ITS A CLASS FOR ADULTS

A look inside Mississippi's only critical race theory class and an unlikely ally

By Giselle Rhoden, Nick Valencia and Jade Gordon, 
CNN - Yesterday

Three weeks ago, Brittany Murphree enrolled in Law 743, a unique class for the University of Mississippi. Despite the skepticism from fellow Republican friends and family, the second-year law student wanted to take the class "to see what it's all about."

"Honestly, I love it," Murphree told CNN. She feels very respected as a White, Republican student in a class on critical race theory, the first of which to be taught in the state of Mississippi.

Critical race theory (CRT) has become a political and social lightning rod with several states banning the concept in the last year. Educators insist that CRT is generally not included in grade school curriculum. The concept is usually taught in graduate-level courses like the one Murphree enrolled in this semester.

Yvette Butler, the professor of Law 743, said CRT was born from the legal academy in the 1980s to analyze and understand why racial inequality still exists despite the aftermath of the civil rights movement.

It acknowledges that racism is both systemic and institutional in American society and that White people have historically held racial power.

Murphree said many Republicans believe CRT is inherently designed to make White people the enemy, but she said she is learning the opposite. She said the class opened her eyes to new perspectives from a theoretical lens.

"We basically study different theories analyzing race and the law and how it applies to our country," she said. "I thought the whole class would be like criticizing White people, but we didn't really even mention White people."

'Another way of looking at the world'

Butler wants others to know her course is simply another class on theoretical framework. It's not meant to shame White people for the discrimination their ancestors may have inflicted on a marginalized group.

"The point isn't to focus on shame and the past," she said. "The point is to say, 'OK, all we want to do is reckon with how the law has been used to perpetuate inequality and how can we get creative about fixing that.'"

Law 743 is designed to give "a full picture of what racial inequality looks like," specifically from a law perspective, Butler said, and to have students think critically.

Her students learn about racial issues beyond just Black and White. Butler emphasizes how important it is for her law students to have access to all aspects of thought from a variety of viewpoints. Analyzing how the justice system has dealt with different marginalized groups is what her class intends to do, she said.


© CNN

Professor Yvette Butler teaches critical race theory at the University of Mississippi.

In the class, Butler often applies CRT to current events, such as the racial reckoning in the summer of 2020.

Those moments of racial injustice are the same events that Butler said furthered the backlash against CRT.


© CNN

University of Mississippi Law School Student Brittany Murphree

Last month, the Mississippi Senate passed Senate Bill 2113, a legislation banning CRT in K-12 schools. After many Black lawmakers walked out of the chamber, the bill passed 32-2 and is on its way to the House.

Mississippi State Sen. Republican Chris McDaniel -- who co-authored the bill -- said CRT promotes "victimhood" instead of student success.

"Here in Mississippi, we were thinking about a way that our children, particularly in K-12, were taught not to be victims but instead to be successful. We're trying to teach upward mobility and prosperity and empowering the individual," he said.

McDaniel wants students to be taught they are capable of anything, rather than be told racism does not allow for achievement. The senator also said the bill is an act that fights against racial inequality. Senate Bill 2113 bans the teaching of a superior and inferior race, gender, sex or ethnic group.

He said he still encourages schools to teach about the history of racism and discrimination in the United States.

"We're not trying to move away from the past or move away from those sins," he said, but "teaching that the sins of our past scar our entire future -- I don't believe that. I think that we're all capable of achieving anything despite our past."

History and other objective courses -- like mathematics -- are more important in the classroom in comparison to theoretical perspectives such as CRT, McDaniel said.

"Taxpayer dollars" and limited hours of teaching prioritize what needs to be taught to children, he told CNN.

Changing misconceptions

Professor Butler said CRT promotes a thorough education for students.

"In K-12, it wouldn't be an accurate representation of the world, cutting out key pieces of history from reconstruction to the civil rights movement or other places where people of color have been instrumental," she said.

She hopes that CRT can be used as an opportunity to expand student knowledge in pursuit of higher education. For now, Butler continues to teach Law 743 with that hope in mind.

Murphree said using what she has learned from this class will be crucial to opening a dialogue with other members of the Republican Party. CRT has been politicized by both parties, thus perpetuating vastly different views on the theory's implications.

As a Republican student studying CRT, Murphree wants to address the implicit biases and misunderstandings of systemic racism expressed by her party.

"I'm still Republican, like I honestly feel more enthused about being Republican," she said. "I really do believe that there are some things that go beyond party lines...I think that I wanna set an example to my party and be like 'we can still be Republican and think this class is OK.'"


© WLBT

Last month, Black lawmakers walk out as Mississippi Senate passes legislation described as a critical race theory bill.


© CNN

State Sen. Chris McDaniel said critical race theory promotes "victimhood" instead of student success.

How Scholars Are Countering Well-Funded Attacks on Critical Race Theory

There is a long history of right-wing forces fighting against progressive educational curricula. Now, scholars like Robin D. G. Kelley are working to level the playing field against the moneyed political interests behind the attacks.

Robin D. G. Kelley, Distinguished Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History.

PHOTO BY LISAGAY HAMILTON

BY SONALI KOLHATKAR

JAN 11, 2022

Invoking Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in mid-December, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced new legislation that allows parents to sue schools for teaching critical race theory. “You think about what MLK stood for. He said he didn’t want people judged on the color of their skin, but on the content of their character,” said DeSantis, a political ringleader in the latest chapter of the United States’ culture war. In using a quote from Dr. King to justify an attack on curricula that uplifts racial justice, the Republican governor inadvertently created a strong case for why critical thinking on the history of race and racism in the U.S. is necessary.

History professor Robin D. G. Kelley is all too familiar with the sort of contradictory statements like those DeSantis spouted. Kelley, who is the Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History at the University of California, Los Angeles, explains that he “came into the profession at the height of a battleground over history, in the 1980s, with the war on political correctness.” And although he’s lived through decades of conservative-led attacks, like those by DeSantis, he describes the 2020s as “dangerous times.”

The Origins of CRT

Kelley sees right-wing attacks on CRT—what he considers an umbrella term for the teaching of “any kind of revisionist or multicultural history”—as a measure of the success communities of color and progressive parents and teachers have had after pushing for years to ensure that educational curricula reflect racially and ethnically diverse classrooms.

The most recent movement for such education can be traced to the Freedom Schools of the 1960s, which, in the words of educators Deborah Menkart and Jenice L. View, “were intended to counter the ‘sharecropper education’ received by so many African Americans and poor whites.” In a civil rights history lesson created for Teaching for Change, Menkart and View explained that the education offered in nearly 40 such schools centered on “a progressive curriculum … designed to prepare disenfranchised African Americans to become active political actors on their own behalf.” In 1968, after months of pressure from student activists, San Francisco State University established the first College of Ethnic Studies in the U.S.

A movement to offer ethnic studies courses in public schools, including colleges and universities, has gained traction nationwide. Such education is now standard fare as part of required college courses. California remains on the cutting edge of multicultural education, becoming the first state in the nation, in October 2021, to require high schoolers to enroll in ethnic studies courses in order to graduate.

Leading African American scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, a law professor at UCLA, coined the term “critical race theory” and co-edited the book of the same name, which published in 1996, to define race as a social construct and provide a framework for understanding the way it shapes public policy. Crenshaw explained in a New York Times article that CRT, originally used by academics and social scientists to analyze educational inequities, “is a way of seeing, attending to, accounting for, tracing and analyzing the ways that race is produced … the ways that racial inequality is facilitated, and the ways that our history has created these inequalities that now can be almost effortlessly reproduced unless we attend to the existence of these inequalities.”

Understanding the Attacks on CRT

Critical race theory is precisely the sort of nuanced educational lens that Crenshaw, Kelley, and others use in their courses and that has White supremacist forces up in arms. Attacks against CRT are taking the form of multi-pronged legislative restrictions and even bans, as well as firings of teachers accused of teaching biased histories.

Kelley sees conservatives like DeSantis working relentlessly to eliminate any education that actually reckons with the history of American slavery, the genocide of Indigenous peoples and dispossession of their lands, sexism and patriarchy, and gender and gender identity. Reflecting again on the ’80s, he says the attacks on ethnic studies, culture, and race didn’t only come from the Right. “In fact,” he says, they also came from “liberals, from the Left,” and from those saying “we’re not paying enough attention to class [struggles].”

Kelley cites “classic liberal fatigue” against ongoing demands for racial justice, which he encapsulates in responses such as, “We already gave you some money, we already gave you this legislation, what else do you want to ask for? Why are you criticizing us?”

A case in point about how liberal figures are joining the right-wing war on CRT is a new venture called the University of Austin, Texas, created by a group of public figures led by former New York Times writer Bari Weiss. Weiss, in an op-ed in the Times, cited unpopular ideas, such as “Identity politics is a toxic ideology that is tearing American society apart.” She expressed dismay that such an opinion—generally considered a racist one—is shunned by many academics.

To counter what Weiss considers censorship, UATX’s founders say they are devoted to “the unfettered pursuit of truth” and are promoting a curriculum that will include the “Forbidden Courses” centering on “the most provocative questions that often lead to censorship or self-censorship in many universities.”

As if to underscore Kelley’s warning about liberals joining the right-wing culture war, the nascent university’s board of advisors includes figures like Lawrence Summers, former U.S. treasury secretary and former President Barack Obama’s economic adviser, who is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the left-leaning Center for American Progress.

A Counter to the Moneyed Interests Backing CRT Attacks

Kelley sees a difference between earlier battles over political correctness and those centered on CRT today. “The Right has far more political weapons. They are actually engaged in a kind of McCarthyite attack on school teachers, the academy, on students, on families, and passing legislation on what’s called critical race theory,” he says.

Right-wing narratives have cast the backlash against CRT as a grassroots effort led by parents concerned about bias in their children’s education. But secretive and powerful moneyed interests are at work behind the scenes. The watchdog group Open Secrets recently exposed how right-wing organizations, like the Concord Fund, are part of “a network of established dark money groups funded by secret donors … stoking the purportedly ‘organic’ anti-CRT sentiment.”

Additionally, CNBC reporter Brian Schwartz exposed how “business executives and wealthy Republican donors helped fund attacks” on CRT and that it is expected to be a centerpiece of the GOP’s campaign ahead of the 2022 midterm elections.

In contrast to the politically formidable and well-funded forces arrayed in opposition to CRT, the Marguerite Casey Foundation each year gives out unrestricted funds to prominent thinkers, like Kelley, to counter “the limited financial resources and research constraints frequently faced by scholars whose work supports social movements.”

The Foundation chose six scholars whom it describes as doing “leading research in critical fields.” Those include abolition and Black, Latino, feminist, queer, radical, and anti-colonialist studies, which are precisely the fields that are anathema to anti-CRT forces.

Kelley, who was named one of the foundation’s 2021 Freedom Scholars, agrees that such funding can help level the playing field for academics working to expand educational curricula that challenge White supremacist and patriarchal histories.

Going beyond defensive countermeasures against the right-wing attacks on CRT, such awards can help fund the study of histories of social justice movements that are thriving. “We’re beginning to break through the narrative of civil rights begets Black Power, [which] begets radical feminism,” says Kelley, citing grassroots change-making groups that have been active over the past 50 years through today and that have not gotten enough attention, such as the Third World Women’s Alliance, the Boggs Center, the Combahee River Collective, The Red Nation, and INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence. “Just in the last two decades, we’re seeing so many amazing movements whose history is being written as we speak,” says Kelley.

He is heartened by what he calls “new scholarship” that is “thinking transnationally, thinking globally, and moving away from a focus on mostly [White] male leadership and thinkers,” giving way instead to the “political and intellectual work of those who have a different vision of the future.”

---

SONALI KOLHATKAR is currently the racial justice editor at YES! Media and a writing fellow with Independent Media Institute. She was previously a weekly columnist for Truthdig.com. She is also the host and creator of Rising Up with Sonali, a nationally syndicated television and radio program airing on Free Speech TV and dozens of independent and community radio stations. Sonali won First Place at the Los Angeles Press Club Annual Awards for Best Election Commentary in 2016. She also won numerous awards including Best TV Anchor from the LA Press Club and has also been nominated as Best Radio Anchor 4 years in a row. She is the author of Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords, and the Propaganda of Silence, and the co-director of the nonprofit group, Afghan Women's Mission. She has a Master’s in Astronomy from the University of Hawai’i, and two undergraduate degrees in Physics and Astronomy from the University of Texas at Austin. She reflects on her professional path in her 2014 TEDx talk, “My Journey From Astrophysicist to Radio Host.” She can be reached at sonalikolhatkar.com

How critical race theory sparked controversy in the U.S. and influenced Canadian education

Tom Blackwell - POSTMEDIA -Monday

A draft blueprint for teaching Grade 2 and 3 students about racism at an Ontario school board offers staff some eye-opening background information.


© Provided by National Post

A rally, promoted by the Michigan Conservative Coalition and in opposition to U.S. President Joe Biden, in the Brandon Township village of Ortonville, Michigan, U.S., on Nov. 20, 2021.

“Race is a made-up social construct to uphold European and white standards,” states the guideline , “and not an actual biological fact.”

The instructions go on to suggest teachers in the Hamilton Wentworth board be ready to discuss “the myth of white supremacy” and related topics with their primary pupils.

South of the border in a growing number of Republican states, such ideas would be considered literally unlawful, the target of new legislation that restricts how race is talked about in the classroom.

The concepts are often associated with critical race theory (CRT), a once-obscure school of academic thought that suggests racism is baked into laws and official policy — and that has become a red-hot battleground in America’s culture wars.

CRT has not only prompted legislation to regulate racism education in several states but is a frequent target on right-wing news channels and has been credited with helping Republican Glenn Youngkin win November’s race for Virginia governor.

“We are building the most sophisticated political movement in America — and we have just begun,” Chris Rufo, the conservative think-tank analyst credited with shoving CRT to the political front lines, wrote after Youngkin’s victory .

Meanwhile, the ideas — couched in sometimes-provocative social-science vernacular — have more quietly gained traction in Canada.

A few of the country’s largest school boards have adopted the language in their campaigns against discrimination, as have parts of the federal civil service in anti-racism training.

But even as critical race theory fills headlines in the U.S., its basic tenets are often misunderstood or misconstrued, merging with a more general opposition to addressing racism and other contentious social issues in American schools.

One typical example of those state laws bars lessons that cause students “discomfort, guilt (or) anguish” because of their race or sex.

And Rufo of the Manhattan Institute all but admitted CRT was being wielded as a political cudgel, tweeting in March that he was trying to make the phrase “toxic.” “The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory,’” he wrote.

The “moral panic” that’s emerged around the issue in the U.S., at least, is no accident, says Joshua Sealy-Harrington, a professor and CRT scholar at Ryerson University’s Lincoln Alexander Law School.

“It’s a well-funded and well-orchestrated political campaign.”

At the same time, though, liberal American media sometimes dismiss criticism of the concepts out of hand, without exploring CRT’s more controversial elements.

And it’s not solely partisan strategists with their eyes on the non-stop U.S. election cycle voicing concern. Suzanna Sherry of the Vanderbilt University Law School in Nashville co-authored a book in 1997 — Beyond All Reason — that suggested CRT was an attack on Enlightenment ideals like merit and objectivity.

“My views on CRT remain similar but more negative now that it has spread beyond the ivory tower and into the population at large,” she said by email recently.

In Canada the concepts have sparked minimal controversy, and little discussion among the broader public.

Sujith Xavier, a law professor at the University of Windsor who applies CRT in his research , argues that Canadians have in a way long been exposed to the pillars underpinning critical race theory.

The familiar concept of systemic racism is closely related.

And policies like employment equity and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms’ equality section — which expressly permits affirmative action programs — respond to the concerns of critical-race theorists and have been part of Canadian law and even the constitution for years, he noted.

“It’s always been here,” says Xavier.



Video: Seeking Indigenous reconciliation through education (Global News)





Seeking Indigenous reconciliation through education

Even so, some Canadians might find its doctrines a challenging departure from more conventional approaches to racism. Or they might simply be wondering, “What is CRT, exactly?”

The theory emerged in the mid-1970s at Harvard University and other U.S. campuses, as academics concluded that advances brought about by the civil rights movement had stalled and new thinking was needed to combat “subtler forms of racism,” according to a leading primer on the topic by professors Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic.

One of the key tenets is that racism is “ordinary,” not an aberration, and that legal systems effectively promote the supremacy of white people over other races, even if their stated goal is equality.

Another is that colour blindness — the notion that everyone should be treated the same regardless of race — is itself a form of racism as it ignores the social and legal factors that can disadvantage people of colour. The Hamilton board’s draft Grade 2-3 lesson guidelines say their aim is to negate the “insidious” colour-blind practice “ by attempting to bring race into the conversation in primary classrooms.”

The theory also posits that race is not biological, but a social construct, again created by Europeans to assert their superiority and justify colonialism. Indeed, aside from the obvious physical differences, human genetics are identical between races, theorists note.

And CRT criticizes liberal notions like the merit principle and constitutional neutrality, saying they assume wrongly that people of all races are on a level playing field when applying for jobs, for instance, or encountering the legal system.

The degree to which the ideas have been implemented in the U.S. or anywhere else is a matter of debate. But after Rufo went on Fox News in September of last year to condemn the concepts, then-President Donald Trump banned federal funding of any programs that mention CRT, calling them “divisive, anti-American propaganda.”

It’s since become a rallying cry for Republicans across America, with Youngkin quickly outlawing CRT in schools, saying “what we won’t do is teach our children to view everything through the lens of race.”

In Ontario, at least, some large school boards have recently taken on ideas that form part of critical race theory, though largely without referencing the term.

Two of those boards — in Toronto and neighbouring York region — did not respond to requests for comment. But their initiatives appear partly driven by statistics that show poor outcomes for Black students, whose rates of high school suspension and dropping out are as much as twice those of white students.

“Racialized children are living in a white supremacist culture, where all aspects of themselves are devalued,” states a Toronto District School Board tip-sheet for parents on discussing racism with their children. “So it is essential that this culture is deconstructed and challenged every day.”

An elementary teacher in the board said the system has promoted teaching of such concepts especially forcefully since the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis last year.

“This is all we talk about at staff meetings, pretty much,” said the teacher, who is not authorized to discuss the matter and asked not to be named. “There’s an extreme concern that the curriculum be focused on anti-colonialist perspectives.”

The York Region District School Board — Canada’s third largest — covers similar ground in the Dismantling Anti-Black Racism Strategy it launched last year.

“Ontario’s public education system has evolved within an historical context of white supremacy, colonialism and anti-Black racism,” it says , “all of which have been woven into the fabric of school board policies and practices.”

In support of those statements, the plan documents a relatively little-known aspect of Ontario’s history: how legislation passed in 1850 and not repealed until 1964 allowed white-controlled school boards to set up segregated — usually sub-standard — Black schools. The last such segregated school closed only in 1965 — 11 years after the U.S. Supreme Court Court’s historic Brown vs. Board of Education decision ruled segregation in America was unconstitutional.

The anti-racism training materials for Global Affairs Canada employees include an eloquent column from a deputy minister of partly Chinese descent. He catalogues a heart-breaking array of racist episodes, from being called “chink” countless times to repeatedly having customs officers question whether he was Canadian — even though he carried a Canadian diplomatic passport.

But the material also reflects the CRT notion of a white-supremacist system, saying that “to justify the idea of a white race, every institution was and is used to prove that race exists and to promote the idea that the white race is at the top of the racial hierarchy and all other races are below.”

Only white people can be racist: Inside Global Affairs' anti-racism course materials
'No dissent is allowed': School board bars teacher from raising concerns over transgender books

Another slide lists what it calls the “characteristics of white supremacy culture,” including perfectionism, sense of urgency, worship of the written word, power hoarding, individualism and objectivity.

Skeptics see peril in such ideas.

Teaching children history with all the racist blemishes is a good thing, says Patrick Luciani, a former executive director of the public policy-focused Donner Canadian Foundation . But he worries that CRT proposes a facile solution to complex problems.

“Why are incarceration rates higher for young black men than white? It’s easy to simply say we basically live in a world that is fundamentally and structurally based on racism,” said the book author and opinion writer for The Hub. “If you simply believe that one thing, you don’t have to go any further. And that’s dangerous.”

To the extent that CRT attacks values like objectivity and objective merit, said Sherry, “it’s extremely dangerous to democracy, to community and to progress.”

But Canadian academics who study and uphold critical race theory say it simply reflects reality — that legal, political and educational systems have clearly resulted in different treatment of certain races. Indigenous people, for instance, are far more likely to end up in prison than other Canadians, have worse educational outcomes and, in many cases, can’t even access clean drinking water. Black men in Toronto stand a higher chance of being shot by police and lower odds of making it to college or university.

And more recently, data indicate that Black and other non-white Canadians have been at greater risk of contracting and dying from COVID-19.

Xavier says it all flows out of this country’s history, from the Indigenous residential schools with their inter-generational impact, to the experience of enslaved people who fled to Canada in the 19th Century, only to encounter more racism here.

“There is a wonderful history but then when these people arrived, the Canadian state treated them as second-class or third-class citizens,” he said. “If we were really to look at the Canadian system, it was built around oppression — some people were more valuable than others.… If we don’t take stock of what happened, how do we move forward?”

The merits of the theory aside, though, Luciani questions the wisdom of imparting critical race ideas to young, highly impressionable children.

“They haven’t formed the faculty of any kind of critical analysis,” he said. “I don’t know what the sociological ramifications of that are, but they can’t be good.”

The Toronto teacher says she’s seen pupils crying “because they were told by administrators that they were essentially colonizers.”

Sealy-Harrington counters that teaching about English and French imperialism in Canada is not the same as telling children they’re colonizers themselves.

Meanwhile, he says, the school system is hardly the first racial influence on young people.

“The question is not whether or not we should expose children to race. Given their inevitable exposure, it’s how should we educate them about race,” said the Ryerson professor. “Basic psychology will tell you that children learn about race at a young age.… This isn’t some Marxist conspiracy theory. This is literally just true.”

Right-wing hysteria has reached a boiling point
History News Network
September 02, 2021

(Shutterstock.com)

Although right-wingers like Rudy Giuliani argue that left-wing cancel culture is dangerous to free speech, the ongoing right-wing movement to ban Critical Race Theory (CRT) from school curriculums fits into the right's long history of attacks on progressives' free speech. The Texas Senate bill removing Martin Luther King, Jr's "I Have a Dream" speech, Native American history, and the history of white supremacy from public school curriculums may be blocked from passing right now, but it has made waves throughout the internet. This bill comes amidst nationwide right-wing outrage over CRT, which Fox News reportedly mentioned nearly 1300 times between March and June this year.

This hysteria reached a boiling point last month when a Virginia school board meeting was shut down by right-wing protestors over a curriculum that allegedly promotes CRT, although Loudoun County Schools officials publicly stated that CRT is not part of their curriculum. The ongoing distress over CRT is fueled by a massive, right-wing media-backed movement to control school curriculums. Fox News host Tucker Carlson, for example, recently called for teachers to wear body cameras to monitor CRT teaching, despite previously arguing in favor of free speech on campuses.

The panic over CRT may seem to have come out of nowhere, with media coverage of it skyrocketing in recent months, but progressive movements in academia have caused alarm for decades. This began with conspiracy theories about critical theory (CT), a method of systemic critique which was the predecessor of CRT. These conspiracy theories focus on the developers of CT, the Frankfurt School thinkers, who were mostly Jewish, and claim that they infiltrated American universities with the goal of destroying Western culture and implementing "Cultural Marxism."

While these theories may seem far-fetched, they are still promoted today by right-wing thinkers like Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson. Frankfurt School historian Martin Jay traced these conspiracy theories back to LaRouche movement writer Michael Minnicino's essay that relies on little to no source material to make false, exaggerated claims. Minnicino claims, without evidence, that "the heirs of Marcuse and Adorno completely dominate the universities" and teach their students "'Politically Correct' ritual exercises." The essay reduces the Frankfurt School's complex "intellectual history into a sound-bite sized package available to be plugged into a paranoid narrative," according to Jay. Despite the suspicious beginnings of this conspiracy theory, right-wing thinkers like Jeffrey A. Tucker and Mike Gonzalez continue to blame the Frankfurt School thinkers for today's attacks on free speech, going as far as to suggest executive action to prevent their influence.

While the evidence supporting CT conspiracy theories is dubious, there is historical evidence to suggest that the Frankfurt School thinkers were far too divided to have devised such a world-changing plot. One must only look towards Adorno and Marcuse's final letters to each other—their correspondence on the German student movement in the 1960s—to see these divisions on full display.

In these letters, the two thinkers debated whether it was justified for Adorno to have called the police on a group of students who occupied his classroom demanding that he engage in self-criticism. While Adorno dismisses the students and their demands as "pure Stalinism," Marcuse aligns himself with the students and their goals, finding it more helpful to aid the movement than disparage it. These thinkers differ in one key aspect: while Marcuse finds solidarity with the students in their goals, and is less concerned with how they achieve them, Adorno is repulsed by the means. How can a group that cannot even agree on which movements are good for society have possibly conducted such a mass, societal shift? The historical, fact-based evidence makes it clear—they didn't.

Some figures on the right have cancelled the Frankfurt School, reducing their complex history into buzzwords, and rendering their ideas meaningless. This is just one example of how right-wing figures cancel things that counter their worldview through misinformation. CT conspiracy theories fit with former Trump advisor Sebastian Gorka's claim that the Green New Deal will take your hamburgers, despite the proposal making no mention of meat. The theories also fit with the Governor of South Dakota Kristi Noem's claim that we need to defend the "soul of our nation" against gay rapper Lil Nas X, just because he released Satan-themed shoes. We saw this pattern of regressive fear-mongering at its worst last month when there were two-stabbings at a protest at a Los Angeles spa, spurred by a transphobic hoax. There is a pattern of misinformed reactionary cancelling in which even former President Barack Obama has been tied to the recent outrage over CRT. And these cancelling efforts clearly have had a wide-reaching effect, with 26 states making steps against CRT just recently.

Although reactionary cancelling is doing some damage, we can fight it through progressive cancelling. While reactionary cancelling serves oppression, pushing racist, anti-Semitic, or homophobic agendas, progressive cancelling advocates consequences for socially unjust actions and amplifies marginalized voices.

In his essay "Repressive Tolerance", Marcuse says that to realize universal tolerance, we first need to escape from our repressive society. One part of doing this is, instead of tolerating all opinions equally, to retract tolerance from opinions that perpetuate violence and oppression. Marcuse calls on us to fight the forces that serve oppression. We cannot play into the pocket of the oppressor like the Loudoun School Board meeting protestors. Instead, we must resist oppression like the 1960s student protestors who used progressive cancelling against perceived injustices like the United States' involvement in Vietnam.

Progressive cancelling is the same form of cancelling that hit J.K. Rowling, Harvey Weinstein, or even Christopher Columbus—one that centers marginalized people and says "enough" to violence and oppression. On a wide-enough scale, we could achieve what Marcuse called a "Great Refusal." To change our societal trajectory to one towards Marcuse's "opposite of hell," we need to fight reactionary cancelling through progressive cancelling.


Leah Allen is Assistant Professor of Gender, Women's and Sexuality Studies at Grinnell College.

This article was originally published at History News Network

The Problem Is the Other CRT (Conservative Race Theory)

Denying systemic racism means blaming black people for their status in America — and that’s far more offensive

July 16, 2021 by Tim Wise 


To hear conservatives tell it, Critical Race Theory — their newfound buzz phrase for virtually any anti-racist analysis or argument — is fundamentally un-American, and even racist itself. By suggesting that the country is systemically unjust, they argue, CRT is rooted in a rejection of the United States as a “good and great” nation. And by insisting upon the existence of white privilege as a social and economic reality, CRT is, they say, racist against white people.

But amid the uproar over anti-racist scholarship, equity trainings, and the movement for Black lives, one important thing has been overlooked. Namely, the alternative to the analysis offered by Critical Race Theory is far more troubling, offensive and racist than anything being forwarded by the Crits themselves.


After all, if disparities in labor markets, education, housing, and the justice system are not the result of deeply embedded systemic racism — meaning the sedimentation of unequal opportunities resulting from a history of white racial domination and ongoing discrimination today — what’s left to explain them?

Frankly, there is only one possible answer: if the problem isn’t America, then it must be Black people.

But to suggest that there is something wrong with Black people as a group, something dysfunctional and pathological, is to forward a racist proposition by definition. So how exactly can the critics of CRT say it’s racist to suggest whites have privilege but acceptable to say Blacks are defective? The former, after all, is a sociological assessment, while the latter is a characterological one. Situating white people within a sociological context of power and relative position is not a judgment upon them as human beings. But placing Black people in a basket marked “inferior” in some way — whether biologically, as in the arguments of The Bell Curve (a book rejected by few conservatives and written by a very prominent one), or culturally — casts precisely such a judgment.

So why is this not being screamed from the rooftops in response to the recent anti-anti-racist backlash? First, because we’ve been bogged down trying to demonstrate how the things being critiqued aren’t really Critical Race Theory or insisting that CRT isn’t really being taught in middle and high schools.

While true, this is a losing strategy of value to no one but scholars and academics. As Christopher Rufo — the researcher who initiated much of the anti-CRT push — said recently in a televised interview, he “doesn’t give a shit” about the specific minutiae of CRT. He knows, as does the entirety of the right, the label’s value as a memetic device. The word critical, to the masses, means being critical of them and the country they love (how dare we!). At the same time, theory triggers images of academics who get paid to ponder intellectual and philosophical issues while “real Americans” have to work for a living. It’s tailor-made for resentment and backlash.

So while we argue the finer points of Derrick Bell’s parables in the book And We Are Not Saved or Kimberle Crenshaw’s theories on intersectionality, the other side is looking to invalidate all anti-racist thought in the hopes that any challenge to the existing racial hierarchy can be resisted.

Meanwhile, no one is holding them accountable for what their rejection of the systemic racism thesis requires of them; namely, an alternate explanation for ongoing racial disparities in American society. And in practice, that explanation — what we can call conservative race theory, or the other CRT — is one that intrinsically necessitates a racist assessment of Black people.

Rather than arguing detailed academic theory, we must answer the right-wing assault on anti-racism by demonstrating the real motives of those who have launched the attack on it. And in this case, their motives are to cast aspersions upon the victims of racial injustice, to pathologize Blackness. For 400 years, it has been their chief project: the very project about which they would keep our children ignorant, even as they continue to further its aims.

Anti-Blackness was at the heart of the nation’s founding. First, it came in the guise of spiritual supremacy, as in, these heathens are cut off from the salvific balm of God, cursed by Ham, meant to be slaves, and instructed, as such, to serve their masters.

Then it morphed from the religious to the scientific, as Blackness came to be seen as a lesser form of human evolution. And so there was phrenology, and the measuring of the facial slope, and later the giving of IQ tests. Black folks were, on this account, inferior not because of God but because of nature. Lesser opportunity, segregation away from whites, and second-class citizenship were appropriate, to hear the nation’s leaders tell it, for Black people were incapable of higher development and accomplishment.

After the Second World War, which was fought in part to smash the notion of racial science, the idea of Blackness as a biological pollutant became a harder sell. Oh sure, there were still true believers and others who might not have gone full-tilt Hitler but nonetheless continued to endorse the idea of biological superiority for whites, alongside definitive inferiority for Blacks. But for most, a new school of analysis was needed.

Enter the idea of cultural pathology. Beginning in the 1970s, in an attempt to fashion a kinder, gentler anti-Blackness, conservatives turned to a critique of Black communities, family structure, and Black culture more broadly. Black folks, on this accounting, didn’t sufficiently value hard work, education, or marrying before childbirth, valorized and glamorized criminal behavior, and generally preferred reliance on the government and various welfare programs to steady employment. Far from proving systemic injustice or inequality of opportunity, racial gaps in educational outcomes, employment, poverty, and crime rates — according to cultural critics — reflected deep-seated pathologies within Black America as a whole.

Although some versions of this argument allow that these cultural tendencies were adaptations (or maladaptations) to past oppression — aversion to work stemmed from past exploitation, and devaluing schooling stemmed from having been denied access to it — others were less ecumenical. Dinesh D’Souza, for instance, argued in his book The End of Racism that Blacks under enslavement had been treated “pretty well,” and that only when they decided to close the “civilization gap” with whites and Asians would the problem of inequity disappear. To this way of thinking, Black people are a deviant sub-group of lazy, fecund brutes, criminals, and welfare parasites, fully deserving of scorn from the rest of us.

But remember, CRT is the racist worldview.

Never mind that the vast majority of Black people do not receive so-called welfare benefits, or that out-of-wedlock birthrates in the Black community have plummeted (contrary to popular misconception), or that Black crime rates are far lower today than 30 years ago, or that Black educational attainment is at an all-time high. Never mind, in short, facts. The proponents of the anti-Black cultural critique know what they know — and more importantly, they know that a white public fed a steady diet of this kind of racism for generations will believe it.

And now is the time for them to push it. In the past year, the defenders of white hegemony have been confronted with a mass movement, led by Black folks, but to which millions of previously unmobilized white persons attached themselves. Even though white enthusiasm for the uprising has waned from its high-water mark a year ago, ongoing support for racial equity (especially among the young) has left many of the old guard nervous. What better way to stem the tide than by launching an assault on anti-racism, not only with police in the streets but also against teachers in the schools?

The latest freakout is part and parcel of what Carol Anderson documents in her book White Rage. Every step forward on the road to Black liberation — and surely the uptick in support for racial justice in the past year would constitute that, at least symbolically, to the right — has been met with pushback by white America. Combined with a shifting popular culture and demographic changes that will soon render whites a plurality of the country rather than the majority, the ingredients for a white existential meltdown have been duly gathered.

Into that breach have stepped political Trumpism — itself a movement marinated in nostalgia for a fictive time of national glory and greatness — and anti-wokeness. While the latter is a reaction, in part, to the admittedly clumsy machinations of a racial justice movement finding its legs, it has been weaponized by those who disagree with more than just the specific narrative chosen by the left or with its particular tactics. Anti-wokeness is firmly attached to a political project that seeks to stifle police reform, derail policy changes to better equalize economic resources, and commit memoricide — the extermination of truth and memory — within the halls of academia.

We must do more than merely argue arcane theoretical points with those who attack the racial justice movement. Debating those who seek to reinforce systemic white supremacy by denying it exists is a fool’s errand. Better to expose them for what they are and what their politic portends. Better to make them explain their theory for racial inequities in America. Make them defend scientific or cultural racism. In short, better to out them as the racists they are and have always been.

Because the problem is either with America or with Black people.

And if you believe it’s the latter, the problem is also with you.


Anti-racism educator and author of 9 books, including White Like Me and, most recently, Dispatches from the Race War (City Lights, December 2020)

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This post was previously published on Medium.

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Teaching About Race is Good, States Need to Stop Banning It

by Ian Wright

 August 23, 2024
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Cover art for the book Our Skin: A First Conversation About Race (First Conversations).

In this back to school season, millions of American students are returning to classrooms where the wrong course, lesson, or textbook can lead to deep trouble. Why? Because for the last several years, conservative activists and lawmakers have been waging a crusade against “critical race theory,” or CRT.

Critical race theory is an academic concept acknowledging that racism isn’t simply the result of individual prejudice but is also embedded in our institutions through laws, regulations, and rules.

As school districts have emphasized, it’s a higher education concept rarely taught in K-12 schools. But cynical activists have used CRT as a catch-all term to target a broad range of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives — and seemingly any discussion about race and racism in the classroom.

Since January 2021, 44 states have “introduced bills or taken other steps that would restrict teaching critical race theory or limit how teachers can discuss racism and sexism,” according to Education Weekly. And as of this writing, UCLA has identified 807anti-CRT “bills, resolutions, executive orders, opinion letters, statements, and other measures” since September 2020.

Critics claim — falsely — that CRT teaches that all white people are oppressors, while Black people are simply oppressed victims. Many opponents claim it teaches white students to “hate their own race,” or to feel guilty about events that happened before they were born.

In reality, CRT gives students of every race the tools to understand how our institutions treat people of different races unequally — and how we can make those systems fairer. That’s learning students of every race would be better off with.

But instead, this barrage of draconian legislation is having a chilling effect on speech in the classroom.

In 2022, Florida passed the “Stop W.O.K.E. Act,” which prohibits teaching that could lead to a student feeling “discomfort” because of their race, sex, or nationality. But the law’s vague language makes it difficult for educators to determine what they can or cannot teach, ultimately restricting classroom instruction. In my home state of Texas, SB3 similarly restricts these classroom discussions.

Running afoul of these laws can get teachers and school administrators in trouble. As a result of this hostile environment, the RAND Corporation found that two-thirds of K-12 school teachers have decided “to limit instruction about political and social issues in the classroom.”

Notably, this self-censorship extends beyond states with such policies: 55 percent of teachers without state or local restrictions on CRT have still decided to limit classroom discussions of race and history.

As a student, I find this distressing.

My high school history classes gave me a much richer understanding of race in our history, especially the discussions we had at the height of the Black Lives Matter protests. And in college, I’ve gotten to learn about racial inequalities in everything from housing and real estate to health care, politics, education, and immigration policy.

As a person of color, I can’t imagine where I’d be without this understanding. Neither white students nor students of color will benefit from laws designed to censor their understanding of history, critical thinking, and open dialogue in the classroom.

The fight against CRT is a fight against the principles of education that encourage us to question, learn, and grow. Rather than shielding students from uncomfortable truths, which they can certainly handle, we should seek to equip them with the knowledge to navigate the world, think critically about our history and institutions, and push for a more inclusive country.

Ian Wright is a Henry A. Wallace Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies and a student at Rice University from Dallas, Texas.