But trust me, the 76ers. Okay? One of my favorite former 76ers is Allen Iverson and he has a wonderful line, I believe when he was inducted into the Hall of Fame. He said, "My haters have made me great."

Well, I will tell you that I had conceived of that book on critical race theory well before Donald Trump made his statement in September of 2020. And I thought, "Okay, here's another book which will sell a modest number of copies to academics." The book is flying off the shelves. Y'all keep talking about it. You're just making me great.

Jill Anderson:  Maybe it will start the revolution that we need.

Gloria Ladson-Billings: Well, thank you so much.

Jill Anderson:  Thank you. Gloria Ladson-billings is a professor emerita at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. She is the author of many books, including the recent Critical Race Theory in Education, a Scholar's Journey . I'm Jill Anderson. This is the Harvard EdCast produced by the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Thanks for listening.

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Critical Philosophy of Race

The field that has come to be known as the Critical Philosophy of Race is an amalgamation of philosophical work on race that largely emerged in the late 20th century, though it draws from earlier work. It departs from previous approaches to the question of race that dominated the modern period up until the era of civil rights. Rather than focusing on the legitimacy of the concept of race as a way to characterize human differences, Critical Philosophy of Race approaches the concept with a historical consciousness about its function in legitimating domination and colonialism, engendering a critical approach to race and hence the name of the sub-field. Critical Philosophy of Race has also departed from broadly liberal approaches that have narrowed racism to individual and intentional forms.

Thus, the Critical Philosophy of Race offers a critical analysis of the concept as well as of certain philosophical problematics regarding race. In this approach, it takes inspiration from Critical Legal Studies and the interdisciplinary scholarship in Critical Race Theory, both of which explore the ways in which social ideologies operate covertly in the mainstream formulations of apparently neutral concepts, such as merit or freedom. While borrowing from these approaches, the Critical Philosophy of Race has a distinctive philosophical methodology primarily drawing from critical theory, Marxism, pragmatism, phenomenology, post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, and hermeneutics, even while subjecting these traditions to critique for their omissions in regard to specifically racial forms of domination and the resultant inadequacy of their conceptual frameworks (Outlaw 1996; Allen 2016; Weheliye 2014; Alcoff 2006).

The main problems addressed by the Critical Philosophy of Race concern the social and historical construction of races, the structural and systemic nature of racist cultures, the relevance of race to formations of selfhood, the mutual constitution of race and class as well as other categories of identity, and the question of how to assess the existing canon of modern philosophy.

1.1 Critical Legal Studies

1.2 critical race theory, 1.3 philosophical influences on cpr, 2.1 multiple racisms, 2.2 revisions of phenomenology, 3.1 race and the self, 3.2 the social construction of race, 3.3 the historical construction of race, 3.4 the cultural construction of race, 3.5 racial identities and whiteness, 3.6 future directions, 4.1 race and class, 4.2 racist cultures, 4.3 racist social sciences, 4.4 racist constructions of women of color, 5.1. doing philosophy differently, 5.2 the revelations of contextualization, 5.3 questioning ‘modernity’ itself, works cited, other important works, other internet resources, related entries, 1. introduction.

Modern European philosophers played a key role in the development of the concept of race as a way to characterize, and rank, differences among human groups (Bernasconi 2018; Valls 2005; Ward and Lott 2002; Bernasconi and Lott 2000). Philosophers in the modern era (roughly from 1600 to 1900) often disagreed on the nature of race, the source of racial differences, and the correlations between race and non-physical characteristics. Kant, Rousseau and Mill, for example, disagreed over the critical issue of whether racial differences were mutable (Kant 2012; Elden and Mendieta 2011; Boxill 2005). Defining race in terms of underlying biological features emerged well after the language of race had become familiar. The biology of race continues to elicit controversy over whether it has explanatory value (Kitcher 2007; Spencer 2015, ; Glasgow et al. 2019).

The Critical Philosophy of Race (CPR) developed in large part as a critique of modern ideas and approaches to both race and proffered solutions to racism. In this, CPR was influenced by the late 20th century developments of Critical Legal Studies (CLS) and Critical Race Theory (CRT) (Unger 2015; Delgado 1995; Delgado and Stefancic 1997; Essed and Goldberg 2002). CLS and CRT were motivated to go beyond questions of formal equality and de jure discrimination to consider the subtle and broad reach of racist ideas and practices throughout social life and institutions, arguing, for example, that norms of neutrality in legal interpretation or reasoning often concealed structural racism.

While borrowing from CLS and CRT, CPR’s distinctive philosophical interests concern the role racialization plays in embodiment, subjectivity, identity formation as well as formations of power and the establishment of meaning. In order to reach beyond Eurocentric philosophical resources CPR has drawn from anti-colonial writings as well as critical work in sociology, history, psychology and other fields that have addressed the topic of race and racism more thoroughly than philosophy (e.g. Mallon and Kelly 2012; Steele 2011; Feagin 2013; Horne 2020).

The influential field of Critical Legal Studies, or CLS, that emerged in the 1970s played an important role in developing new approaches to the study of how the law affects and is affected by social domination. Influenced by some strands in continental philosophy, CLS scholars showed how legal arguments and concepts could covertly support existing power relations (Douzinas 2000). Early CLS scholars such as Duncan Kennedy (2008) and Roberto Magabeira Unger (2015) argued that the pattern of social effects produced by legal decisions indicates that the law is not an impartial arbiter but largely an arm of existing hierarchies.

To see this required new methods of legal analysis that could discern patterns of implicit assumptions operating across the major paradigms of legal reasoning, whether intentionalist, textualist, or originalist. One such assumption is the centrality and legitimacy of stare decisis or judicial precedent. CLS argued for setting precedent aside in order to judge decisions in relation to their often disparate impact on different groups. They argued that these differential impacts were often the result of unexamined assumptions structuring legal argumentation, such as the assumption that responsibility must track conscious intent, or that male power over women is natural, or that equality claims must be based on sameness.

CLS scholars argued that conventions of legal analysis promulgated mystifying ideologies that obscured the law’s social embeddedness and political function. They argued that we need to take a new look at the concepts of liberalism such as rights, neutrality, and freedom to see whether these concepts were as universally applicable as some claimed. Laws and policies based on liberal ideas, such as meritocracy, exacerbated class and racial inequality and injustice. Liberal approaches led to these outcomes because they downplayed differences of history and embodiment and assumed the fungibility of roles such as citizen or rights-holder (Mills 2017).

The emergence of classical liberalism coincided with the development of brutal forms of capitalism, a decrease in women’s property rights, and race-based slavery, colonization, and genocide. Was liberalism simply negligent, or did its central concepts play a role in sanctioning social oppression? Progressives like John Stuart Mill tied the right of self-determination to cultural advance, thus justifying colonial administrations. John Locke’s labor theory of value helped to legitimate the expropriation of indigenous lands on the grounds that many groups relied more on hunting than labor-intensive agriculture. Reading the central arguments of liberalism in light of their diverse impact on different groups raised new questions about liberalism’s relationship to domination.

The work of legal theorist Derrick Bell was key in bringing a CLS approach to the topic of race. Bell developed a series of interpretive arguments focused on the reforms won by civil rights cases to show that the successes were generally contained to those that did not threaten white entitlement (Bell 1987). Corporate elites used the mandate for diversity, for example, as a means to create a diverse managerial class more effective at controlling the broad multi-racial low-paid workforce. When establishing racism required evidence of intentional attitudes or conscious conspiracies, it was all but impossible to redress cross generational wealth disparities based on race or the structural forms of anti-black racism so deeply embedded in such institutions as education, the justice system, health care, housing, and the local, state and national organizations intended to serve democratic representation. Thus, civil rights reforms left racism “firmly entrenched,” as Bell put it (1987, 4). Forced to work with liberal concepts, progressive civil rights legislation ended up providing cover for the continuation of racial divides in housing, wage scales, and education while the criminal justice system has become even more lethal to Black and Brown populations.

CPR also draws from Critical Race Theory, or CRT. Like CLS, CRT scholars have been concerned to critique liberalism as the hegemonic ideology of the West, but they pursue a more interdisciplinary approach. CRT scholars argued that solutions that stay within the bounds of liberalism are insufficient because “racialized power” is embedded “in practices and values which have been shorn of any explicit, formal manifestations of racism” (Delgado 1995, xxix). Moreover, liberals often argue that any form of “race consciousness” is racist, with the result that anti-racist reforms, such as affirmative action or housing subsidies, must prove allegiance to the doctrines of abstract individualism and present race-conscious reforms as temporary deviations from the normative ideals of neutrality. Liberal ideals that imagine individuals abstractly outside of their historical and social context thwart efforts to address the effects of historical legacies on current social relations, property distributions, group welfare and security, and the determination of merit.

In an influential article, CRT scholar Richard Delgado shows that the academic scholarship that pursues anti-racist ends is hobbled by an incapacity in effective self-reflection. In 1984 Delgado set out to find the top twenty law review articles on civil rights—those most often cited, those published in the most well-established journals—and found that all were written by white men. There was an “elaborate minuet” of exclusively internal engagement within this grouping over the best means to move forward on racial justice (1995, 47). Their arguments were strong, but how could it be, Delgado wondered, that even an idea such as having a “withered self-concept” would be best represented in the work of white authors citing other white authors rather than the important work by people of color on the phenomenal effect of racist societies? When he asked the author of one article on this topic why theorists such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Kenneth Clark, Frantz Fanon or others were not cited, the author explained that he preferred the source he cited because it was “so elegant.” Criticism directed at the origin of intellectual work continues to be considered a suspect species of ad hominem argument, making concerns about the politics of citation appear illegitimate. Yet can white writing achieve sufficiency in a matter such as self-esteem that involves first person experience? The problem here, from Delgado’s perspective, was that ruling out considerations of social identity in the development of intellectual work diminished the quality of that intellectual work, but in a way that liberal premises could never reveal.

Connected to this has been the ongoing problem of the conceptualization of “merit.” If normal hiring or publications decisions are viewed as generic, without considerations of the social identity of the candidate, then preferential hiring is a deviation from the norm and must meet a high bar to establish even temporary legitimacy. But both CLS and CRT have endeavored to show that merit-based decisions often promulgate implicit racism. Judging which are the top articles by the number of their citations may look to be a neutral standard, but it in fact perpetuates injustice while concealing that injustice.

Critical Philosophy of Race, then, has followed in this critical tradition of considering the varied and subtle forms in which race operates in the development, debate, and assessment of philosophical ideas and arguments. Although many make use of Anglo-American and analytic philosophical approaches, what distinguishes the work in CPR from the general work in philosophy of race is its use of figures and traditions of philosophy in what is sometimes called the “continental” sphere. For example, as will be discussed below, David Theo Goldberg (1993) and Cornel West (1982) have both made productive and creative use of Michel Foucault’s analysis of power and power/knowledge; Lewis Gordon (1995a; 1995b, 2000) and George Yancy (2008) developed new phenomenological approaches to the study of racism by drawing from and building upon the work of Jean-Paul Sartre and Frantz Fanon; and others have found resources in Jacques Derrida, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Simone de Beauvoir, Friedrich Nietzsche, Herbert Marcuse, Jurgen Habermas, Martin Heidegger, and Sigmund Freud. To be sure, each of these European continental philosophers exhibited some of the same patterns of racial ignorance rife in the general canon of Western philosophy and have come under critical debate themselves within CPR. Yet the continental tradition paid productive attention to embodiment, socially variable rather than universal modes of perception, the link between power and concept formation, and thus contributed new ways to think about the covert background structures that affect democracy.

Continental philosophy has also begun to critique its own artificially narrow canon and to include more prominently the writings of Frantz Fanon, Edouard Glissant, W. E. B. Du Bois, Edward Said, Kwame Nkrumah, Gayatri Spivak, and others who were more centrally concerned with, and acutely perceptive about, issues of race.

In a recent innovative move to approach the history of philosophy differently, some CPR scholars are “creolizing” canonical figures to foreground their reception in the colonized world (Gordon and Roberts 2015; Monahan 2017). Rousseau for example had a major influence on Caribbean thought, and reading Rousseau through Fanon, C.L.R. James, and others has produced new interpretive insights as well as new critical dialogues. These “illicit blendings” can bring questions of slavery, colonialism and race into the forefront of discussions that continue to engage the European modern tradition but in new ways (Bernabé et al. 1990). By expanding the sphere of interlocutors in debates over freedom or human dignity, we can also come to engage a wider plurality of philosophical concepts and, in effect, creolize the canon.

To suggest that CPR has a singular methodology would be a mistake: discourse analysis, psychoanalysis, and phenomenology have conducted a famous war against one another, and do not share a methodology. And yet what one finds on this side of the ledger of philosophical discussions of race are a notable body of differences in the topics of analysis; for example, unlike in analytic philosophy of race, there is little attention to the question of whether the category of race is scientifically viable, whether we should eliminate the racial terms, and perhaps regrettably, there is little attention to the debates over concrete policies to redress racism, such as affirmative action or reparations.

In general, Critical Philosophers of Race focus on how race operates in societies, the effects of race at both the structural and phenomenological levels, and the ways in which some forms of resistance to racial systems can be recuperated into sustaining the status quo. Race as a category is subject not so much to biological debate as genealogical analysis, which makes it possible to see how, as Falguni Sheth argues, the central issue is not the fact of the division of human beings into diverse groups, but the identification of racialized peoples as unruly or a priori threats to the body politic (Sheth 2009, 35). Just as Muslims are assumed to be terrorists until proven otherwise, so all non-white groups must prove their right to inclusion, their right to have rights. This suggests a different problematic than a decontextualized approach to the reference of racial concepts.

2. Phenomenologies of Race and Racism

Phenomenology was one of the first philosophical resources that CPR began to use to explore racial effects on experience, subjectivity, and social relations. Although Existentialism and Phenomenology are philosophical approaches founded by European philosophers who tended to ignore race, the questions that these traditions focused on from the beginning, concerning anguish and responsibility, freedom, temporality, and a prefigured social imaginary, have been of profound concern to the development of the Critical Philosophy of Race (Gordon 1995a, 1997; Lee 2014, 2019; Yancy 2008; Ngo 2017).

Edmund Husserl initially developed the phenomenological method as a way to foreground and critique what he called “the natural attitude”: the unexamined background that helps constitute how we experience the world (Husserl 1939 [1973]). The phenomenological method as Husserl imagined it would put this natural attitude in brackets, allowing for the possibility of a greater self-awareness through a transformed mode of interacting with the world. Contemporary phenomenologists are increasingly concerned with the social structures that produce and reinforce natural attitudes as well as with habits of understanding that can render our worlds comforting and predictable (see e.g. Weiss, Murphy, and Salamon 2019). There is also an increased focus on working through the specificity of differently embodied perspectives, or natural attitudes that are correlated to specific group identities. For example, recent work in the phenomenology of race has developed an analysis of the formation of specific first-person experiences within racist societies, such as an experience of fear that feels natural but is caused by racist projections.

In the mid-20 th century, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Frantz Fanon, and Richard Wright began to consider the ways in which perception, embodiment, relations with others, experiences of one’s temporal existence, as well as the way one conceptualizes the natural and social worlds could all be substantively affected by racial identities, even if this was latent and unarticulated (Sartre 1946 [1948]; Beauvoir 1954 [1999]; Fanon 1952; Wright 1940). Fanon took up the question of black embodiment in anti-black societies, in which one’s actions would be interpreted by others against the backdrop of racist cultural images, curtailing agency and foreclosing individualism as well as the recognition of one as a meaning-making subject. An anticipation of anti-black responses suffuses one’s everyday life. Sartre considered the ways in which colonization had created a situation in which the structural violence of colonizers was obscured and the resistance of the colonized was perceived as irrational. Beauvoir reflected on how her white identity restricted the possibilities of relations with others, reframing the meanings of her intended actions in ways that would reinforce racism. And throughout his novels Wright explored the changed possibilities for self-making that were beginning to emerge for black people with the demise of legal segregation.

Inspired by this work, new existential categories were developed by Lewis Gordon (1995a, 1997), Paget Henry (2000), Robert Birt (1997), Jonathan Judaken (2008), Gertrude James Gonzalez (1997) and others to provide more precise accounts of Black existence in anti-black worlds. For example, there is both invisibility and hyper-visibility: the invisibility of black pain and suffering, now documented in medical research, against the hyper-visibility of black bodies in spaces assumed to be rightfully dominated by whites, which include higher education, government, and institutional leadership of all sorts, now documented by sociologists and social psychologists (Gallagher 1994; Gordon 1995a; Williams 1997). Gordon developed an account of the invisibility of black subjectivity, in which black people become mirrors or empty hulls, mere projections of white needs and desires. White affection for black people is similar to their affection for their pets, he argued, based on the fact that pets do not judge their masters. Black people who go against these expectations to assert their subjectivity and capacity to judge are subject to violence and erasure. Gordon used a phenomenological approach not only to reveal white supremacist attitudes, but also to analyze various black responses to anti-black racism, such as the use of the n-word as a means to deflate its power and divert its original meaning.

Phenomenological approaches to race also helped to disaggregate the experiences of diverse racial identities as well as expose the diverse forms of racism. Liberalism generally defines racism as the result of an illegitimate racial consciousness or racial awareness, in which the race of an individual is noted and taken to be significant, setting aside the question of who is noting who or how the significance is understood. By decontextualizing racism in this way it is rendered a uniform practice that could be philosophically treated in the abstract, with generic solutions. By contrast, phenomenological approaches have suggested that white practices of racial consciousness, among others, need a distinct analysis (Sullivan 2006). White racial consciousness often involves self-attributions of innocence, wilful ignorance about race-related social realities, and a sense of spatial entitlement that Sullivan names “ontological expansiveness.”

While there are some similarities in racist habits—such as forms of group-based antipathy, denigration, and essentialism—there are also differences important in understanding our experiences. The very term “anti-black racism” Gordon developed indicated that his analysis was not meant to be generic but specific, attending to the manifestations of racism that emerge from the specific histories of slavery, Jim Crow, and the ongoing colonization of Africa. Emily Lee and David Haekwon Kim have used phenomenonological approaches to explore the particularities of anti-Asian racism, Asian American assimilation and the idea of Asian-Americans as “model minorities,” in which the natural attitude of whites directs a different set of expectations and normative judgements toward Asians but ones that continue to curtail both individual and collective agency (Kim 2014; Lee 2020).

Even when racism involves a negative projection, there is also always a positive ideal against which the negative projection is identifiable. The criminal black person is contrasted with the compliant black, the lazy Mexican is contrasted with the hard-working Mexican, and so on. For Asian Americans, Kim argues, the natural attitude of whites expects passivity, with the result that nonpassive Asians appear to be seeking dominance, even if their non-passivity is merely sticking “to an unpopular proposal in a committee meeting” (Kim 2020, 297). Asian assertiveness disrupts some people’s comfort and reveals their commitment to the idea that Asians are “socially passive” (ibid). Such attitudes are not caused exclusively by cognitive commitments but operate as affective states that play a formative role in desire as well as understanding, such as the desirability of Asian passivity.

Martin Heidegger’s concept of Dasein, or “being there,” understands temporal and spatial location to be constitutive of subjectivity. This has provided a helpful elucidation of immigrant, bilingual, multilingual, and transnational experiences of identity, such as many Latinx people experience, among others. Dasein’s experience of being at home in the world and being with others in a comfortably collective “we” state is disrupted by angst when the ease of this connectedness is broken by migration and racism. Mariana Ortega makes use of Heidegger’s approach to develop a phenomenology of migrant life, a life in which the experience of at-homeness is never more than fleeting. This experience disrupts the solidity of the natural attitude and can lead to a critical consciousness. European male existentialists sometimes portrayed the self as normally unreflective, with the secure ease of practical functionality within their worlds, until a crisis, such as the Nazi occupation of France, forces reflexivity and a new awareness of what had been taken for granted. Ortega argues that the mestiza and the migrant live in an everyday world of ambiguities, uncertainties of meaning, and contradictory norms of practice, resulting in a discontinuous and multiplicitous self that requires a new phenomenological analysis (Ortega 2016, 50; see also Schutte 2000).

CPR scholars have thus effectively used phenomenology to displace the concept of the normative subject. But to do this, they have also had to critique the early phenomenologists attachment to universalizing human experience. For example, they have shown how particular social conditions, rather than universal ones, create and sustain the possibility of an unreflective consciousness that phenomenologists once took to be the universal default. Non-dominant identities rarely have the privilege of a relaxed absence of self-consciousness. In contrast, dominant groups have not needed to thematize their identity as, for example, white or male (Ngo 2017).

As early as 1944, Sartre began to apply his concept of “bad faith” to anti-Semitism (Sartre 1946 [1948]; Vogt 2003). “Bad faith” is the term Sartre used to describe how one lies to oneself about the constitutive elements of the human condition—most notably, the inevitability of death and the responsibility we must bear for our choices, even those choices constrained by social conditions—as a way to avoid the existential angst this condition produces. “We have here a basic fear of oneself and truth” (Sartre 1946 [1948, 18]). Anti-Semitism works similarly, Sartre argued, by attempting to avoid the necessity of self-creation. The status of the Gentile as constitutionally superior is rendered solid and impermeable no matter what one does because of its contrast with the Jew: every decision the Gentile makes is legitimate, while every decision the Jew makes is corrupt. Anti-Semites are intentionally antagonistic to facts or reasoning that would challenge their view; hence Sartre calls it a form of faith. Gordon took up this idea as the basis for understanding anti-black racism, which is motivated by the desire to maintain the moral goodness and intellectual superiority of whiteness despite any contrary evidence.

The use of the concept of bad faith in this way challenges Husserl’s hopeful view about our ability to critique the natural attitude, given the power of bad faith’s temptations and its intransigence to reason. But in this way, the phenomenological approach to race and racism has helped to reveal racism’s persistence.

The phenomenological approach has also taken up the way in which racial identities and racisms refigure the temporal dimensions of human existence. In line with Ortega, both Edouard Glissant (1989) and Octavio Paz (1950 [1961]) argued that in colonized spaces there can be a plural sense of temporality that takes a distinct form: an experience of the temporality of progress and development put forward by the dominant mainstream alongside a sensation of the static, petrified conditions of the marginalized periphery, creating a fractured sense of one’s temporal context that can lead to ennui. Alia Al-Saji has argued that understanding these diverse temporalities is key to seeing how self-other relations can be short-circuited when the dominant perceive the marginal as existing in a distinct time-space that is “behind” (2013, 2014). This justifies replacing dialogue with pedagogy: explaining to the other how they can advance. The diverse temporalities instituted by colonization, and the subsequent politics of memory they engender and sometimes enforce, is a central theme of decolonial philosophy today, making use of phenomenological work from Fanon, Emmanuel Levinas, and other victims of racism and anti-Semitism to assess the aspects of our natural attitudes still hidden to ourselves. Further, despite the permanence of existential temptations toward rendering oneself as solid and thus secure, in truth, we are always in a state of becoming, with possibilities of playfulness and imaginative self-creation that can lend hope for the battle against racism.

3. The Construction of Racial Identities

In general, Critical Race Philosophers have started with the view, following Alain Locke, that race, even though it is signified by physical attributes, is basically a social kind rather than a natural kind (Harris 1989). Locke wrote: “The best consensus of opinion then seems to be that race is a fact in the social or ethnic sense, that it has been very erroneously associated with race in the physical sense…that it has a vital and significant relation to social culture, and that it must be explained in terms of social and historical causes…” (Locke 1916 [1992, 192]). Locke also alluded to a contradiction still very much relevant to the debate over eliminativism, which is how racial consciousness can be both desirable and dangerous: desirable in that it recognizes social and historical realities, but dangerous in its potential to sanction prejudice and overplay division (Harris 1989, 203).

A central issue in the work of the Critical Philosophy of Race has been how socially instituted categories of race are related to the self. As Charles W. Mills has put it, the assignment of racial identity “influences the socialization one receives, the life-world in which one moves, the experiences one has, the worldview one develops—in short…one’s being and consciousness .” (1998, xv; emphasis in original) Given this, abstract notions of the self that pare away particularities of our identities such as race risk producing theories and norms that tacitly assume whiteness, especially given the white predominance in the philosophical profession.

How, then, should we understand the interaction between social identities and the self? Is it deterministic from the top or more dialectical? In truth, the meanings of race have been influenced by those victimized by racism who collectively organize for resistance and survival in racist regimes. Both individuals and social movements have articulated new ways to think about what it means to have a racial identity (Marcano 2003; Gooding-Williams 1998; Omi and Winant 1986; Taylor 2004, 2016). Any theory of social construction, then, needs to understand this as a complex process with multiple players.

Race itself is a historically and culturally specific aspect of human experience (Gossett 1965; Hannaford 1996; Augstein 1996). Although there are precursors in earlier periods, most believe that the main way the concept of race has been defined in the modern era—as signifying inherited, stable dispositions and capacities linked to physical characteristics—emerged within Europe during its era of global empire. The idea of ranked, permanent human differences motivated or rationalized state policies governing a variety of social protections, inclusions and exclusions, from suffrage to immigration to property rights.

This history may make race appear to be something imposed on the self. The idea that race has been socially constructed is sometimes presented in this way: that external forces have constructed social identities as a way to divide and rank and ultimately exploit and oppress. On this view, while the individual has been categorized and grouped by political systems, with a subsequently curtailed (or magnified) agency, we are still essentially individuals free to engage in self-making.

On this version of social construction, two important ideas follow. The first is that philosophical treatments of the self, moral agency, personal identity, linguistic capacity, normative practices of cognition and so on can be pursued separately from, or prior to, an engagement with questions of social categories of identity such as race. And this accords with standard philosophical practices currently in place. The second implication is that the most liberating approach to race will be to deflate its significance and eliminate it from social life. If it is only contingently related to our identity, and has been used to legitimate discrimination, we should strive to reduce the power of race (Haslanger 2011; Glasgow et al. 2019). Some states, such as France, use such arguments to disallow the gathering of statistics that involve racial as well as ethnic and religious identity.

Theories that take a social constructionist approach to race often understandably focus on the nefarious ways race has been constructed. Yet, by unseating the biological determinist view of race, social constructionist approaches can also instigate reflection on the varied functions of racial terms--to signal collectivity, for example--as well as their open-ended future. Philosophers of race as well as other theorists have put a lot of work into showing how the concept was built on the colonizing ideologies and practices that served economic as well as other ends (Harris 1999; Mills 1997, 2017). But eliminativists about race have to do more than reveal the problematic genealogy of the concept: they also must show that the meaning of race is uniform and eliminating the concept is both possible and desirable.

Critical Philosophers of Race have generally argued that the elimination of race terms will encroach on our ability to retain an effective historical consciousness, which hermeneuticists such as Hans-Georg Gadamer described as central to the capacity to reason well (Gadamer 1975 [2004]). On the hermeneutic view, individuals engage in the work of judgment and interpretation while embedded within particular traditions, but eliminativism could disable the self-reflection this calls for. And for phenomenologists such as Sartre, at least in his later works, the self is the product of a dialectical interaction between the particulars of one’s social situation and the choices one makes as an individual. As Donna-Dale Marcano explains, Sartre’s approach “enables us to explain how and why members of an oppressed group positively assume and create an identity for ourselves” grounded in that group experience: in order to acknowledge the importance of this shared history as well as the forms of resistance that have had a hand in shaping our current social identities (Marcano 2003, 25). The desirability of forgetting this history may vary across groups, since some might wish to forget atrocities that played a role in their family enrichment, while others wish the world to remember the lessons of the past as well as the history of group resistance and survival. If our selves are indeed the product of dialectical engagement, a philosophical treatment of identity and the self will need to incorporate the situated and relational elements that play a significant role in constituting us, and this will include our racialized identities. This approach is not antithetical to a social constructionist theory but one form it can take.

The history of race reveals its fundamentally social origin and many nefarious uses, but not the reach of its dynamism. Although race is an important element in our histories, this does not mean there are no similarities across racial groups, no significant differences within groups, or that racial meanings will remain stable. Yet, still, as Mills emphasizes, race has such a significant impact on our lives it cannot but affect what we know, how we know, and how we understand ourselves in relation to our worlds (Mills 1998).

The social constructionist approach can sometimes lend itself to the idea that societies can bring races into existence simply by the formal use of the category in, for example, official legal documents. This view in turn can give rise to the belief that races can be deconstructed by reversing this process. The historical approach to racial identities offers a different, though not entirely distinct approach. Racial groups exist within history and are formed by historical forces, but these include not only top-down machinations of states but also the collective agency of those so designated. It is not just state policies that construct identities, but social movements, both progressive and reactionary. Through historical periods and collective group action, the meanings of race can change as well as their political valence (Glasgow et al. 2019; Omi and Winant 1986; Alcoff 2015).

W.E.B. Du Bois took a Hegelian approach that understood African peoples in the post-slavery diaspora as engaged in a dialectic process of self-formation in light of their racialized treatment. Slaves had been violently dispossessed of their languages, ethnic cultures and religions as a means of domination and control. Yet, rather than simply assimilating to the Anglo-European culture of North America, black people even under slavery were creatively producing new forms of cultural expression and communal forms of life that gave voice to the sensibilities of their unique and shared historical experience (Du Bois 1903 [1997]). Historical forces had shaped the conditions in which blackness became a feature of the self, albeit a dynamic and variable one.

Similarly, in the southern part of the Western hemisphere, theorists such as José Vasconcelos and José Carlos Mariátegui were articulating specifically racialized forms of social identity with political implications (Vasconcelos 1925 [1997]; Mariátegui 1928 [1993]; Von Vacano 2011). For Vasconcelos, racial identities are the product of both biological and social forces, but racial rankings are simply tools of “imperialistic policy” to generate self-justification (Vasconcelos 1925 [1997, 33]). Vasconcelos was concerned to defend racial mixing, which was a practice widespread in Latin America and also the target of criticism by European intellectuals who justified their own superior ranking on the basis of claims to purity and unified cultural essences. Vasconcelos held that such claims ignore the fact that all races are in a constant process of interaction and mutual influence. Diversification improves humanity, he believed, and will eventually produce a more unified or cosmic race stronger than any “pure” race. Yet, while advocating in this way for mestizahe , or the mixing of races and cultures, Vasconcelos reproduced a new form of racial ranking in which “pure” blacks and Indians were ranked lower than mixed race peoples, or mestizos.

In contrast, Mariátegui criticized the way in which mestizo and criollo elites defined the “problem of the Indian” as a problem of resistance to assimilation. As a forerunner of societies that define themselves today as “plurinational,” Mariátegui argued that political systems needed to recognize the legitimacy of Indian identities and land claims. Indigenous groups in Peru had distinct ideas and practices about how to communally navigate land stewardship, how to practice religion, and how to express aesthetic values, and these practices had produced flourishing communities prior to the Conquest. Indian survival was not predicated on assimilation but on land.

In Latin America and the Caribbean, theorists tended to hold that the Conquest and transatlantic slavery altered and realigned but did not erase prior values, practices, or beliefs (Henry 2000). New group identities carried vestiges of earlier practices and cultural ideas. Liberation from colonialism and emancipation from slavery created new political constituencies who had shared aspirations for new forms of society in which they could chart their own futures. These new constituencies manifested some continuities with the pre-Conquest, pre-slavery past but were also dynamic responses to new conditions and possibilities. For example, while diverse indigenous groups were forcibly realigned by territorial annexations, they responded by developing new group identities that included pan-indigenous identity while maintaining a historical consciousness of their distinct lineage (Jimeno 2014; de la Cadena 2015).

The contrast between political philosophy in Latin American versus Europe is instructive here. The project of Latin American political philosophers such José Martí, Simon Bolivar and Mariátegui was never to create ideal political institutions for any given collection of abstract individuals, but to create workable institutions that could overcome the devastations wrought by colonialism, cultural imperialism, and slavery. This required addressing group differences and group histories. For Mariátegui, the Indians of Peru deserved land rights not as individuals but as specific historical peoples whose land had been stolen. The political philosophy of a nation such as Peru could not then follow liberal theoretical traditions that treated individual citizens as essentially fungible with uniform rights and duties.

This is what fueled Martí’s concern that the Eurocentric universities of Latin America offered no “analysis of elements peculiar to the peoples of America” (Martí 1999, 114). As a result of their European or U.S. based curriculum, “the young go out into the world wearing Yankee or French spectacles, hoping to govern a people they do not know” (ibid). Marti despised the concept of race, held that racism was a sin against humanity, and sought to undo the racism that the Spaniards institutionalized in the colonial era (Schutte 2011). But he also held that new societies must come to understand and address the fact that different groups had distinct histories with their own “vital and individual characteristics of thought and habit…” (Martí, 119) Eurocentric curricula are not universal, but particular, and may have only partial relevance outside Europe. Writing some decades later, the philosopher Leopoldo Zea echoed Martí’s warning and argued that philosophical approaches need to address human and cultural specificity (Zea 1986).

In many post-liberation, post-slavery writings, racial identity began to signify differently than it had for the colonizers: it came to mean group identities and forms of life that had been forged by historical processes involving not only colonialism but also the forms of resistance devised by the colonized. Generic terms like “Black” would change their meanings to signify new group formations whose content or unifying elements referred both to the enforced diaspora as well as new forms of collectivity and resistance. The generic term “Indian” itself denoted a widely diverse set of communities, initially united only in that it was used by settler societies to project negative attributes on all indigenous peoples. In this sense the term had elements very similar to other racial terms. Yet it began to signify something more substantive as well as more positive: a difference of historical experience, values, and practices that cut across many particular differences between indigenous groups. There is ongoing debate today about the validity of such a broad term, but there is agreement that the term “Indian” signifies not only what was done to the peoples it signifies, but broadly shared forms of religiosity, community, and relationality (Teuton 2008; Pratt 2002; Burkhart 2019).

How should we understand the connection between racialized identities and the production of cultures? “Civilizations and peoples are not…coterminous with races,” as Leonard Harris reminds us (Harris 1999, 445). Yet there are links. For Alain Locke, as Harris explains, socially created races can be defined in relation to “beliefs, habits, customs, and informal institutional regulations,” but these are the products of group agency rather than innate: it is civilizations and peoples that decide what traits to encourage given particular historical circumstances (Harris 1999, 444–5). While it is a mistake to see races as causes of cultural formations, it is also a mistake to assume that racialized group histories play no role in the “beliefs, habits, customs” that play a role in surviving adversity, or, on the other hand, in conquering.

Perhaps the most philosophically rich discussion and debate over race and culture came out of the anti-colonial movement that put forward the concept of Negritude in the midst of anti-colonial struggles in Africa and the French Caribbean. Negritude was the name given for the concept of “black culture.” For some theorists, such as Léopold Sédor Senghor, biologically caused racial identities have cultural products that, because of their biological origin, have limited transformational potential. But for other theorists, the production of black culture is essentially to be understood within the history of colonialism (Mosley 1999, 75).

For both Aimé and Suzanne Césaire, Negritude was the cultural fruit of the historical process of intellectual cross-fertilization known as métissage . Within this dynamic history, new cultural forms developed that could offer intellectual nourishment to the developing social movements striving for self-determination (Denean Sharpley-Whiting 2003, 117). “For us, the problem is not to make a utopian and sterile attempt to repeat the past, but to go beyond…It is a new society that we must create, with the help of all our brother slaves, a society rich with all the productive power of modern times, with all the fraternity of olden days” (Césaire 1955 [1972, 31]). Thus, Negritude articulated a new set of norms and values that aimed to depart from Europe’s barbarism. Rejecting colonialism involved turning toward rather than away from the historical tie to indigenous African cultures. This would prove to be a productive relation, since these cultures were neither modern nor liberal by Europe’s lights but communal, cooperative, and anti-capitalist, with their own forms of democracy (Césaire 1955 [1972, 23]). Decolonization required not simply nation-building but a reassessment and realignment of cultural forms and related social ideas about human possibilities (Getachew 2019). Negritude was the name given to this endeavor.

To be sure, Negritude has sustained decades of critical debate concerning the dangers of cultural homogenization (Sealey 2018; Appiah 1992; Wilder 2015; Mosley 1999). Another line of debate concerned the championing of emotion, intuition and myth in indigenous cultures, and whether this only played into the hands of white supremacists. Senghor responded that the point is to redefine the sphere of emotion and the importance of myth as a feature of every society. Du Bois (1903 [1997]) also expressed and affirmed the idea of a specific form of spirituality, inspired in part by Hegel. Eventually these ideas would find resonance in the idea of “soul” as the cultural form of a people, another conception with an indelible racial connotation.

Negritude was motivated by the project Aime Césaire called “disalienation”: to overcome the denigration of Africa and the forced assimilation into the culture of the colonizer (Táíwò 1999). Yet to be clear, disalienation for Césaire did not require a denial of métissage. His own writings were influenced by the French poetry and literature he had imbibed as a student, but Césaire insisted that his project was to “create a new language, one capable of communicating the African heritage” (Césaire 1955 [1972, 67]). In the colonial context of Martinique, the use of French did not need to stop but what was most important was to develop “a new means of expression” that would be “Antillean French, a black French that, while still being French, had a black character” (ibid.). Negritude aimed to allow the expression of a full range of memory, affect, orientation, and sensibilities across the domain of many diverse ethnic, religious, and language communities from which the slaves were kidnapped.

The emphasis on the historical construction of cultural differences and social identities led to diverse conclusions by different theorists. Sartre came to defend the concept of Negritude against its detractors, but his defense portrayed it as a transitional stage in a Hegelian dialectical moment that would lead to a future without racial differences. (Sartre 1948 [1988]; Bernasconi 1995, 2006) Such a future may be one that many anti-racists, people of color among them, aspire to (Williams 1997). But the problem, as Fanon put it, was that Sartre was wielding a universal historical teleology in which sacrifices of collective identification and historical memory were disproportionately distributed (Fanon 1959 [1967]). It is the Black man who must “renounce the pride of his color…[accept] the twilight of his negritude…in order to find the dawn of the universal” (Sartre 1948 [1988, 329]). This formulation maintained the conception of universal humanism held by the French colonizers. Fanon rejected the idea that negritude was simply a stage, and retorted that “It is the white man who creates the Negro. But it is the Negro who creates negritude” (Fanon 1959 [1967, 47]).

Edouard Glissant took the concept of metissage and applied it to the way in which we approach historical understanding to argue that the danger with historical approaches lies with the assumption of a singular history that unifies us all (Sealey 2020). “One of the most disturbing consequences of colonization could well be this notion of a single History…The struggle against a single History for the cross-fertilization of histories means repossessing both a true sense of one’s time and identity…” (Glissant 1989, 93).

As Kris Sealey argues, homogenized teleologies such as Sartre presumes puts a stranglehold on the political imagination. Yet Fanon and Amilcar Cabral both worried that in some forms Negritude itself downplayed dynamism, internal conflicts, and the heterogeneity of the diasporic experience. Both suggested that the imaginary projections of homogeneous cultural identities based on shared racialization were the product of alienated middle classes seeking an authenticity they had lost. While recognizing that the group specificity of cultural formations and ideas remained vital, they, together with Kwame Nkrumah, held that we need to retain a capacity to develop historically informed critiques of anti-racist philosophies (Nkrumah 1964; Cabral 1973).

If social identities are contextual in relation to social, historical and cultural elements, this extends to what it means to be white. Whiteness across the Americas and Europe varies, since not all began as settler states, and yet the unconscious habits and frameworks inculcated by white or light-skinned persons positioned as superior to all other groups can have some commonalities. No matter one’s individual political and moral commitments, a person from the dominant group will have common experiences across most of their contexts in light of this feature of their social identity.

In his essay, “The Souls of White Folks,” Du Bois considered the effects of a perpetually reinforced idea of natural superiority and dominance on white subjectivity (Du Bois 1940 [1986c]). His concern was the “conditioned reflexes” and “long followed habits” built into customs and folkways (Du Bois 1940 [1986c], 679). The fact that the white poor and white workers were promised well more than they ever received had a profound effect on their resentments as well as their illusions. Du Bois was also interested in how a generic self-regard could be attached to such an insignificant fact as white skin color: what does it do to a man, he asks, to believe that his skin entitles him to ownership of the world? Du Bois claimed an epistemic advantage as a non-white person who can discern the pathological identity complex that afflicts whites. He describes himself as a non-foreigner who lives among them and can view them from an “unusual vantage” so that, as he put it, “I see in and through them.” (Du Bois 1910 [1986b, 923]). This knowledge is terrifying for white people and animates their antipathy: no Emperor wants to share table with those who know he is naked. The habitual practices that ensure white self-regard are largely unconscious, Du Bois suggested, and whites often vigorously resist being made conscious of them.

More recently Charles W. Mills used the concept of the “epistemology of ignorance” to describe habits of knowing that the dominant consciously pursue in order to ensure that they can retain moral self-regard (Mills 1997). Ignorance of the reality of racial domination, and of its illegitimacy, certainly requires more concerted effort in the recent period. One must consciously avoid certain books, courses, films, television shows, newspaper articles, and so on, but one must also attach oneself to certain ideas about objectivity, the irrelevance of genealogy in assessing a claim, and the absoluteness of truth claims that obviate the need for self-reflection. José Medina (2012) has developed this idea further to explore how self-knowledge has been curiously circumscribed in mainstream traditions of epistemology to exclude knowledge of others or knowledge of one’s society. If we are what we are always in relation to others, he argues, then knowledge of others, and of the social conditions we must all inhabit, is a necessary condition of self-knowledge.

Shannon Sullivan (2006) has explored the idea of unconscious habits of whiteness more broadly. Her work has developed some aspects of psychoanalytic theory and pragmatism to explore the common elements of white racial identity formation. This proves a fruitful way to consider how racism can be effectively passed down across generations without conscious intent. Bodily posture toward a person of color who comes to one’s door can convey a whole array of ideas to children without needing to be stated. Sullivan elaborates a host of sometimes unconscious assumptions in white ways of being, involving entitlement, fear, guilt, and other affective states. Sullivan has looked particularly at “lived spatiality”: the way in which diverse groups live their spatiality and understand themselves in relation to specific spaces. Given the “ownership” idea attached to whiteness, and the historical practices of forming settlements in foreign lands, a phenomenological approach to the racialization of lived spatiality can reveal sediments of assumed white privilege that can affect such current issues as gentrification and the reemergence of white nationalism. Some of these habitual practices common to white subjectivity may be formulated as epistemically praiseworthy (for example, aspiring to colorblindness, ignoring history, or the motivation to “discover” unknown lands and make one’s mark upon the world).

The analysis of race and the self, then, includes unconscious habits as well as subjective features produced by collective experience. Yet an important theme of CPR has been an attentiveness to métissage , as well as a defense of mestizahe and the productive creolizations of cultures that have been too little acknowledged. Although clearly marked cultural borders and pure lines of racial descent are praised and pursued by racist social systems, they have never been achieved in reality. Our plural lineages and influences mean that, to some extent, we all operate within what are called pluritopic hermeneutic frameworks, rather than monotopic, homogenous, or coherent hermeneutic frameworks (Mignolo 2012). This fact does not imply that we can go back to taking a universal “we” as a starting point, or some form of abstract individualism. Perhaps we are all pluritopic today, but racialized subjectivity is formed differently vis-à-vis power.

Alain Locke insisted on the fact that “most cultures” have been found to be “highly composite”: “the resultant of the meeting and reciprocal influence of several culture strains, several ethnic contributions. Such facts nullify two of the most prevalent popular and scientific fallacies, the ascription of a total culture to any one ethnic strain, and the interpretation of culture in terms of intrinsic rather than the fusion values of its various constituent elements” (Locke 1924 [1989, 195]). Locke took this feature of cultures to provide a definitive rejoinder to supremacist claims, since the cultural achievements of societies marked by white supremacy bear the influences of subordinated groups.

It remains true, however, that as we saw with Vasconcelos, ideas of mixing can and have co-existed alongside and even supported racism (Bernasconi 2010). The slipperiness of racial meanings and the flexibility of racism requires philosophers to continually assess the contextual conditions within which any given philosophical claim is operating.

4. The Question of Causes: Capitalism or Culture

A central issue of debate in the Critical Philosophy of Race has been how to understand the causes of racism in relation to economic motivations and the system of capitalism as well as cultural forces and social ideology. Orthodox Marxists often sidelined issues of racism, diminishing the struggle against racism as a struggle for bourgeois rights within a legal system that would remain structurally unjust under capitalism. Some thought the focus on racism would divide the working class and weaken solidarity. Despite the weakness of these arguments, it remains true that some anti-racist agendas sideline economic issues and focus on representational equity at the top of the pyramid. This has led to an ongoing debate about how to relate the issue of race with the issue of class (Grosfoguel 2016).

Racism is very profitable. It can work to reduce compensation for jobs designated “unskilled” or “low skilled” because the articulation of “skill” values mental over manual labor and often misrepresents the complex demands of the latter. Racist prejudices incline some to accept the idea without examination that the labor done by racialized groups is unskilled. All manual workers are disrespected and shut out of decision making, but the racial organization of the labor market makes this sector more non-white than other sectors, and in some locations, such as Latin America or South Africa, almost entirely non-white. Racial divisions among workers are regularly exploited by capitalists to diminish solidarity. Neo-colonialism in the global south continues to facilitate the exploitation of labor in countries too desperately poor to negotiate terms very effectively. In truth, then, both national and transnational markets in labor and goods have been racially organized since the Conquest of the Americas for the benefit of elites. Even when the elite class is multi-racial, they benefit from the racist system of organizing and remunerating labor. This is the meaning of the term “racial capitalism” (Robinson 1983; Mills 1997).

Clearly, emerging capitalism made use of the racist ideologies initiated in the early days of colonialism, such as the idea that Native peoples and African peoples exist in an earlier stage of human development and are thus legitimately subject to governance and control by more advanced or developed human cultures (Grosfoguel and Cervantes-Rodríguez 2002; Quijano 2008). Capitalism also profits from the denigration of the value of indigenous cultures around the world, especially when these thwart mining, logging, or other types of resource extraction and the transformation of environments upon which groups depend for their subsistence. On the other hand, some argue that because capitalism has no intrinsic need to respect cultural traditions, it often upends traditions involving racism and sexism when these conflict with its labor needs: for example, the profit motive encourages hiring the best from any group for its professional/managerial and creative teams. One of the prime features of capital markets is their tendency to disrupt existing social conventions. These points have raised debate over whether capitalism is necessarily committed to the maintenance of racism. And further debate has arisen over whether racist ideologies are intrinsic to cultures or to economies, or both.

Most critical theorists of race and ethnicity argue for an expansion beyond economic analyses. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam hold that “While political economy is absolutely essential to any substantive left critique, it is also important to articulate culture and economy together, to conceive of them as existing in and through each other” (2016, 421). In this vein, the cultural theorist Stuart Hall developed what he called a heterodox Marxist approach to race, emphasizing the role of culture in producing the hegemony required to maintain the racial organization of labor (Mills 2010, 186). Yet Hall rejected the idea that culture operates as a sufficient cause or is separable from material conditions (Hall 1980 [2002], 1997a, 1997; Morley and Chen 1996). Hall’s approach to the importance of culture in regard to racism was inspired by 20 th century Marxist theorists such as Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser and those associated with the Frankfurt School, although these theorists avoided addressing race. Some did address anti-Semitism and the links between the rise of authoritarian societies and the forms of group hatred the Nazi’s promoted, but they wrote little about racism or colonialism (Allen 2016; Farr 2018). Hall suggests however that Gramsci’s origins in southern Italy informed his understanding of how regional ethnic identities could animate prejudice and play a formative role in the crafting of hegemony.

Gramsci’s concept of hegemony focused on the ways in which broad majorities come to accept significant income inequality and diminished democracy, reducing the need for capitalist states to use brute force. Gramsci suggested we must reach beyond economic motives to explain the success of hegemony. To avoid a mono-causal approach to racial domination, Hall adapted three concepts from Gramsci and Althusser: hegemony (the production of cross-class acceptance of social injustice), relative autonomy (for cultural forces that sometimes operate autonomously from profit maximization), and overdetermination (the necessity “to grasp the multiplicity of social determinations in play – and the fact that they work in combination, as an articulation of different forces” [Hall 2017, 90]). For Hall, the significance of this overall approach is to alert us to potential misalignments between causative elements, so that the power of social determinism is understood to have some instability. Further, we can see how non-economic motives can drive the choices of both workers and capitalists. One may be motivated to maintain one’s social position in a racial hierarchy, for example, and to ensure that racial groups considered lesser are not gaining social and economic advantages, even if this compromises one’s ability to fight capital.

However, if we assume that racial identities are epiphenomenal illusions or imaginary in some sense, such motives will fall under the category of false consciousness, in which case race-based motivations will not challenge economic determinism. One’s “real” interests as a worker will continue to lay in opposing racial divisions. As discussed earlier in this entry, the idea that racial concepts are illusory may seem to have good evidentiary grounds. Yet racial categories that operated within the emerging settler states, such as the United States and Australia, distributed significant privileges and protections by race. These included both economic and political rights, including homestead rights, voting rights, and labor rights. In this way, socially created kinds such as racial identities had a powerful social reality: even if some of the ideas about such identities are false, real historical events produced shared experiences and shared sets of interests (Beltrán 2020).

The fact that racial groups are led to compete with one another for economic advantages is itself socially engineered rather than natural, but it may have heterogeneous causes. The concept of overdetermination allows us to expand the concept of what is in one’s rational “interest” to include pride and self-regard, group self-affirmation, relational advantage over other groups, the desire to enact domination and to protect longstanding special entitlements. Is the imbrication of this complex array of motives such that we should see the economic as the main determinant, operating behind what look to be identity-protections? In other words, are racist motives ultimately caused by a choice structure crafted by capitalists?

Some argue that the structural racism of modern European societies (and European-based societies such as the United States) is deeply embedded in their cultures and languages in ways that are concealed by their espousal of classical liberalism’s dominant concepts of individualism, equality, and freedom (Goldberg 1993, pp. 6–7; see also Mills 2017). It is liberalism that espouses neutrality and color-blindness as ideal norms for social interaction, leading to an unwillingness to engage with racial realities in social institutions and economic outcomes. David Theo Goldberg argues that liberal cultures are racist in taking difference to be a problem requiring assimilation, integration, and “normalization” in Foucault’s sense of a comparative ranking that justifies forcible conformity. People of color and non-European immigrants who reject the color-blind ideal are seen as not yet assimilated into advanced, modern ways of life, and thus incapable of self-governance. Every articulation of anti-racist rage and rebellion can then be cast aside as based in ignorance. If these groups knew how to work within liberal democratic institutions and educational systems, some believe, they would be faring better with no need to rebel. In a sense, then, the suffering of nonwhites is viewed as self-caused by their inferior cultures, leading to a hegemonic acceptance of social inequality. The liberal view, as opposed to the conservative view, is distinguished only in that it sees this deficiency as remediable with assimilation.

A key element of Goldberg’s approach is to highlight the malleability of racial and racist discourses: just as liberalism has morphed into neo-liberalism, with its emphasis on self-maximizing strategies, individual responsibility, and punitive attitudes toward those who cannot effectively monetize their talents, so old-school biological racism morphs into cultural racism: the problem is not nonwhite genes but nonwhite cultures. Against those who take race to simply mean biology, Goldberg holds that the language of race can continue its noxious effects without any recourse to “biological reference” (1993, 11). Goldberg proposes that the West is made up of racist cultures so deeply committed to racism that new forms emerge as soon as old ones lose their power. Cultures are inherently dynamic, counseling against a metaphysically inclined pessimism, but the dynamism and plasticity of racism requires permanent vigilance.

Goldberg and Cornel West have independently made use of the Foucauldian concepts such as “fields of discourse” and “epistemes” to suggest that racial ideas are reinforced by loose coherence relations without logical entailments or causal determinism (West 1982). Familiar ways of organizing and achieving knowledge—such as classification tables—resonate across quite different disciplines and projects and help to guide, and control, the formulation of intelligible objects and problematics. Human differences, West suggests, were mapped in the 18th and 19th centuries via small visual variations to resonate with the ways in which botanists organized typologies of flora and fauna, as if such mapping constituted knowledge.

Despite their variety, racist cultures tend to portray racial identities and racism as natural in a way that obscures their historical construction. Although the 19th century theories and practices in regard to race have been discredited and largely rejected, the ways in which race is approached today in both the social and natural sciences retain some continuity with these problematic histories, with disturbing effects: “The scientific cloak of racial knowledge, its formal character and seeming universality, imparts authority and legitimation to it” (Goldberg 1993, 149).

Foucault’s focus was on the ways in which knowledge projects are framed, confining those so defined “within the constraints of the representational limits” (Goldberg 1993, 152). Such projects have typically assumed that the most important goals are uplift, assimilation, and integration with whites rather than extending democracy or reformulating justice (Shelby 2018). Knowledge projects are themselves conducted in ways that can exacerbate epistemic injustice: “The Other, as object of study, may be employed but only as informant, as representative translator of culture” (Goldberg 1993, 150; see also Narayan 1997 and Bayruns Garcia 2019). Concepts in use today such as “ghettos,” “ganglands,” “inner cities,” “underclass,” and “puppet governments” operate in a similar manner as older concepts like “savages,” “primitives,” and “barbarians” to reify and naturalize peoples, neighborhoods, and cultures (Goldberg 1993, 152–155).

Resonating effects between the new language and the old does more than support their plausibility, as Goldberg points out: “noncontroversial meanings [of terms such as ‘inner city’ or ‘underclass’] offer to their racialized ones the aura of respectability, just as their racial connotations spill over silently, unself-consciously, and so unproblematically into their racialized ones” (1993, 155). New meanings for old terms can emerge as needed by new contexts and new social projects, but with persistently problematic connotations. The concept of the “primitive” was originally intended to refer to ancient social groups from which contemporary human societies are descended; only later did it become a synonym for the racially other and the culturally “backward”. In this case the meaning remained stable while the referent group shifted. Ancient social groups that were nomadic, polygamous, and communal rather than individualist were then tagged onto nonwhite groups that exist today, such as indigenous groups in Africa and Latin America.

Both CPR and CRT scholars have shown how a significant amount of social science research has been functional for the state, with dubious results: providing information, data, statistical regularities that are used to formulate state policies; assuming frameworks that overlook agency and divert attention from considerations of justice (Murakawa 2014; Shelby 2018; Bauman 2003; Darby and Rury 2018). Statistics gathering on recidivism rates correlated to race are still used in parole decisions, as if recidivism is a natural fact or caused by bad individual choices rather than inadequate social services and prejudicial labor markets. In this way social science continues to participate in the construction of social ontologies, such as “likely repeat offender,” through feedback loops between representation and reality. Social sciences can then represent racial Others in an ostensibly neutral way while protecting white dominance (Goldberg 1993, 174).

To believe that we simply need to find more politically correct alternatives for terms like “underclass” or “primitive” is to assume that the object of reference can be defined and demarcated within racist cultures outside of a racist linguistic system. If we understand racism to be infecting the delimitation of fields of knowledge and the formation of objects as well as associated meanings, then the task must be to critically assess cultures, discourses, and institutions at every level. The project of inquiry then becomes one of understanding how racial domination has been reproduced across generations, encompassing political sensibilities from conservatism to liberalism.

Goldberg’s approach may be interpreted by some as a postmodern approach that has gone too far in conferring sufficient causality to language or discourse (see e.g. Mills’ critique of Hall, 2010, on this same point). Yet both Goldberg and Hall continually emphasize material structures alongside linguistic and discursive ones. There remains the question of how to understand the relation between these various aspects of racist cultures. The question of whether there are ultimate or sufficient causes, however, does not animate Goldberg’s work. His goal is to unearth the cultural and discursive elements involved in the constitution, perpetuation, and fluid transformations of racist concepts and racist societies. We need to understand the constitutive discourses operating in the social sciences to grasp how it can be the case that they “have done much to create, authorize, legitimate, and extend both the figures of the racial Otherness and the exclusion of various racisms” (Goldberg 1993, 175).

Other philosophers who analyze the social sciences have also offered a strong critique of existing frameworks and policy approaches (esp. Darby and Rury 2018 meant; Shelby 2018). Tommie Shelby critiques mainstream work on racial poverty in the social sciences for downplaying the agency of the poor as well as the rationality and moral reasoning that can motivate decisions to self-segregate, for example, or, at times, to resist certain kinds of wage labor. Ghetto poverty is caused by macro structural forces, but the collection of individuals forced into these spaces are actively endeavoring to survive, to occasionally flourish, and also to foment resistance of one sort or another. We cannot explain their choices by their culture (as in the “culture of poverty” thesis) but by their choice situation. We also need frameworks that allow theorists to see the creative and assertive responses devised by collective effort (the assertiveness of rap, for example, that re-describes social worlds against dominant misrepresentations). Shelby no less than Goldberg takes apart the linguistic apparatus that produces a large body of social science functional for racial capitalism. And his use of what is a usually denigrating term – “ghetto” – may be seen as an instance of what Goldberg calls “standing inside the terms” as a means to transform and redirect their political effects (1993, 174).

Critical philosophers of race, even those influenced by postmodernism, tend to set limits on the plasticity of linguistic transformation. Goldberg suggests that those designated by the term “primitive,” such as indigenous groups, “are rarely in a position of power, politically and technologically, to take on the category as a form of self-reference, even should they choose to” (1993, 174). Speech, however constitutive its reach, exists in a material world.

Critical race feminist philosophers have developed a critical analysis of the ways in which categories such as “Black women” as well as “women of the global south” have been constituted as an academic object of study and analysis (Narayan 1997; Khader 2011, 2018; duCille 1997). Uma Narayan argued that representations of women in India reproduce naturalistic frames and global hierarchies that devised a version of the culture of poverty thesis on an international scale. Notably, violence against women in the global north is not generally given cultural explanations but portrayed as a problem of individual pathology or an undifferentiated misogyny that operates outside of specific histories and contexts. By contrast, women of the global south are portrayed as oppressed by their cultures and religions.

Serene Khader expands on this analysis to show how culturalist explanations result in underestimating the agency of women in the global south, creating the view that their agency is only possible when they completely reject their religion or culture. This is a problem not only in the social sciences but also in postmodern feminist theory, and it occludes possibilities of universalist feminism because the oppressed Third World woman constructed in this way requires uplift, not dialogic engagements in which there might develop a larger understanding of the complex nature of sexism as well as the multiple possibilities of liberation from sexism. In some writings, the Third World woman is reified to such a degree that no serious political engagement about how to formulate shared feminist aims is possible.

Khader develops an approach to adaptive preferences that allows for non-ideal and historically attuned assessments of choices in any given context. All gendered individuals in reality make choices within structured environments. Outsiders to these environments tend to misdiagnose women’s choices, viewing them as accepting of oppression when in truth they may be efforts at self-protection. Mistaken analyses can also occur when cultures are reified as static; if we drop this idea Khader suggests we can judge choices based on their potential for transitions. For example, covering can enable women to venture out of the home without risk, and lead to changed public spheres. She argues for an approach that attends to contextual conditions of all sorts – material and cultural – for understanding oppression and gauging effective resistance. Contextualization will yield pluralist rather than uniform notions of liberation from gender-based oppression, and Western feminists need to be open to a multiplicity of liberatory forms even including certain kinds of gender-based divisions of labor.

Ann duCille takes a critical look at how the category “Black women” has been constructed within postmodernism, as well as other radical theoretical platforms. It is problematic to take Black women as the quintessential Other or the paradigm of difference (duCille 1997; Davidson 2010). Black women can be epistemically privileged in a way that does not reify their otherness, concealing its contextualization and internal variability. Maria del Guadalupe Davidson takes up duCille’s challenge to rethink the category by drawing from Gilles Deleuze’s concept of “the fold” as an alternative approach to identity and subjectivity. This presents an approach to subjectivity as constitutively relational. If theorists will focus on activity and relationality, rather than being, we may be able to specify unique conditions of Black women without reification (Davidson, 2010, 128–130).

Debates continue about how to formulate racial identities as well as whether identity-based movements have overshadowed class-based movements. Shohat and Stam explain that the focus on identity should be seen against the backdrop of a larger project of global decolonization, rather than assumed to be forever complicit with neo-liberalism (2016). The point is not to replace the frame of class struggle, but to complicate it, bringing ongoing forms of cultural imperialism to the center of analysis, so that we can begin to discern the “multiaxial forms of resistance and struggle” that face down “multiaxial forms of oppression…shaping new social actors, new vocabularies, and new strategies.” (2016, 421)

5. Reconstituting the History of Philosophy

The racist beliefs of major figures in the traditional canon of modern philosophy went unexplored until the second half of the 20 th century. Most historians of philosophy assumed that canonical figures were simply men of their time, and that their racism was devoid of philosophical interest and significance. Critical race philosophers have opened up debate on these issues, such as how the racism of important philosophers such as Locke and Kant may require us to reassess standardly generous interpretations of their political and ethical views (Zack 2017; Taylor et al. 2018; Mills 2017; Bernasconi and Mann 2005). They have also argued that bringing racism to the fore will require changing the standard ways of doing the history of philosophy.

First, a change in interpretive methods is in order, to change the way in which we read canonical texts. Before we assume that the racism of a given philosopher was typical of their day, we need to explore the historical context and consider the written views of his or her contemporaries so that we can reasonably assess what any given philosopher “could or should have known” about, for example, slavery (Bernasconi 2018, 3). In fact, as recent work has shown, throughout the modern period, slavery and colonialism were subject to vigorous debates both by those inside and outside of imperial nations (Jeffers 2018; Valls 2005; Mehta 1999; Pitts 2006; Dussel 2018, 2013; Mosley 2017). A thorough examination of the intellectual scene in which canonical philosophers were ensconced raises new questions about their views and assumptions (Bernasconi and Mann 2005; Ward and Lott 2002). But such an examination requires that we contextualize philosophical texts historically and socially before we can justify our interpretations.

Second, the existing canon has too many omissions on crucial issues, especially in regard to moral and political debate, to be taken as sufficient unto itself, given that such topics as slavery were extensively discussed and debated by other theorists in the same time period. The question of how to expand, if not reconstitute, the canon of modern philosophy has generated debate over what constitutes “philosophical” writings as opposed to other sorts. It is important to remember that the canon of modern European philosophers does not include only professional philosophers working within universities: such professionals did not even appear until the beginning of the 19 th century. And the issue of what makes a text count as a philosophical argument is of course subject to further debate. Many of the already accepted canonical European texts come in the form of letters, memoirs, fiction, dialogues, interpretations of sacred writings, and journalistic essays. Think of Augustine’s Confessions, Thomas More’s Utopia, Hume’s Dialogues on Natural Religion, Pascal’s Pensees, The Federalist Papers, Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, or Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. Philosophers read texts in a philosophical manner even when the text itself is not written in the form of a logically ordered argument.

There is original philosophical work in Africana, Latin American, indigenous and other traditions on metaphysics, morality, aesthetics and a whole host of philosophical issues that should become part of a revised canon (Jeffers 2018; Henry 2000; Dussel 2013, 2018; Wiredu 2004; Maffie 2013). The existence of original philosophical work in ancient China and India is not as contested, yet these sources are also absent representation in many so-called “top” graduate programs. Hence, there is an unjustificable Eurocentrism in the existing canon’s formation. The question of whether a given work counts as philosophy cannot be decided upon by a priori criteria created by a foreshortened canon. Therefore, we need to engage in both critical and reconstructive work on the question of canonicity itself.

The third point follows from the last. The traditional canon is not only insufficient but problematic in ways that require new analyses and interpretations. Without doing this critical work, taking concepts developed within modern Western political philosophy as the foundation from which to build further theories of social justice may result in extending the life of racist ideas and failing in our anti-racist aims (Mills 1998; Gines 2014; Basevich 2020; Zack 2017; Taylor et al. 2018). Concepts that look to be neutral on issues of race may have racist effects even without racist motivations, such as the labor theory of value that excuses the appropriation of lands from indigenous groups, or concepts of equality that may be formulated in a way that assumes sameness, or ontologies of the self that obscure relationality and dependence on hierarchical social infrastructures. Thus, it is not merely that the traditional canon needs to be augmented: it needs a thorough critical analysis that puts ideas and concepts in their historical context, explores their real-world applications, and then considers the reasons for their influence and popularity vis-à-vis other possible positions available at the time or, frankly, even now.

To reiterate, a historical and cultural contextualization of philosophical ideas is perhaps the most crucial methodological reform needed to change the way we understand the history of philosophy, and contextualization is just as important in regard to present day work as for philosophy written in the distant past. Contemporary approaches to philosophical historiography have sometimes assumed that contextualization is unnecessary, but this assumption, left unchallenged, can constrain critical analysis. When traditional historians of philosophy have begun to engage with questions of race, the problematics have sometimes been foreshortened by decontextualized methods of analysis. In this vein, Robert Bernasconi argues that naturalistic tendencies in analytic philosophy have overemphasized the question of whether a given philosopher believed in race as a natural kind, resulting in a limited interpretive exploration (2012, 552–553).

Take, for example, Du Bois’s rich 1899 [1986a] text “The Conservation of Races” where he elaborates an account of African Americans as a distinct historical people. Du Bois’s account was reduced in a number of contemporary critical essays to the question of whether he meant “black” to refer to biology, in which biological concepts themselves were understood as free of culture. But from phenomenology’s point of view, the philosophical conceptualization of nature, and the current political uses made of naturalist claims, are themselves cultural artifacts, historically and culturally contingent. Thus, when we read the history of modern European philosophy, we need to be alive to the ways in which “nature” is being socially constructed and conscripted for philosophical projects.

CPR has worked to advance new interpretations of canonical philosophers but has also, at the meta-level, contested standard approaches to interpretation. The interpretation of Kant, for example, has had to contend with his extensive writings on anthropology and geography in which he espoused unambiguously racist claims (Elden and Mendieta 2011; Kant 1798 [2012]). Until recently this large body of writings was considered irrelevant to the understanding of Kant’s ethics or his cosmopolitanism on the grounds of disciplinary distinctions between philosophical work and other writings. But why ignore Kant’s writings about the nature of human difference if we are trying to understand his actual views about the way peoples should interact? Like feminist philosophers who developed an analysis of the subtle ways in which some moral theories assumed a male embodiment, Critical Philosophers of Race have shown that doctrines of self-determination and universal reciprocity developed by modern European philosophers were never intended to apply to all groups: the right to autonomy was based on certain capacities that legitimated the exclusion of children, the disabled, and usually women, but, also, non-Europeans who were viewed as developmentally “behind”. Taking some aspect of a philosophers’ view and giving it the most generous reading possible distorts our understanding of modern philosophy and its conceptual offerings (Basevich 2020; Shorter-Bourhanou forthcoming; Kirkland 2018).

Mills argues that the only way to make sense of the evident contradictions in modern European philosophy is to understand this body of work as distinguishing types of selves among the human race (Mills 1998). Because of these type-differences, anti-authoritarian reforms and demands for democracy were never meant to be extended to the colonies. Sub-persons (women, slaves, the members of inferior cultures) did not merit suffrage, freedom, consultation, or self-determination. There was debate over whether these groups would remain forever inferior, less than human, or whether they might advance (Boxill 2005). But even those, like Rousseau, who believed in the possibility of uplift, assumed that “persons” would be the ones showing “sub-persons” the way forward, and judging their progress.

Lucius Outlaw characterizes modern European philosophers as sharing a commitment to a “project of modernity” that aimed to put all human activity “under the aegis of ‘reason’” (1996, 147; see also Kirkland 2018; Yancy 2020; Dussel 1995, 2013, 2018; McCarthy 2009; Mehta 1999). Despite a diversity of approaches and disagreements, the modern Europeans shared a distinctive philosophy of history that defined progress as the expansion of freedom and rationality. Social institutions and cultures could then be compared and ranked in regard to this singular metric of universal development. It was useful for Empire, as Outlaw argues, to reframe the wide expanse of alterity among human beings and cultures as developmental differences. The possibilities of a true pluralism was then foreclosed by norms of modernity. The unfortunate result still with us is that the impetus to study current social and cultural differences in thought, or the variety of philosophical writings, is diminished on the grounds that these constitute inessential and accidental aspects of the human condition, irrelevant to the formulation or discernment of freedom and reason. Eurocentrism in philosophical curricula is then no accident, Outlaw concludes, nor is it viewed as a deficiency since the modern European canon is assumed to provide sufficient elaboration and debate over the universal principles of freedom and reason.

Thus, this project of modernity gave birth to a “false universalism that blocks the appreciation of racial and ethnic differences…and contributed to deceptions that masked various forms of domination that were rationalized…” (Outlaw 1996, 150). Critical social theory worthy of the name needs to embrace a pluralism of philosophical projects, concepts, and frameworks that have arisen from differently situated thinkers from diverse regions or group experiences who are addressing, at least in some cases, dissimilar puzzles and challenges. A pluralist approach to philosophical projects can then engage in critical dialogue across these differences. The point of noting real philosophical alterities for Outlaw is not to counsel empty tolerance but to avoid presumptive judgments based on putative universals crafted by only one side.

Questioning European projects of modernity has been productively disruptive of the staid problematics that have dominated numerous sub-fields, from political philosophy to aesthetics to epistemology (Narayan and Harding 2000; Dotson 2012, 2014; Taylor 2016). Previously, the focal points that dominated these sub-fields, such as skepticism, ideal forms of justice, the universal nature of aesthetic value, and so on, came exclusively from modern European or ancient Greek philosophers. The recent critical work is challenging the hegemony of the traditional canon in setting out the agenda for philosophy. To be sure, previous movements in philosophy have also made progress in expanding the problematics, such as pragmatism, post-structuralism, social epistemology, feminist philosophy, and others. New questions have made it to the table, and old questions have had new formulations.

Particularly important has been the transformation of political problematics, reaching well beyond the debates over liberalism, conservatism, and Marxism (McGary 1999; Cohen 1999, Gooding-Williams 2009; Shelby 2018; Lugones 2003; Corlett 2003 and 2010; Darby and Rury 2018; Hanchard 2018). The move from ideal to non-ideal approaches has played a particularly productive role in opening up the field of political philosophy to engage with racial injustice and inequality (Mills 2005). Non-ideal approaches have cast new light on ideal conceptions of normative, optimally functional behavior. Shelby, Gooding-Williams, and Cathy Cohen have all, in different ways, turned to the project of investigating “how [so-called] deviant practices can be transformed into political challenges to the power that the state exercises over the ghetto poor through the promotion and enforcement of [illegitimate] norms” (Gooding-Williams 2009, 251). Gooding-Williams indicts Du Bois’s adoption of mainstream norms of respectability in his account of the Philadelphia ghettos and suggests that we look instead to Frederick Douglas as the better political philosopher for emancipation (see also James 1997). The project of civilizing Black people was a strategy that would only ensure their subjection. Douglas envisioned a subaltern black counterpublic that might have its own distinct ideas about the optimal norms of communal life and what constituted civilized behavior (see Dawson 2011).

These new problematics in political philosophy often draw from neglected historical sources, including Douglass and Du Bois as well as Martin Delaney, Anna Julia Cooper, Simon Bolivar, Kwame Nkrumah, Amilcar Cabral, Walter Rodney, Haya de la Torre, Jose Martí, Aimé and Suzanne Cesaire, Edouard Glissant, and many others. Related to these new non-European sources has been an altered map of the European sources of greatest interest, to include more of Montaigne, Las Casas, Condorcet, Rousseau, Gramsci, Marcuse, and others.

To be sure, many Critical Philosophers of Race decline to follow Outlaw in believing that there is a ‘black counterpublic’ that represents a racially cohesive formation. To the extent there is cohesion, it is based more on opposition to white supremacy, some argue, than an expression of shared sensibilities and orientations. And so the debate ensues. As this entry has shown, strong differences abound among CPR scholars over the history of Negritude and metissage , the implications of intersectionality, the meaning and future of racial concepts, and the weighty role of capitalism as a causal factor. A newly interpreted, reorganized and expanded history of philosophy is reformulating our central questions in many sub-fields, invigorating new lines of argumentation, more relevant for current challenges.

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• Harris, Leonard (ed.), 1983, Philosophy Born of Struggle , Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company.
• Henry, Paget, 2019, “Africana Studies as an Interdisciplinary Discipline: The Philosophical Implications,” The CLR James Journal , 25 (1&2): 7–38.
• Hord, Fred Lee (Mzee Lasana Okpara) and Jonathan Scott Lee (eds.), 1995, I Am Because We Are: Reading in Black Philosophy , Amherst, MA.: University of Massachusetts Press.
• Jeffers, Chike, 2013, “The Cultural Theory of Race: Yet Another Look at Du Bois’s ‘The Conservation of Races’,” Ethics , 123 (April): 403–426.
• Lott, Tommy L., 1999, The Invention of Race: Black Culture and the Politics of Representation , Malden, MA: Blackwell.
• Mendieta, Eduardo, 2014,“The Sound of Race: The Prosody of Affect,” Radical Philosophy Review , 17 (1): 109–131.
• Pittman, John (ed.), 1997, African-American Perspectives and Philosophical Traditions , New York: Routledge.
• Shelby, Tommie, 2005, We Who Are Dark , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Sullivan, Shannon, 2014, Good White People: The Problem with Middle-Class White Anti-Racism , Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press.
• Taylor, Paul C., 2000, “Appiah’s Uncompleted Argument: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Reality of Race,” Social Theory and Practice , 26 (Spring): 103–128.
• –––, 2016, Black is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics , Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley-Blackwell.
• Turner, Jack, Awakening to Race: Individualism and Social Consciousness in America , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• –––, 1993, Keeping Faith: Philosophy and Race in America , New York: Routledge.
• Zack, Naomi, 1994, Race and Mixed Race , Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

[Please contact the author with suggestions.]

colonialism | critical theory | Du Bois, W.E.B. | existentialism | Fanon, Frantz | Latin American Philosophy | Latinx Philosophy | liberation, philosophy of | Locke, Alain LeRoy | Négritude | phenomenology | race

Copyright © 2021 by Linda Alcoff < lmartina @ hunter . cuny . edu >

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What's the best state for you », what is critical race theory and why are people so upset about it.

Most Americans are not familiar with term critical race theory, but that hasn’t stopped some from getting upset about attempts to reckon with the sprawling repercussions of slavery.

What Is Critical Race Theory?

ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS | AFP | Getty Images

A mother and daughter stand before a historical marker for the the 1921 Tulsa Massacre on Monday, in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

One hundred years ago, on May 31 and June 1 of 1921, white rioters ransacked and set ablaze a wealthy Black neighborhood in northern Tulsa, Oklahoma – a place known as "Black Wall Street," where Black people were business owners, doctors, lawyers and where they were building and accumulating wealth at a time when that was unheard of in much of America.

The massacre, which left hundreds of Black people dead and roughly 10,000 homeless in its immediate aftermath, has haunted families for generations – not only by stunting their family trees but also by stripping them of future opportunities that such a solid foundation would have brought.

"I call on the American people to reflect on the deep roots of racial terror in our Nation and recommit to the work of rooting out systemic racism across our country," President Joe Biden said in a proclamation on Monday, in which he underscored the devastating repercussions the federal highway system and redlining had in making it "nearly impossible" for the neighborhood to recover.

When the president visits Tulsa on Tuesday to mark the century that's passed since the Tulsa race riot and meet survivors and their families, he's set to deliver remarks and acknowledge how federal laws and policies, to this day, stunt the ability of Black communities to thrive.

In doing so, he will effectively deliver a lesson on critical race theory – the term that's roiling conservatives in Congress and statehouses across the country.

And while nearly 80% of Americans have not heard of the term critical race theory or are unsure of whether they have, according to one recent poll , that hasn't stopped some people from getting really, really upset about what they see as the Biden administration's attempt to reckon with the sprawling repercussions of slavery.

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So What Is Critical Race Theory, Anyway?

Critical race theory traces its origins to a framework of legal scholarship that gained momentum in the 1980s by challenging conventional thinking about race-based discrimination, which for decades assumed that discrimination on the basis of race could be solved by expanding constitutional rights and then allowing individuals who were discriminated against to seek legal remedies. However, some legal scholars pointed out that such solutions – though well-intentioned – weren't effective because, they argued, racism is pervasive and baked into the foundation of the U.S. legal system and society as a whole.

Take the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education, for example, in which the Supreme Court ruled in 1954 that separate is not equal and that state laws protecting segregated public schools are unconstitutional. While the ruling gave Black children the right to attend schools that had long prohibited them, it also resulted in some white families enrolling their children in private schools, moving to the suburbs or redrawing school district boundaries in an effort to resist integration.

Even now, more than half a century after the Brown v. Board decision, efforts are still underway by some wealthy and majority white communities to create their own school districts , and there exists a $23 billion gap between majority white and majority Black school districts out of which spills an array of inequalities.

Today, critical race theory is used by academic scholars – and not just in law schools – to describe how racism is embedded in all aspects of American life, from health care to housing, economics to education, clean water to the criminal justice system and more. Those systems, they argue, have been constructed and protected over generations in ways that give white people advantages – sometimes in ways that are not obvious or deliberately insidious but nonetheless result in compounding disadvantages for Black people and other racial and ethnic minorities.

Many Americans, especially white people, believe racism is the product of intentionally bad and biased individuals, but critical race theory purports that racism is systemic and is inherent in much of the American way of life, no matter how far removed we are today from its origins.

Over the last two decades, academic researchers and policymakers have increasingly focused on issues of equity, linking how systems were established in the U.S. with how and why they serve different groups of people differently.

In education, for example, that effort took off after Congress passed No Child Left Behind, which for the first time required states to disaggregate academic achievement data by race, income and disability status. From there, policymakers began linking the racial makeup of school districts to state and local education funding, or lack thereof, and their broader academic profiles – not just math and reading scores but also access to high quality teachers, Advanced Placement courses, extracurricular activities and school counselors, graduation rates and much more.

Today, policymakers are shining a light on glaring racial gaps in a whole host of domestic policy arenas, and as the country reckons with systemic racism and inequality in the wake of George Floyd's death at the hands of a white police officer, the term critical race theory is having a moment in the sun.

Why Are People Talking About Critical Race Theory and the 1619 Project Right Now?

The term critical race theory began gaining traction in the mainstream two years ago – or notoriety depending on people's outlook – after The New York Times published the 1619 Project , a compilation of essays, commentaries and poems that brought the idea of critical race theory out of academia for the first time by asking readers to center the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans in the country's national narrative.

The project's orchestrator, Nikole Hannah-Jones, won a Pulitzer Prize for the moving personal essay she wrote – the introduction to the package – about her father, a veteran, and why he flew an American flag in their front yard and was proud to be American when what she saw as a little girl was a country that used and then abandoned him.

While the project was widely hailed, it also irked many people who argued that it put ideology before historical accuracy, as well as a handful of prominent academic scholars who challenged some of the package's guiding principles, including that colonists fought the Revolutionary War in order to preserve slavery and that slavery was a uniquely American enterprise.

Political conservatives in particular found the darker portrayal of America's origins and its shortcomings galling, saying that it undercut patriotism and had a divisive effect. Former President Donald Trump found it especially insulting.

"Critical race theory, the 1619 Project and the crusade against American history is toxic propaganda, ideological poison, that, if not removed, will dissolve the civic bonds that tie us together, will destroy our country," he said about it at the time.

Months following the 1619 Project's publication, Trump convened the "1776 Commission" to counter the narrative and develop a "patriotic" curriculum that schools can use to teach U.S. history. The commission published a 41-page report two days before the end of the Trump administration, which concluded, among other things, that progressivism is at odds with American values and recommended that schools teach positive stories about the country's founders.

President Joe Biden disassembled the 1776 Commision on his first day in office and repealed the executive order that pushed schools to adopt the former president's so-called patriotic curriculum, which had unlikely legs anyway, given that under federal law the government is prohibited from setting curriculum or persuading states and local school districts to adopt certain curricula.

Two months later, the Biden administration's Education Department published in its federal register a new proposal to prioritize federal grants for history to proposals that incorporate diverse perspectives. Specifically, the federal register stated: "Projects That Incorporate Racially, Ethnically, Culturally, and Linguistically Diverse Perspectives into Teaching and Learning."

The department includes as an example the 1619 Project's connection to the "growing acknowledgment of the importance of including, in the teaching and learning of our country's history, both the consequences of slavery, and the significant contributions of Black Americans to our society."

For Biden, whose vice president, Kamala Harris, is the first Black person to assume the role and whose Cabinet and high-ranking White House officials include more people of color than any previous administration, the move was more than just symbolic, especially coming on the heels of mass protests over systemic racism and inequality and a pandemic that exacerbated those realities.

What's at Stake, Politically, With Critical Race Theory?

Federal register notices hardly get attention, but congressional Republicans pounced on the item and accused the Biden administration of pushing a divisive and revisionist U.S. history curriculum on schools – though that's not what the federal register notice proposed since the federal government cannot interfere with school curriculum.

In a letter addressed to Education Secretary Miguel Cardona and signed by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and 36 of his Republican colleagues, McConnell argued the Biden administration's efforts are akin to "spoon-feeding students a slanted story."

"Americans do not need or want their tax dollars diverted from promoting the principles that unite our nation toward promoting radical ideologies meant to divide us," McConnell wrote. "Our nation's youth do not need activist indoctrination that fixates solely on past flaws and splits our nation into divided camps. Taxpayer-supported programs should emphasize the shared civic virtues that bring us together, not push radical agendas that tear us apart."

The ping-ponging debate over the foundation of America and how it should be taught in schools comes at a time of national reckoning over the impact of systemic racism and inequality borne out of the country's history of slavery, as well as at moment of legitimate crisis in civics education.

Recent surveys have shown that barely half of Americans can name the three branches of government and that most would earn an "F" on the U.S. citizenship exam. The most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress found that just 15% of eighth-graders are proficient in U.S. history.

Those critical of the push for states and school districts to emphasize a view of U.S. history that examines more deeply the generational impacts of some of the country's ugliest moments argue that it amounts to revisionism and promotes division, negativity and shame in identifying as American. Instead, they say, now is a moment to strengthen the traditional U.S. history curriculum.

Meanwhile, advocates for a reimagined teaching of U.S. history argue that embracing the hard lessons will better equip students to strive for the ideals of democracy on which the country was founded.

When Cardona testified before the House Appropriations Committee last month about the administration's budget request, Republicans grilled him on the proposal in the federal register.

"It's effectively, in my view, jeopardizing civics as a bipartisan priority," said Rep. Tom Cole, Oklahoma Republican who introduced bipartisan legislation with Rep. Rosa DeLauro, Connecticut Democrat, to provide $1 billion in federal aid for civics education.

Cardona told Cole and his Republican colleagues that the Education Department will play no role in setting curriculum but that it's important for students to be able to see themselves and their heritage in the history they learn – a mantra he's repeated in weeks since.

"Students should always see themselves in curriculum," he said.

But the secretary's promises proved not convincing enough. In recent weeks, at least 20 attorneys general co-authored a letter to Cardona that said the federal register proposal would impose "deeply flawed and controversial teachings" on schools and teachers, and a growing number of Republican-controlled states are passing laws prohibiting schools from teaching critical race theory and the 1619 Project.

Where Does Critical Race Theory Go From Here?

Critical race theory is proving to be more than simply the latest and greatest culture war Republicans are using to bolster their base – see here, also, state laws banning transgender athletes from participating in school sports.

Instead of fizzling after a month in national headlines, the issue continues to motivate and energize conservative voters in ways other hot-button topics have not. And its staying power is likely getting a boost from the simultaneous debate over reopening schools for in-person learning amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, which itself has exposed major racial gaps .

In one powerful sign that Republicans will likely propel their opposition of critical race theory into a 2022 campaign issue, it's motivating some conservative parents – again, alongside their support for reopening schools full time – to run for school board seats and drawing a lot of grassroots support.

In fact, a new political action committee, called the "1776 Project," which launched last month, plans to focus on school board races in North Carolina and Florida in hopes of building momentum.

"Help us overturn any teaching of the 1619 Project or critical race theory," its website reads. "Let's bring back Patriotism and Pride in our American History."

Meanwhile, a bill that would provide reparations to descendants of slaves moves through Congress, the president's Cabinet makes a top-to-bottom examination of federal policies and laws that handicap Black people and other racial and enthinic minorities, and Biden himself elevates the Tulsa race massacre to convey its lasting repercussions.

"The Federal Government must reckon with and acknowledge the role that it has played in stripping wealth and opportunity from Black communities," Biden said in Monday's proclamation, before asking the country to "commit together to eradicate systemic racism and help to rebuild communities and lives that have been destroyed by it."

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Tags: education policy , K-12 education , education reform , race , racism , history , The Racial Divide

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• v.100(Suppl 1); Apr 2010

Critical Race Theory, Race Equity, and Public Health: Toward Antiracism Praxis

C. L. Ford originated the commentary and led the writing. C. O. Airhihenbuwa assisted in developing key ideas and in writing the commentary.

Racial scholars argue that racism produces rates of morbidity, mortality, and overall well-being that vary depending on socially assigned race. Eliminating racism is therefore central to achieving health equity, but this requires new paradigms that are responsive to structural racism's contemporary influence on health, health inequities, and research.

Critical Race Theory is an emerging transdisciplinary, race-equity methodology that originated in legal studies and is grounded in social justice. Critical Race Theory's tools for conducting research and practice are intended to elucidate contemporary racial phenomena, expand the vocabulary with which to discuss complex racial concepts, and challenge racial hierarchies.

We introduce Critical Race Theory to the public health community, highlight key Critical Race Theory characteristics (race consciousness, emphases on contemporary societal dynamics and socially marginalized groups, and praxis between research and practice) and describe Critical Race Theory's contribution to a study on racism and HIV testing among African Americans.

ALTHOUGH RACE REMAINS salient to public health in a variety of ways, the field's theoretical and methodological conventions inadequately address the complexity with which structural racism influences both health and the production of knowledge about populations, health, and health disparities. Many projects lack clarity about the nature of racial stratification. They conceptualize, measure, and analyze race- and racism-related factors using tools better suited for studying other risk factors. Although structural forces drive inequities, research and interventions disproportionately emphasize individual and interpersonal mechanisms. Additionally, overconfidence in the objectivity of research can blind investigators to the inadvertent influence of a priori assumptions on research.

Race as a category denoting skin color was first used to classify human bodies by Francois Bernier, a French physician. 1 The notion of racial groupings was introduced in Carolus Linnaeus's Natural History in 1735 and subsequently advanced by many others. 1 Both Linnaeus's concept of race and the subsequent racial groupings devalued and degraded those classified as non-European. 2 Linnaeus's classification became the foundation on which many countries, including the United States, based their racial policies. Later, racialized policies gained “scientific” affirmation in the work of scholars such as Josiah Nott, whose publications reinforcing White supremacy appeared in 1843 in such respected journals as the American Journal of the Medical Sciences .

Prevailing notions about race shaped early scientific research, but because investigators were not critical about their relationships to their racialized social contexts, they were unable to perceive the insidious influence of racism in their work. The contributions of minorities who might have challenged underlying assumptions were largely excluded. Their exclusion buttressed artificially high levels of confidence among researchers about the import and validity of racial findings. Against this backdrop, progressive scholars, many of them racial or ethnic minorities, began to scrutinize knowledge production processes and the implications for minority communities. By the late 20th century, they had begun developing new frameworks such as Critical Race Theory to explicitly account for the influences of racism on both outcomes and research processes.

Gilmore defines racism as “the state-sanctioned and/or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.” 3 (p247) This definition suggests that health for all cannot be achieved if structural racism persists. Eliminating racism, therefore, is part and parcel to achieving the objectives of public health. Table 1 provides definitions of public health and of the Critical Race Theory concepts discussed in this commentary.

Definitions of Public Health and Selected Concepts of Critical Race Theory

Source. Critical Race Theory concepts adapted from Delgado and Stefancic. 5

Critical Race Theory offers the field of public health a new paradigm for investigating the root causes of health disparities. Based on race equity and social justice principles, Critical Race Theory encourages the development of solutions that bridge gaps in health, housing, employment, and other factors that condition living.

The newly developed Public Health Critical Race Framework adapts Critical Race Theory for public health research and practice (Ford CL and Airhihenbuwa CO, unpublished paper, 2009). Our aim here, however, is to introduce Critical Race Theory to the multidisciplinary field of public health and, more specifically, to researchers of health disparities and health equity. We also illustrate its application to empirical research.

In the following section, we discuss the origins of Critical Race Theory, highlighting 4 of its basic features: race consciousness, contemporary orientation, centering in the margins rather than in the mainstream, and praxis (i.e., theory-informed action).

Although the term “theory” appears in its name, Critical Race Theory is not like behavior change or epidemiological theories. Rather, it is an iterative methodology for helping investigators remain attentive to equity while carrying out research, scholarship, and practice. It also urges scholars to work to transform the hierarchies they identify through research.

Critical Race Theory integrates transdisciplinary methodologies that draw on theory, experiential knowledge, and critical consciousness ( Table 1 ) to illuminate and combat root causes of structural racism. It emerged after years of struggle by law students and faculty contesting what they perceived as institutionalized racism in the hiring and curricular decisions of elite law schools. 4 Convinced that their understandings of racial power dynamics diverged in important ways from those of other legal models, they convened a meeting in 1989 at which they enumerated key racial equity principles. They coined the term “Critical Race Theory” to name the emergent set of methodologies that draws on these principles in pursuing racial equity via the law. Persons whose scholarship relies on Critical Race Theory (called critical race theorists) are often described as “a collection of activists and scholars interested in studying and transforming the relationship among race, racism, and power.” 5 (p2)

Over the last 2 decades, Critical Race Theory scholarship has generated a broad transdisciplinary movement toward race equity. Knowledge production is the primary medium through which Critical Race Theory operates. The scholarship distinguishes contemporary racial mechanisms from older ones (e.g., Jim Crowism), expands the vocabulary for discussing racial phenomena and investigating racism effects, and explicitly incorporates the knowledge of racial and ethnic minority communities regarding marginality.

Race Consciousness

Critical Race Theory challenges widely held but erroneous beliefs that “race consciousness” is synonymous with “racism” and that “colorblindness” is synonymous with the absence of racism. 6 Colorblindness, which is both an attitude and a school of thought, posits that nonracial factors (e.g., income) fundamentally explain ostensibly racial phenomena. Although abuses of race-conscious research (such as early eugenics research) have been noted, in truth, both race consciousness and colorblindness can be deployed in ways that contribute to inequities. Only colorblindness, however, precludes explicit examination of racism's potential contributions to inequities. Race consciousness is essential for understanding racialized constructs and mechanisms.

Contemporary Mechanisms

By definition, structural racism evolves across time and contexts. Research on racism should reflect the aspects of racialization that are contemporarily salient. 7 Currently, structural mechanisms continue to have the greatest impacts even though contemporary racism is characterized by its subtlety and ordinariness ( Table 1 ). The Critical Race Theory concept of ordinariness posits that racism is normal and integral to society. Minorities are chronically exposed to diverse forms of everyday racism (e.g., being followed while shopping). In response, they may learn to ignore everyday racism because it occurs so frequently, become adept at detecting it, or become hypervigilant about it, perceiving any unfair treatment as racism. Understanding ordinariness can inform research hypotheses about minorities’ health behaviors and attitudes.

Centering in the Margins

To center in the margins ( Table 1 ) is to shift a discourse's starting point from a majority group's perspective, which is the usual approach, to that of the marginalized group or groups. The position of critical race theorists as “outsiders within” their respective disciplines is valuable in facilitating this process. By grounding themselves in the experiences and perspectives of the minority communities from which they largely come, critical race theorists integrate critical analyses of their lived experiences and disciplinary conventions to advance knowledge on inequities. This synthesis can enhance the relevancy of findings for communities and provide disciplines with fresh perspectives on old problems.

Critical Race Theory is an iterative methodology for helping investigators remain attentive to equity while carrying out research, scholarship, and practice. Community engagement and critical self-reflection enrich research processes, while research based on the lived experiences of marginalized communities provides the communities with more meaningful data for their ongoing efforts toward collective self-improvement.

For years, some public health researchers have employed (implicitly or explicitly) Critical Race Theory approaches to investigate racism, 8 , 9 emphasize the historical and sociopolitical roots of contemporary disparities, 10 – 12 study how the field's conventions may inadvertently constrain movement toward equity, 13 – 15 focus on structural forces, 16 – 19 emphasize the intersectionality of racial and other axes of inequity, 20 , 21 investigate links between White racial identity and inequities, 22 , 23 and use allegory 24 as an antiracism educational tool. Critical Race Theory can contribute the following: a comprehensive framework for connecting these research endeavors, a vocabulary for advancing understandings of racial constructs and phenomena, critical analyses of knowledge production processes, and praxis that builds on community-based participatory approaches linking research, practice, and communities. 25 , 26 To illustrate how Critical Race Theory can inform public health research, we describe in the next section several ways that it informed a study 27 of HIV testing among African Americans. That study, by C. L. Ford et al., purposefully employed Critical Race Theory in its design and in carrying out the research.

APPLICATION OF CRITICAL RACE THEORY

The study was conducted from 2003 to 2005 in an urban area with a high prevalence of HIV. It sought to understand whether racism-related factors are potential barriers to African Americans obtaining readily available, routine HIV testing as recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Routine HIV testing has become the backbone of US HIV prevention because, after more than 2 decades of HIV prevention efforts, prevalence remains elevated. 28 Although African Americans are diagnosed later and have worse prognoses than members of other groups, the factors influencing their HIV testing behaviors are poorly understood. The focus on racism as a potential barrier grew in part out of formative research during which some African Americans reported that discriminatory treatment by clinic staff might be a barrier to HIV testing.

The study's methods and key findings have been described elsewhere. 27 Briefly, we enrolled approximately 400 African Americans presenting to a public health clinic for diagnosis or screening of a sexually transmitted disease. Everyone newly presenting for these purposes was automatically offered HIV testing. Controlling for standard HIV prevention covariates such as perceived HIV risk and patient satisfaction, we examined the contribution of perceived everyday racism to laboratory-confirmed HIV test uptake or decline. As perceived racism may be inversely correlated with segregation, 29 we also accounted for levels of segregation in participants’ residential areas. In the next section, we discuss the relevance of race consciousness, contemporary mechanisms, centering in the margins, and praxis to the study. This discussion is illustrative and does not capture the entirety of Critical Race Theory or all the ways it informed this research.

Conceptual Model

The conceptual model integrated the Andersen access to care model, 30 , 31 which is widely used to examine behavior within clinical settings, a socioecological framework, 32 and Critical Race Theory concepts. Figure 1 shows the backbone of Andersen's model, which we adapted to specify variables for inclusion ( Figure 2 ). In Andersen's model, race typically is considered a population characteristic that predisposes one toward particular behavior(s). According to Critical Race Theory, however, race is socially constructed. It is less a risk factor itself than a marker of risk for racism-related exposures. Race is useful in that it enables the identification of persons at risk for exposures that vary by racial category (e.g., discrimination). We removed race from the model as a manipulable variable, limited the sample to African Americans, and incorporated 2 racism variables: perceived everyday racism (individual level) and residential segregation (neighborhood level). Removing race from the model shifted the focus from how Black race might influence behaviors to how the racialized experiences of African Americans might do so.

Andersen's access to care model.

Note . Andersen's model 30 , 31 goes beyond behavioral outcomes to examine health outcomes.

Adaptation of Andersen's access to care model 30 , 31 used as the study's conceptual model.

Robert Brackman allied the independent spirit of his young subject with the future of the whole country, titling his portrait of her “Somewhere in America.” From the recent Smithsonian American Art Museum exhibition, “1934: A New Deal for Artists.” Printed with permission. Image courtesy of the Smithsonian Art Museum.

Race consciousness ( Table 1 ) informed all aspects of the project, including development of the conceptual model. Race consciousness suggested that considering the racialized social context of African Americans would be germane to research on their HIV preventive behaviors given their historical experiences with the health care system and stigma linking HIV and Black race. Social construction suggests that different racial groups experience the social environment differently. We conceptualized social contexts as racialized at the individual, clinical, and residential levels and sought to explain African Americans’ experiences of their social contexts. Limiting the study to African Americans contrasts with typical approaches that compare groups, making the underlying question, “How do African Americans differ from Whites?” 15 Our within-group design encouraged exploration of the diversity of perceptions, experiences, and attitudes among African Americans. 15 , 33 , 34

The study controlled for standard explanatory factors (e.g., perceived HIV risk) to focus on racism-related contributions. Drawing on race consciousness, the investigators first enumerated salient aspects of contemporary racism (e.g., its ubiquity, multilevel nature, etc.) and applied these broad characteristics to Andersen's model. This led to the individual-level focus on perceived everyday racism rather than on the extreme forms of racism (e.g., HIV conspiracy beliefs) previously examined.

A key characteristic of contemporary racism is its subtlety and ordinariness. Ordinariness suggests that constant, chronic exposure to seemingly minor insults (e.g., being followed while shopping) may have lasting impacts on one's health. Ordinariness reinforced the decision to operationalize the main individual-level explanatory factor as perceived everyday racism. Everyday racism is an integral element of the social environment. We conceptualized everyday racism as a ubiquitous aspect of the social environment and perceived everyday racism as individuals’ detection of it.

The study was motivated in part by extensive outreach conducted among community residents. Critical self-awareness, especially regarding personal privilege and racial relations, informed team members’ interactions with community members, study participants, and other research project staff. For instance, throughout the research process, members of the research team noted ways that their identities (especially with regard to race) and social positions (e.g., educational attainment) could influence power dynamics in their interactions with participants or recruits.

Through critical self-consciousness, 1 member of the research team realized that she considered her racial identity (African American) to be more important than her other identities (e.g., class), which led her to hold a priori assumptions (e.g., that she and study participants held similar views). By identifying these assumptions and their potential implications early on, she prevented their inadvertent influences on the research process (e.g., data collection or data interpretation) and derived more accurate assessments of the nature of her interactions with community members. For some recruits and participants, her affiliation with a predominantly White institution was a major source of distrust and was more salient than her race. Challenging power differentials is central to Critical Race Theory. Her critical self-consciousness helped her to do just that by attending to intraracial power imbalances throughout the research process.

Together, critical consciousness and race consciousness ( Table 1 ) helped the project remain oriented toward race equity. Because all research is produced within and in relation to social contexts that may inadvertently influence research, 35 , 36 this grounding in equity heightened awareness of the power imbalances between academic institutions and the communities in which they conduct research. We attempted to redress these imbalances throughout the research process. For instance, African American community members were recruited and trained as research assistants even though doing so was more expensive and labor intensive than hiring student research assistants.

The project was attentive to the ways that researchers may be personally affected by racism while studying it. In an arm of the study that entailed phoning a probability sample of residents based on a sampling frame derived from telephone directory white pages, interviewers sometimes reached non–African Americans who, ineligible for the study, responded to the interviewers with hostility. Staff debriefed after such incidents. Research staff also read literature on racism and race, discussed their personal experiences with and perceptions about racism, and regularly checked in with each other during the data collection period.

Analyses and Interpretations

The choice of analytic technique—logistic regression with generalized estimating equations (GEE)—followed from the conceptual model in which perceived racism occurs within racialized social environments. Critical Race Theory was relevant to the analyses in that it informed the conceptual model and interpretations of the study's findings. As in other recent studies, 37 , 38 our findings suggested that despite perceiving everyday racism, African Americans at high risk for HIV transmission actively engage in primary preventive behaviors. 27 On the basis of the Critical Race Theory concept “centering in the margins,” our report of the findings included the strengths on which members of marginalized communities may draw.

One objective of Critical Race Theory is to go beyond merely documenting disparities. Therefore, we included policy and practice implications in the published findings and shared the findings with community members, frontline public health professionals (e.g., outreach workers, clinic staff), and study participants.

CONCLUSIONS

We have introduced Critical Race Theory, a race equity methodology that originated in legal studies, to the public health community, and described several ways that Critical Race Theory informed a study of racism and HIV testing among African Americans. Four Critical Race Theory concepts—race consciousness, contemporary orientation, centering in the margins, and praxis—were central to that study. Critical Race Theory has been adapted for use in several fields, including education and gender studies. Public health's tradition of championing social justice issues suggests that Critical Race Theory can provide powerful new tools for targeting racial and ethnic health inequities. To facilitate appropriate and systematic use of Critical Race Theory within public health, Ford and Airhihenbuwa developed the Public Health Critical Race Framework (unpublished paper, 2009). That framework and the Critical Race Theory concepts introduced here build on the growing public health momentum toward achieving health equity.

Acknowledgments

This project received support from the W. K. Kellogg Foundation Kellogg Health Scholars Program (P0117943) and the UCLA AIDS Institute and Center for AIDS Research.

We acknowledge Peter Ford, JD, and Phyllis M. Autry for their contributions regarding Critical Race Theory, Kara Keeling for rich conversations on this topic, and 2 anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback.

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What the hysteria over critical race theory is really all about

Conservatives have launched a growing disinformation campaign around the academic concept. It’s an attempt to push back against progress.

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Watching the news or browsing social media, it would be easy to think that critical race theory is a complicated, controversial, or new idea.

But critical race theory, created four decades ago by legal scholars, is an academic framework for examining how racism is embedded in America’s laws and institutions. It is just now receiving widespread attention because it has morphed into a catchall category, one used by Republicans who want to ban anti-racist teachings and trainings in classrooms and workplaces across the country.

Over the past six months, Republicans in more than two dozen states have proposed bills that aim to stymie educational discussions about race, racism, and systemic oppression in the US — potentially eliminating the conversations altogether.

It all began as racial justice protests took off across the country in the summer of 2020 and a Fox News story fashioned critical race theory as a boogeyman. Though the school of thought had been relatively obscure outside of academia, a conservative campaign was launched against it, and by September, then-President Donald Trump had signed an executive order restricting implicit bias and diversity trainings by government agencies. His exit from office didn’t put an end to the assault on critical race theory, though — it only amplified it.

By January, GOP lawmakers began quietly drafting and introducing bills that mirrored one another in an effort to stop schools from teaching about racism or any topics that confront America’s history of racial and gender oppression. While they don’t all name critical race theory — which in and of itself is not being taught in many, if any, K-12 schools — the new state bills rest on the same foundation: the desire to broadly stop teaching and training on “divisive concepts.”

Many focus on public grade schools, while some target community colleges, universities, state government entities, contracts, grant recipients, and private schools. A bulk of the bills include vague language, calling for a ban on what they call “race and sex stereotyping” or “race or sex scapegoating,” meaning they want to stop instruction that makes “value judgments” that lead to, for example, white men writing apology letters, as Russell Vought, a conservative activist whose organization has written model legislation for these bills, told Vox.

Some bills specifically want to prevent the teaching of the New York Times’s 1619 Project — a sweeping collection of essays and literary works that center Black Americans’ founding contributions to the country via enslavement — which conservatives have scrutinized since it was first published in 2019. Others reflect calls by Trump for “patriotic education,” or instruction that doesn’t stray from the traditional telling of American history (think: the American Revolution, Thomas Jefferson, and the fight to make the greatest country in the world).

Together, the bills amount to a Republican scare tactic and disinformation campaign, and critical race theory has in some circles become a dog whistle that communicates resistance toward racial justice progress.

So far, about 10 of these bills have passed through state legislatures, and about two dozen others are in committee; several have died. Even though legal experts told Vox that many of these bills are likely to be shot down on free speech grounds, hysteria around the term “critical race theory” has already caused chaos in local school boards, at community colleges, and for educators who want to teach students all of American history — even the parts about systemic oppression that may cause discomfort.

“When you’re really serious about addressing a problem, the last thing you do is punish people for building the tools to see the problem, to analyze the problem, and to develop the capacity to remove the problem,” legal scholar and founding critical race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw told Vox. “You can’t fix a problem that you can’t name. Racism is a problem in the United States, and conservatives don’t want us to name it because they are uncomfortable with it.”

What critical race theory actually is

Critical race theory emerged in law schools in the 1970s and ’80s as an alternative to the mainstream discourse and classes on civil rights law, many of which held that the best way to fight racial discrimination was to enact legal reforms. According to the doctrine of the time, when these reforms took root, they would eventually phase out racial discrimination. Critical race theorists saw this as a surface-level understanding of the role of race and racism in the law and instead posited that racism is endemic and institutionalized in the United States. For example, one legal reform can’t undo decades of housing discrimination that have kept Black people out of the housing market, nor can one bill end the health care inequities that created poor health outcomes for Indigenous communities .

Critical race theory also highlighted how, even when the law changed to increase racial equity, institutions disrupted the intentions of those laws and tried to get around them, Laura Gomez, a University of California Los Angeles law professor who co-founded the school’s critical race studies program in 2000, told Vox. At its core, critical race theory identifies this dynamic: When the country takes two steps forward in the name of progress, racist forces push it a step back.

The late Harvard professor Derrick Bell is credited with establishing critical race theory through his publications and groundbreaking course Race, Racism, and American Law. The academic concept was further cemented in 1993 when a group of legal scholars — Mari Matsuda, Charles R. Lawrence III, Richard Delgado, and Crenshaw — published a seminal book on the theory, Words That Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, and the First Amendment . “Individual law teachers and students committed to racial justice began to meet, to talk, to write, and to engage in political action in an effort to confront and oppose dominant societal and institutional forces that maintained the structures of racism while professing the goal of dismantling racial discrimination,” the authors wrote.

In addition to claiming that racism is endemic to American society, the authors put forth five tenets of critical race theory.

• First, the group was skeptical of legal theories that supported colorblindness, objectivity, and neutrality, which created an “abstracted story of racial inequality as a series of randomly occurring, intentional, and individualized acts.” In other words, the scholars wanted the legal field to think of racism on a scale much larger than one-to-one interactions; racism could never be a random act because race was socially constructed for the purpose of oppression. To be objective is to support the status quo, and thus the country isn’t working to actively redress racial inequities.
• Second, the scholars stated that every analysis of the law should be grounded in historical context, arguing that “racism has contributed to all contemporary manifestations of group advantage and disadvantage along racial lines, including differences in income, imprisonment, health, housing, education, political representation, and military service.” For example, the Black-white wealth gap — which exists because Black people have historically been excluded from wealth-building measures like homeownership — hasn’t changed since researchers started collecting related data more than 50 years ago; the typical white family is almost 10 times wealthier than the average Black one .
• Third, the theorists wrote that critical race theory acknowledges, values, and centers the knowledge of people of color who experience racism daily.
• Next, the scholars noted that critical race theory is “interdisciplinary and eclectic,” meaning it borrowed from a number of traditions like feminism, Marxism, and critical legal theory. The thinkers argued that a combination of these ideas only strengthened their framework.
• Lastly, they identified critical race theory’s goal: eliminating racial oppression as a step toward eliminating all oppression. “The interests of all people of color necessarily require not just adjustments within the established hierarchies, but a challenge to hierarchy itself.”

With this foundation, critical race theory has informed many disciplines, from education to political science to sociology, moving scholars across the country to investigate how race and racism impact their fields.

“Critical race theory is not one coherent school of thought. It’s simply an effort to confront our history of race and racism and to give us a capacity to think about what its implications are today,” Crenshaw said.

Over time, even before the recent wave of GOP bills, critical race theory has faced pushback from both conservative and liberal scholars. Liberals held that race couldn’t be theorized in relation to the law since it’s a social construct (critical race theorists countered that class was also a construct that has legal ramifications). Conservatives held that critical race theorists were taking their analysis too far, with remedies for problems like segregation turning white people into the victims.

For decades, critical race theory — and discussions and criticisms of it — have mostly been relegated to higher education, with students studying the concept in college- and graduate-level courses. It’s not, despite what the Republican bills would have their constituents believe, being discussed in many elementary or high school classrooms. What has changed over the past year, though, is the growing conservative fear that schools and educators may want to reexamine what perspectives have been traditionally left out of American history lessons.

What critical race theory has come to stand for

Credit former President Donald Trump and Fox News TV personality Tucker Carlson for the new wave of attention to critical race theory.

The backlash began last summer as America was trying to reckon with racism in the wake of the police killings of Black Americans including Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, and millions of people in major cities and small towns protested for racial justice and helped change public opinion about racism . Organizations pledged to be anti-racist. The Merriam-Webster dictionary even changed the definition of racism to include how it is systemic. Events of the summer set off what appeared to be a sea change ahead of a pivotal presidential election.

In July, a month after the height of the protests, Fox News began airing segments featuring conservative activist and Manhattan Institute senior fellow Christopher F. Rufo, who on Twitter claimed that he was uncovering a new “cultural revolution” that was being carried out through corporate HR, government diversity trainings, and public school curriculums.

The City of Seattle held a training session for white employees called “Interrupting Internalized Racial Superiority and Whiteness.” So I did a public records request to find out exactly what this means. Let's go through it together in this thread. — Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) July 6, 2020

Later in the summer, he told Tucker Carlson that he was “declaring a one-man war against critical race theory in the federal government, and I’m not going to stop these investigations until we can abolish it within our public institutions.” He pointed to a total of six training sessions or programs in federal departments that told attendees that America was “founded on racism” and “built on the backs of people who were enslaved,” and that white people “benefit from racism.”

“My goal is simple: to persuade the President of the United States to issue an executive order abolishing critical race theory in the federal government,” he tweeted . Rufo appeared on Carlson’s show once more on September 2, and two days later, Trump issued an executive order banning federal contractors from conducting racial sensitivity trainings, emphasizing his desire to stop “efforts to indoctrinate government employees with divisive and harmful sex- and race-based ideologies.”

Russell Vought, the Office of Management and Budget director at the time, also released a memo instructing federal agencies to identify any critical race theory and white privilege training within their departmental training plans in an effort to stop funding any and all programming that suggests the “United States is an inherently racist or evil country.”

Conservative media celebrated the document as a win; in response to a Breitbart article about the memo, Trump tweeted on September 5: “This is a sickness that cannot be allowed to continue. Please report any sightings so we can quickly extinguish!” The Labor Department also launched a hotline to solicit complaints about training programs that violated the executive order.

Immediately after being sworn into office, President Joe Biden rescinded Trump’s order, but the action became fuel for Republicans looking to abolish critical race theory and discredit the 1619 Project as part of their policy platforms. Since Biden’s inauguration, at least two dozen states have put related bills on the books.

“We’ve made a lot of progress,” Vought told me on a call. “Bills are popping up all over the place in areas where we have Republican governors and legislatures.”

Vought’s organization, the Center for Renewing America, along with others like the Heritage Foundation and the American Legislative Exchange Council, have created model legislation for lawmakers and school boards to adopt, released toolkits, and held webinars to strengthen the backlash against a problem they created.

At the federal level, Vought has partnered with North Carolina Rep. Dan Bishop to try to codify Trump’s executive order. Sens. Tom Cotton, Marsha Blackburn, and Mitch McConnell have also reintroduced the Saving American History Act, legislation that would block federal funds from going to schools teaching the 1619 Project.

Vought told Vox that critical race theory is a top issue for his firm because it’s important to push back against the “false” idea that America is a systemically racist country, curb approaches that make value judgments about white people, and put a stop to the kinds of trainings that have gotten white male participants to write apology letters to women and people of color.

But critical race theory and racial justice advocates say that the GOP bills are just in search of a problem that doesn’t exist. In Georgia, where the state board of education recently approved a resolution to stop the teaching of “divisive ideologies,” it was reported that there have been no known plans to implement the discipline in the state’s classrooms. In Missouri, where lawmakers have pursued three separate bans, academics noted that critical race theory is not widely taught in schools; the same is true for Kansas and many other states.

The conservative website Critical Race Training in Education , launched by a Cornell Law School professor, aims to track implementation of critical race theory but doesn’t offer direct evidence of critical race theory being taught in K-12 schools. A statement on the website says, “Our database does not yet cover primary or secondary schools” because critical race theory education at that level is “significantly more difficult to track.”

Gomez likens the obsession with critical race theory to the “ debate ” about transgender people and public bathrooms. “It was an issue that didn’t affect large numbers of people, but right-wing media and social media decided that it was a legitimate and dangerous issue,” Gomez said.

Since March, Fox News has mentioned “critical race theory” nearly 1,300 times, according to an analysis by Media Matters. In March, Rufo, the man who spearheaded much of the outcry, declared a victory on Twitter: “We have successfully frozen their brand — ‘critical race theory’ — into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category.”

More data on Fox News mentions of critical race theory shows a dramatic rise over this year: https://t.co/i5tDn1Aqrr — Matt Grossmann (@MattGrossmann) June 15, 2021

The less people understand an issue, the more leeway there is for the GOP to gin up controversy, as Gomez points out. What the fight against critical race theory really shows is how Republicans are threatened by the progress that has been made with respect to racial justice and are uncomfortable with what it might actually look like to confront and eradicate racism.

“The strategy basically takes an academic concept that’s been around for three decades and suddenly turns it into an existential crisis in American politics,” said Crenshaw. Republicans “filled it with any kind of meaning — with the worst nightmares of those who believe that the American republic has turned their backs on them, that they’re seeking to replace them, that no one cares about them,” and then created “a scare tactic around it that works because there hasn’t been much conversation and critical thinking about race in the public square.”

Crenshaw says that those who have the most to lose in classroom bans against race discussions are children of color, who often don’t learn about their histories or aren’t given a fundamental understanding about oppression in school. “To preserve the idea that the past doesn’t shape the future, they are willing to heap on to current generations of students of color a story that explains how our communities have been situated in American society,” Crenshaw said of opponents of critical race theory. “That is an affront to this generation and future generations and an intolerable dimension of this assault.”

Even if the bills do pass, they are likely to be killed in court, as the states are discriminating by singling out viewpoints that they disagree with, Amber Koonce, a human rights attorney with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, told Vox. The bills also possibly violate the equal protection of the laws since they prevent employers from complying with Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by banning workplace diversity trainings.

Regardless of their viability, the bills and the discussion around them have already captured the media’s attention, caused confusion as to what critical race theory actually is, and are now having a chilling effect at some educational institutions. In Oklahoma, a community college paused its fully enrolled summer course on race and ethnicity over fears of legal trouble. In Nevada, where critical race theory hysteria is only just beginning, a conservative group suggested that teachers wear body cameras to ensure they’re not teaching critical race theory. In Loudoun County, Virginia, a group of conservative parents is attempting to recall school board members after the district required teacher training in “systemic oppression and implicit bias.”

Ultimately, the controversy over critical race theory exemplifies a tenet of the theory itself: Any racial progress will be met with great resistance.

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critical race theory

Frequently asked questions.

To help you learn more about Critical Race Theory (CRT), LDF has compiled answers to the most frequently asked questions about critical race theory. This resource also includes information on the laws banning critical race theory and racial justice discourse being enacted across the country and how they fit into a larger effort to suppress the voice, history, and political participation of Black Americans. 

Critical Race Theory, or CRT , is an academic and legal framework that denotes that systemic racism is part of American society — from education and housing to employment and healthcare. Critical Race Theory recognizes that racism is more than the result of individual bias and prejudice. It is essentially an academic response to the erroneous notion that American society and institutions are “colorblind.”

Critical Race Theory recognizes that racism is embedded in laws, policies and institutions that uphold and reproduce racial inequalities. According to CRT, societal issues like Black Americans’ higher mortality rate, outsized exposure to police violence, the school-to-prison pipeline, denial of affordable housing, and the death rates of Black women in childbirth are not unrelated anomalies.

The scholarly framework holds that racism goes far beyond just individually held prejudices, and that it is in fact a systemic phenomenon woven into the laws and institutions of this nation. A cursory review of U.S. history — or even just news headlines from 2020, where far too many examples of police brutality and violence against Black people propelled a historic racial justice movement — proves the truth of this theory. The classroom itself, currently the focal point of the ongoing fight to suppress uncomfortable truths about America, has traditionally been the site of some of this nation’s most egregious acts of state sponsored racism. This includes segregation, which theLDF has been at the forefront of challenging since our founder and the first Black Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall successfully litigated Brown v. Board of Education   in the 1950s.

Critical Race Theory was first developed by legal scholars in the 1970s and ‘80s following the Civil Rights Movement. It was, in part, a response to the notion that society and institutions were “colorblind.” CRT holds that racism was not and has never been eradicated from our laws, policies, or institutions, and is still woven into the fabric of their existence.

Critical Race Theory should be embraced as a framework to develop laws and policies that can dismantle structural inequities and systemic racism. Building a more equitable future requires an examination of how the shameful history of slavery, caste, and systemic racism were foundational to laws and institutions that exist today.

• Bans on any discussion or teaching that the United States is inherently or fundamentally racist. 
• Bans on what legislatures have deemed “divisive concepts,” including white supremacy, male privilege, white privilege, equity, unconscious or implicit bias systemic racism. However, the bans lack context, definitions, or examples of the ways they are being taught.
• Requirements to teach “without giving deference to any one perspective” and provide a counter narrative or opposing view of anything being taught.
• Ban discussions of systemic racism and sexism that would “discriminate,” “hurt feelings” or make someone feel “guilty” about their skin color.
• Drastic limits and funding cuts for anti-bias trainings and diversity and inclusion initiatives for students and teachers.
• Provisions allowing the state to withhold funding for schools that violate the bans.

Former President Trump’s “ Executive Order on Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping” issued in September 2020 became the blueprint for states to craft their own bans on truth. Many of the same vague “divisive concepts” banned in the Executive Order reappear in current state legislation. Many state laws also include provisions that establish financial penalties for noncompliance and threaten to cut state funding of schools that disobey the bans.

In the Executive Order, former President Trump directed federal agencies to end trainings related to the discussion of inequality, critical race theory or other forms of what he labeled “propaganda.” It went so far as to establish a McCarthy-esque hotline for people to report on the behavior of others. A few months later, a federal judge later blocked the directive and the Biden Administration has since rescinded the Order.

Critical Race Theory is primarily taught at the secondary and post-secondary levels. However, many states have enacted laws banning CRT in elementary or high schools and laws that could restrict what students can learn and silence conversations about our history. These laws have already had a chilling effect .

Classrooms are again being used as a cudgel to silence the voices and deny the experiences of Black people and other historically marginalized groups in America. Many of these laws and measures effectively put severe restrictions on how American history and issues such as school segregation can be taught or even discussed in classrooms. Many of these measures broadly censor conversations about racism by framing the subject itself as “divisive” and “harmful,” and at least a dozen of these laws have already gone into effect. Even more worryingly, several state legislatures have a staggering and ever-growing   number of anti-truth bills. Several states and districts have begun banning books.

The term “critical race theory” has been co-opted by opponents as a catch-all and rallying cry to silence any discussions about systemic racism, ban the truthful teaching of American history, and reverse progress toward racial justice. The term has been unjustifiably used to include all diversity and inclusion efforts, race-conscious policies, and education about racism, whether or not they draw from CRT. Attempts to ban CRT are really attacks on free speech, on discussions about the truthful history of race and racism in the U.S., and the lived experiences of Black people and other people of color. 

Lawmakers and proponents of the bans insist they are advocating for a balanced and “patriotic” education. However, these bans do the exact opposite: deny the truth about our nation’s history, silence dissent, and punish those who speak the truth to counter whitewashed falsehoods.

After the historic 2020 election, which included record turnout among Black voters, states passed the strictest voting laws in decades. When millions of people took to the streets to protest police violence, states responded by passing laws criminalizing protest. Now, as individuals across the country, of all races and backgrounds, are coming to recognize the history of systemic racism and its ongoing impact, states are responding by attempting to silence discussions of these issues. The bans are part of a coordinated backlash to the realization of a true multi-racial democracy in America.

Bans on “critical race theory” are bans on truth and history. Critical Race Theory is not taught in K-12 schools. These laws seek to ban the teaching of a true American history and all of its racist elements. These laws ban virtually any discussions about how racism has shaped our nation’s policies and history- from education and housing to employment and healthcare. Ultimately, these laws are blanket bans on racial discourse and attempt to deny our nation’s shameful legacy of racial oppression. These bans are attacks on free speech that silence those who speak the truth about our nation’s history. 

The vast majority of school board members are elected officials who have power over school policy decisions, budgets, programming, resource allocation, curriculum, and faculty tenure. They have the power to vote down or institute school district policies, programs, and budgets. Currently, unprecedented numbers of mostly white parents are attending meetings to demand that school boards use their power to ban the teaching of so-called “critical race theory” in schools. 

Recent efforts to ban racial justice discourse are part of a long American history of backlash in response to demands for educational equity. Laws banning racial justice discourse are attacks on all students’ right to a fair, full, and truthful education about their country and their communities. Members of school boards must use their influence to resist bans on truth and defend the rights of teachers and students to discuss race in a classroom setting. Lo cal elections have the power to shape the future of your school district. Learn more about local elections and candidates at Vote.org.

Former President Trump’s Executive Order, and the attacks on racial discourse that followed, emerged after the publication of The 1619 Project by the New York Times. The landmark journalism series published in 2019 aimed to tell a more complete story of slavery’s role in shaping America and the lasting effects of enslavement. Many states specifically banned The 1619 Project as an example of “teaching or discussing that the U.S. is inherently racist.”

The 1619 Project was conceived by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones. In April 2021, Ms. Hannah-Jones accepted the appointment as Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism at University of North Carolina. In an unprecedented decision, the university’s Board of Trustees voted to deny her tenure. The decision was a clear retaliation against Ms. Hannah-Jones for her leadership on The 1619 Project and the result of a campaign by conservative activists to discredit her work. More broadly, it was an attempt to silence those who speak the truth about our nation’s history of race and racism.

LDF represents Ms. Hannah-Jones in connection with the Board’s failure to consider and approve the faculty recommendation of tenure. Read Ms. Hannah-Jones’ statement regarding her decision to decline the eventual tenure offer at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and to instead accept a Knight Chair appointment at Howard University here .

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LDF is at the forefront of the fight to ensure that America lives up to the ideals of justice and equality for all. The right to free expression and the right to vote are cornerstones of our democracy. Through litigation, public advocacy, and community organizing, LDF and coalition partners are fighting back to protect truth. LDF is working to protect truth in education in Texas , Alabama and South Carolina . All three states introduced legislation that could threaten truthful and honest discussions of history in classrooms , universities, and state agencies. 

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Justice Above All Podcast

Outside influence, the origins of anti-crt mania.

Dr. Kesha Moore unpacks the anti-truth movement and the coordinated attempts to censor the accurate teaching of American history. Justice Above All  is joined by Katrina Feldkamp, Assistant Counsel for the Legal Defense Fund and Anya and Raven, two student leaders in the  Southlake  Anti-Racism Coalition. 

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