The other day a relative of mine who lives in another city saw a woman outside the local school district office holding a sign saying, “No CRT.” My relative considered getting out of the vehicle to interview her, to see if she understood what CRT really was.
Critical race theory (CRT) is not an easy thing to wrap one’s head around. It’s a complicated conceptual framework, with origins lying in the legal discipline in the 1970s. It has since branched out to influence other disciplines, including mine. It is certainly not something that I can easily define in a 600-word column, but I’ll try my best.
CRT fundamentally acknowledges that this country was built using the labor of black slaves, and that fact cannot be erased, no matter how progressive we deem our own beliefs and practices, no matter how color blind we proclaim to be. CRT asserts that no one is color blind, and racism is as ordinary and mundane as summers in Tucson that top 100 degrees. I notice race, you notice race, and that simple fact informs our thoughts and behavior.
And maybe those thoughts and behaviors are good, like “I’ll be nice and give this guy a fair interest rate,” or, as in my case recently, “I’ll let this student resubmit a paper so that she has a chance to earn an A.”
Or maybe they are bigoted, as in the scenario where my husband, who has a dark complexion, jokingly asked a customer why he was wearing such an enormous hat: “So that my skin doesn’t look like yours.”
CRT is something that tries to explain why Black people consistently pay more for cars, loans, and houses. It tries to explain why Black people have a lower average salary and life expectancy. It tries to explain why my Black friend tensed up when she drove past a police cruiser because she drove “such a nice car,” she once told me. The car here was a Toyota Highlander, lacking scrapes, dents, and other markers of poverty.
The important thing to note is that nobody is teaching this in our K-12 schools. As our new Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson hinted in her confirmation hearings when she discussed encountering the subject in law school, our kids wouldn’t study it until college, though more probably, graduate school.
Now, CRT is something that can guide our thinking, meaning that it may guide books and other productions, like the book “Racist Baby” that Ted Cruz held up in the hopes of branding Jackson a liberal nut (she sat on the board of a school that included this book in its curriculum). Cruz’s question, “Are babies racist?” was a bit of demagoguery that it seems CRT writ large has been used to advance.
CRT may also guide the teaching philosophy of our kids’ teachers, and that is a good thing! We need more teachers informed by CRT! A teacher guided by this theory would be thoughtful, and present a diverse blend of reading materials and learning activities. Such a teacher wouldn’t neglect the subjects of science or math, but would subtly inform students that race is a socially constructed category and challenge them to work for real justice. Such a teacher would teach historical facts so as to avoid going back to dark chapters of history.
And had such a teacher touched the life of a certain white supremacist, he wouldn’t have driven to a predominantly black neighborhood in Buffalo in a racist fury and murdered 10 people. Ten people! With families and loved ones who are assuredly grieving in the familiar injustice this country has subjected people of color to. I can only imagine such grief.
Meanwhile, some people are up in arms over an acronym. To those people I say, wake up. CRT is not the enemy.