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What is Critical Race Theory, and why is it under attack?

First, what is it?

In the 1ate 1980s, debates around race and legal theories and the permanence of racism led to critical race theory. Derrick Bell, the first African American tenured law professor at Harvard and legal scholar Kimberle Crenshaw, led these discussions. At its best critical race theory overlaps with the ongoing development and understanding of racism as being systemically structured in American institutions.

Critical race theory is not entirely new. Back in the 1960s, social scientists began to discuss racism as a systemic or structural issue. However, what critical race theory brought to the table was a more focused argument on the role of laws in the maintenance of systemic racism, something implicit if not explicit in sociological discussions.

Most American institutions were involved in producing and perpetuating American racial apartheid from 1865 to 1965. Unless they have been restructured, they still are.

Why is critical race theory under attack? There are at least three reasons.

One reason is too many people are confused about racism. Typically, people regard racism as something that bigoted people do intentionally. They base this view on the faulty assumption that all racism proceeds from individual prejudice.

Yes, bigoted individuals may commit racism and may do so because they are prejudiced. But individual racism is mostly petit racism, bothersome but not crucial in the grand scheme of things racial. Moreover, individual racism is significantly less consequential than systemic racism—racism spewing from the operation of American institutions.

Most American institutions were involved in producing and perpetuating American racial apartheid from 1865 to 1965. Unless they have been restructured, they are still generating racism.

This “individual versus institution racism” issue was at play between two competing academic sets of scholars in the late 1980s. The National Research Council (NRC) of the National Academy of Sciences organized a study of the status of African Americans. Their study groups contained some scholars with a commitment to principles of equality and fairness. However, they stacked the study groups with conservative scholars who tended to rule out both the historical oppression of African Americans and contemporary discrimination against blacks as significant influences of the present condition of African Americans.

To combat the NRC study, we assembled 61 scholars from several disciplines under the Trotter Institute at UMass/Boston to study the status of African Americans. The book from the NRC project admitted the existence of racism but treated racism as the isolated actions of individuals. Our study groups produced four books that explicitly or implicitly treated racism as a structural (systemic) phenomenon.

critical race theory forces a fault line between liberals and progressives.

A second reason that critical race theory is under attack is that it forces a fault line between liberals and progressives. Liberals are not wholly on board with the idea and therefore do not defend it forcefully.

Liberals tend to believe that American institutions are sound, but they may need a little tinkering here and there. Progressives know better. They know that many institutions need restructuring.

An example of this divide shows in the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests against the killing of African Americans by police officers. The liberal approach is to tinker around the edges, for example, order up more police officer training and develop better methods of hiring police officers. But, on the other hand, progressives are calling for a restructuring of policing, sometimes—unfortunately–under the banner of “defunding the police.”

A third reason critical race theory is under attack is that a large segment of white America is currently pushing white supremacy in traditional ways–like keeping fundamental truths about race and the establishment, growth, and maintenance of America out of the hands of its citizens.

Education has always been complicit in this effort. And white supremacists are currently resisting any change to that process.

They tend to argue that the country has gone too far with integrating blacks and other minorities into America’s mainstream. Consequently, according to a Pew Research poll in 2019, only 37 percent of whites say the country has not gone far enough in giving blacks equal rights with whites.

What should we do? We must fight for the education of more Americans about racism and how it works in American history. And we must do so outside as well as inside school buildings.

We must also fight to restructure some of our institutions — primarily criminal justice in general and law enforcement in particular.

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Wornie Reed is Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies and Director of the Race and Social Policy Research Center at Virginia Tech University. Previously he developed and directed the Urban Child Research Center in the Maxine Goodman Levin College of Urban Affairs at Cleveland State University (1991-2001), where he was also Professor of Sociology and Urban Studies (1991-2004). He was Adjunct Professor at the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine (2003-4). Professor Reed served a three-year term (1990-92) as President of the National Congress of Black Faculty, and he is past president of the National Association of Black Sociologists (2000-01).

This column first appeared online at What the Data Say and is shared here by permission.