Strong Medicine: What Is Critical Race Theory and Why Are Some People So Mad at It?
What Is Critical Race Theory and Why Are Some People So Mad at It?
We talked to experts who have the answers.
https://www.snopes.com/news/2021/05/27/what-is-critical-race-theory/?utm_source=piano&utm_medium=onsite&utm_campaign=929
Bethania Palma
Published 27 May 2021
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Critical race theory is a discipline developed by legal scholars decades ago, and it is primarily taught in law school. It looks to the law for answers as to why racial inequality persists even as American founding documents and aspirational ideals vaunt equality, and after the civil rights movement brought about landmark legislation aimed at ending racism de jure.
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Basically, Bridges explains, critical race theory scholarship considers race to be a social construct and racial inequality the norm in American society, not a deviation from the norm. Bridges wrote:
Prior to the advent of CRT [critical race theory], most in the legal academy had embraced the idea that norms of fairness, equality, and justice guided the law. Accordingly, they found it difficult to contemplate that the law could be involved in creating a society that, racially speaking, is unfair, unequal, and unjust. The intellectual forefather of CRT, Derrick Bell, was one of the first to challenge this view. Bell, the first black tenured professor at Harvard Law School, devoted his scholarship to exploring how it came to be that black people remained at the bottom of practically every measure of social well-being, even though the Civil Rights Movement had forced the passage of laws that ostensibly were designed to end black people’s subordination. Bell concluded that racial inequality endured in a post civil rights era because, among other things, the vision of racial justice that civil rights lawyers had championed was a weak and impoverished one. The result was that the civil rights laws that had been passed, which reflected this vision, were equally weak and impoverished. Thus, Bell argued that if racial inequality persisted in a post-civil rights era, then the law was central to explaining that persistence.
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Meaning, Crenshaw said, that critical race theory “takes seriously the idea that race is not a biological difference. There are not inherent differences in how people across races are constituted. Race is not real, it’s socially constructed.”
And since there are no inherent differences in how human beings are constituted, Crenshaw said, then there must be another explanation for the material differences in the quality of life of people by race.
Critical race theory challenges the idea that racism exists only in silos like the Ku Klux Klan or individual acts of bigotry. Instead, the theory argues, racism is embedded in the system and enabled by the law. By interrogating how it lives on in the law, critical race theorists hope to help undo racism.
“In our society, the highest court in the land said Black people were so inferior they could never be citizens, and indigenous people could be removed from their own land,” Crenshaw said. “These were two conditions of possibilities; the theft of labor and the theft of land, that were foundational to the American republic and they were embedded in our laws.”
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“Critical race theory is strongest at explaining how broader systems interact — how do racism and classism get embedded and institutionalized in the health care system, or the legal system, or the educational system, or whatever word you wart to put in front of ‘system,'” Berrey added.
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She pointed out that even though critical race theory is hardly new, it only became a prevalent talking point after millions of people of all races took to the streets calling for racial justice after Floyd’s murder. She called the backlash the weaponizing of lies.
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“This is not about a particular theory. This is about whether we will continue to talk about racism in our schools,” or whether we will have “the censoring of racial discourse for generations to come,” Crenshaw said. “We’re not going to allow ideas to be canceled, and we’re not going to shrink in the face of who we have been. To become the country we really need to be, we have to be strong enough to confront our history.”
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I support this 100%. I hated the title, but it asks the one question I've always had once I became aware of racism: if we're all the same, what is it that separates some of us into 'others'?
I also admit: my first reaction was I was going to be picked on.
= new reply since forum marked as read
