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Implementing Critical Race Theory would actually be a great practice for my building. Most students in my building are there for alternative education. Therefore, the persons that Critical Race Theory impacts the most are those that are in my building. Those who act out because the lack the resources of other prominent students. Those who come from broken homes or impoverished neighborhoods because of generations of dealing with Critical Theory/Critical Race Theory.

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BOBBY CAINA CALVAN. (2021, June 10). Florida bans “critical race theory” from its classrooms. AP News; AP News. https://apnews.com/article/florida-race-and-ethnicity-government-and-politics-education-74d0af6c52c0009ec3fa3ee9955b0a8d

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Kreiss,Alice, D. (2021, November 10). The Anti–Critical Race Theory Movement Will Profoundly Affect Public Education. Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-anti-critical-race-theory-movement-will-profoundly-affect-public-education/

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Implementing Critical Race Theory would force Americans to really deal with the daunting history of race relations in America. Implementing Critical Race Theory acknowledges that there is a racism problem in education.  Implementing Critical Race Theory acknowledges that there are achievement and opportunity gaps in education. Some believe that implementing Critical Race Theory not only further promotes racism but also promotes hatred against Whites.

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As an attorney, Derrick Bell worked on many civil-rights cases, but his doubts about their impact launched a groundbreaking school of thought.

The town of Harmony, Mississippi, which owes its origins to a small number of formerly enslaved Black people who bought land from former slaveholders after the Civil War, is nestled in Leake County, a perfectly square allotment in the center of the state. According to local lore, Harmony, which was previously called Galilee, was renamed in the early nineteen-twenties, after a Black resident who had contributed money to help build the town's school said, upon its completion, "Now let us live and work in harmony." This story perhaps explains why, nearly four decades later, when a white school board closed the school, it was interpreted as an attack on the heart of the Black community. The school was one of five thousand public schools for Black children in the South that the philanthropist Julius Rosenwald funded, beginning in 1912. Rosenwald's foundation provided the seed money, and community members constructed the building themselves by hand. By the sixties, many of the structures were decrepit, a reflection of the South's ongoing disregard for Black education. Nonetheless, the Harmony school provided its students a good education and was a point of pride in the community, which wanted it to remain open. In 1961, the battle sparked the founding of the local chapter of the N.A.A.C.P.

That year, Winson Hudson, the chapter's vice-president, working with local Black families, contacted various people in the civil-rights movement, and eventually spoke to Derrick Bell, a young attorney with the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense and Educational Fund, in New York City. Bell later wrote, in the foreword to Hudson's memoir, "Mississippi Harmony," that his colleagues had been astonished to learn that her purpose was to reopen the Rosenwald school. He said he told her, "Our crusade was not to save segregated schools, but to eliminate them." He added that, if people in Harmony were interested in enforcing integration, the L.D.F., as it is known, could help.

Hudson eventually accepted Bell's offer, and in 1964 the L.D.F. won Hudson v. Leake County School Board (Winson Hudson's school-age niece Diane was the plaintiff), which mandated that the board comply with desegregation. Harmony's students were enrolled in a white school in the county. Afterward, though, Bell began to question the efficacy of both the case and the drive for integration. Throughout the South, such rulings sparked white flight from the public schools and the creation of private "segregation academies," which meant that Black students still attended institutions that were effectively separate. Years later, after Hudson's victory had become part of civil-rights history, she and Bell met at a conference and he told her, "I wonder whether I gave you the right advice." Hudson replied that she did, too.

Bell spent the second half of his career as an academic and, over time, he came to recognize that other decisions in landmark civil-rights cases were of limited practical impact. He drew an unsettling conclusion: racism is so deeply rooted in the makeup of American society that it has been able to reassert itself after each successive wave of reform aimed at eliminating it. Racism, he began to argue, is permanent. His ideas proved foundational to a body of thought that, in the nineteen-eighties, came to be known as critical race theory. After more than a quarter of a century, there is an extensive academic field of literature cataloguing C.R.T.'s insights into the contradictions of antidiscrimination law and the complexities of legal advocacy for social justice.

For the past several months, however, conservatives have been waging war on a wide-ranging set of claims that they wrongly ascribe to critical race theory, while barely mentioning the body of scholarship behind it or even Bell's name. As Christopher F. Rufo, an activist who launched the recent crusade, said on Twitter, the goal from the start was to distort the idea into an absurdist touchstone. "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," he wrote. Accordingly, C.R.T. has been defined as Black-supremacist racism, false history, and the terrible apotheosis of wokeness. Patricia Williams, one of the key scholars of the C.R.T. canon, refers to the ongoing mischaracterization as "definitional theft."

Vinay Harpalani, a law professor at the University of New Mexico, who took a constitutional-law class that Bell taught at New York University in 2008, remembers his creating a climate of intellectual tolerance. "There were conservative white male students who got along very well with Professor Bell, because he respected their opinion," Harpalani told me. "The irony of the conservative attack is that he was more respectful of conservative students and giving conservatives a voice than anyone." Sarah Lustbader, a public defender based in New York City who was a teaching assistant for Bell's constitutional-law class in 2010, has a similar recollection. "When people fear critical race theory, it stems from this idea that their children will be indoctrinated somehow. But Bell's class was the least indoctrinated class I took in law school," she said. "We got the most freedom in that class to reach our own conclusions without judgment, as long as they were good-faith arguments and well argued and reasonable."

Republican lawmakers, however, have been swift to take advantage of the controversy. In June, Governor Greg Abbott, of Texas, signed a bill that restricts teaching about race in the state's public schools. Oklahoma, Tennessee, Idaho, Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Arizona have introduced similar legislation. But in all the outrage and reaction is an unwitting validation of the very arguments that Bell made. Last year, after the murder of George Floyd, Americans started confronting the genealogy of racism in this country in such large numbers that the moment was referred to as a reckoning. Bell, who died in 2011, at the age of eighty, would have been less focussed on the fact that white politicians responded to that reckoning by curtailing discussions of race in public schools than that they did so in conjunction with a larger effort to shore up the political structures that disadvantage African Americans. Another irony is that C.R.T. has become a fixation of conservatives despite the fact that some of its sharpest critiques were directed at the ultimate failings of liberalism, beginning with Bell's own early involvement with one of its most heralded achievements.

In May, 1954, when the Supreme Court struck down legally mandated racial segregation in public schools, in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, the decision was instantly recognized as a watershed in the nation's history. A legal team from the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense and Educational Fund, led by Thurgood Marshall, argued that segregation violated the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, by inflicting psychological harm on Black children. Chief Justice Earl Warren took the unusual step of persuading the other Justices to reach a consensus, so that their ruling would carry the weight of unanimity. In time, many came to see the decision as an opening salvo of the modern civil-rights movement, and it made Marshall one of the most recognizable lawyers in the country. His stewardship of the case was particularly inspiring to Derrick Bell, who was then a twenty-four-year-old Air Force officer and who had developed a keen interest in matters of equality.

Bell was born in 1930 in Pittsburgh's Hill District, the community immortalized in August Wilson's plays, and he attended Duquesne University before enlisting. After serving two years, he entered the University of Pittsburgh's law school and, in 1957, was the only Black graduate in his class. He landed a job in the newly formed civil-rights division of the Department of Justice, but when his superiors became aware that he was a member of the N.A.A.C.P. they told him that the membership constituted a conflict of interest, and that he had to resign from the organization. In a move that would become a theme in his career, Bell quit his job rather than compromise a principle. He began working, instead, at the Pittsburgh N.A.A.C.P., where he met Marshall, who hired him in 1960 as a staff attorney at the Legal Defense Fund. The L.D.F. was the legal arm of the N.A.A.C.P. until 1957, when it spun off as a separate organization.

Bell arrived at a crucial moment in the L.D.F.'s history. In 1956, two years after Brown, it successfully litigated Browder v. Gayle, the case that struck down segregation on city buses in Alabama-and handed Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Montgomery Improvement Association a victory in the yearlong boycott they had organized. The L.D.F. launched desegregation lawsuits across the South, and Bell supervised or handled many of them. But, when Winson Hudson contacted him, she opened a window onto the distance between the agenda of the national civil-rights organizations and the priorities of the local communities they were charged with serving. In her memoir, she recalled a contentious exchange she had, before she contacted Bell, with a white representative of the school board. She told him, "If you don't bring the school back to Harmony, we will be going to your school." Where the L.D.F. saw integration as the objective, Hudson saw it as leverage to be used in the fight to maintain a quality Black school in her community.

The Harmony school had already become a flashpoint. Medgar Evers, the Mississippi field secretary for the N.A.A.C.P., visited the town and assisted in organizing the local chapter. He told members that the work they were embarking on could get them killed. Bell, during his trips to the state, made a point of not driving himself; he knew that a wrong turn on unfamiliar roads could have fatal consequences. He was arrested for using a whites-only phone booth in Jackson, and, upon his safe return to New York, Marshall mordantly joked that, if he got himself killed in Mississippi, the L.D.F. would use his funeral as a fund-raiser. The dangers, however, were very real. In June of 1963, a white supremacist shot and killed Evers in his driveway, in Jackson; he was thirty-seven years old. In subsequent years, there was an attempted firebombing of Hudson's home and two bombings at the home of her sister, Dovie, who was Diane Hudson's mother and was involved in the movement. That suffering and loss could not have eased Bell's growing sense that his efforts had only helped create a more durable system of segregation.

Bell left the L.D.F. in 1966 for an academic career that took him first to the University of Southern California's law school, where he directed the public-interest legal center, and then, in 1969, in the aftermath of King's assassination, to Harvard Law School, as a lecturer. Derek Bok, the dean of the school, promised Bell that he would be "the first but not the last" of his Black hires. In 1971, Bok was made the president of the university, and Bell became Harvard Law's first Black tenured professor. He began creating courses that explored the nexus of civil rights and the law-a departure from traditional pedagogy.

In 1970, he had published a casebook titled " Race, Racism and American Law," a pioneering examination of the unifying themes in civil-rights litigation throughout American history. The book also contained the seeds of an idea that became a prominent element in his work: that racial progress had occurred mainly when it aligned with white interests-beginning with emancipation, which, he noted, came about as a prerequisite for saving the Union. Between 1954 and 1968, the civil-rights movement brought about changes that were thought of as a second Reconstruction. King's death was a devastating loss, but hope persisted that a broader vista of possibilities for Black people and for the nation lay ahead. Yet, within a few years, as volatile conflicts over affirmative action and school busing arose, those victories began to look less like an antidote than like a treatment for an ailment whose worst symptoms can be temporarily alleviated but which cannot be cured. Bell was ahead of many others in reaching this conclusion. If the civil-rights movement had been a second Reconstruction, it was worth remembering that the first one had ended in the fiery purges of the so-called Redemption era, in which slavery, though abolished by the Thirteenth Amendment, was resurrected in new forms, such as sharecropping and convict leasing. Bell seemed to have found himself in a position akin to Thomas Paine's: he'd been both a participant in a revolution and a witness to the events that revealed the limitations of its achievements.

Bell's skepticism was deepened by the Supreme Court's 1978 decision in Bakke v. University of California, which challenged affirmative action in higher education. Allan Bakke, a white prospective medical student, was twice rejected by U.C. Davis. He sued the regents of the University of California, arguing that he had been denied admission because of the school's minority set-aside admissions, or quotas-and that affirmative action amounted to "reverse discrimination." The Supreme Court ruled that race could be considered, among other factors, for admission, and that diversifying admissions was both a compelling interest and permissible under the Constitution, but that the University of California's explicit quota system was not. Bakke was admitted to the school.

Bell saw in the decision the beginning of a new phase of challenges. Diversity is not the same as redress, he argued; it could provide the appearance of equality while leaving the underlying machinery of inequality untouched. He criticized the decision as evidence that the Court valorized a kind of default color blindness, as opposed to an intentional awareness of race and of the need to address historical wrongs. He likely would have seen the same principle at work in the 2013 Supreme Court ruling in Shelby County v. Holder, which gutted the Voting Rights Act.

In the years surrounding the Bakke case, Bell published two articles that were considered both brilliant and heretical. The first, "Serving Two Masters," which appeared in March, 1976, in the Yale Law Journal, cited his own role in the Harmony case. He wrote that the mission of groups engaged in civil-rights litigation, such as the N.A.A.C.P., represented an inherent conflict of interest. The two masters of the title were the groups' interests and those of their clients; what the groups wanted to achieve may not have aligned with what their clients wanted-or even needed. The concept of an inherent conflict was crucial to Bell's understanding of how and why the movement had played out as it did: the heights it had attained had paradoxically shown how far there still was to go and how difficult it would be to get there. Imani Perry, a legal scholar and a professor of African American studies at Princeton, who knew Bell, told me how audacious it was at the time for Bell to "raise questions about his own role as an advocate and, perhaps, the way in which we structured civil-rights advocacy."

Jack Greenberg, who served as the director-counsel of the L.D.F. from 1961 to 1984, depicted Bell in his memoir, " Crusaders in the Courts," as a complex, frustrating figure, whose stringent criticism of the organization's history and philosophy led to tensions in their own relationship. Yet Sherrilyn Ifill, the current president and director-counsel, told me that, despite some initial consternation in civil-rights circles, Bell's perspective eventually found purchase even among those he had criticized. "I think most of us-especially those who long admired and were mentored by Bell-read his work as a cautionary tale for us as lawyers," Ifill told me. Today, she said, L.D.F. attorneys teach Bell's work to students in New York University's Racial Equity Strategies Clinic.

Bell eventually formulated a broader criticism of the objectives of both the movement and its lawyers. The issue of busing was particularly complicated. Brown v. Board of Education centered on the circumstances of Linda Brown, an eight-year-old girl who lived in a mixed neighborhood in Topeka, Kansas, but was forced to travel nearly an hour to a Black school rather than attend one closer to her home, which, under the law, was reserved for white children. During the seventies, in an attempt to put integration into practice, school districts sent Black students to better-financed white schools. The presumption was that white parents and administrators would not underfund schools that Black children attended if white children were also students there. In effect, it was hoped that the valuation of whiteness would be turned against itself. But, in a reversal of Linda Brown's situation, the white schools were generally farther away than the local schools the students would otherwise have gone to. So the remedy effectively imposed the same burden as had been imposed on Brown, albeit with the opposite intentions. Bell "was pessimistic about the effectiveness of busing, and at a time when a lot of people weren't," the scholar Patricia Williams told me.

More significant, Bell was growing doubtful about the prospect of ever achieving racial equality in the United States. The civil-rights movement had been based on the idea that the American system could be made to live up to the democratic creed prescribed in its founding documents. But Bell had begun to think that the system was working exactly as it was intended to-that that was why progress was invariably met with reversal. Indeed, by the eighties, it was increasingly clear that the momentum to desegregate schools had stalled; a 2006 study by the Civil Rights Project, at U.C.L.A., found that many of the advances made in the first years had been erased during the nineties, and that seventy-three per cent of Black students around that time attended schools in which most students were minorities.

In Bell's second major article of this period, "Brown v. Board of Education and the Interest-Convergence Dilemma," published in January of 1980 in the Harvard Law Review, he lanced the perception that the societal changes of the mid-twentieth century were the result of a moral awakening among whites. Instead, he wrote, they were a product of "interest convergence" and Cold War pragmatism. Armed with images of American racial hypocrisy, the Soviet Union had a damning counter to American criticism of its behavior in Eastern Europe. (As early as the 1931 Scottsboro trial, in which nine African American teen-agers were wrongfully convicted of raping two white women, the Soviets publicized examples of American racism internationally; the tactic became more common after the start of the Cold War.)

The historians Mary L. Dudziak, Carol Anderson, and Penny Von Eschen, among others, later substantiated Bell's point, arguing that America's racial problems were particularly disruptive to diplomatic relations with India and the African states emerging from colonialism, which were subject to pitched competition for their allegiance from the superpowers. The civil-rights movement's victories, Bell argued, were not a sign of moral maturation in white America but a reflection of its geopolitical pragmatism. For people who'd been inspired by the idea of the movement as a triumph of conscience, these arguments were deeply unsettling.

In 1980, Bell left Harvard to become the dean of the University of Oregon law school, but he resigned five years later, after a search committee declined to extend the offer of a faculty position to an Asian woman when its first two choices, who were both white men, turned it down. Harvard Law rehired Bell as a professor. His influence had grown measurably since he began teaching; "Race, Racism and American Law," which was largely overlooked at the time of its publication, had come to be viewed as a foundational text. Yet during his absence from Harvard no one was assigned to teach his key class, which was based on the book. Some students interpreted this omission as disregard for issues of race, and it gave rise to the first of two events that, in particular, led to the creation of C.R.T. The legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, who was a student at the law school at the time, told me, "We initially coalesced as students and young law professors around this course that the law school refused to teach." In 1982, the group organized a series of guest speakers and conducted a version of the class themselves.

At the same time, the legal academy was roiled by debates generated by a movement called critical legal studies; a group of progressive scholars, most of them white, had, beginning in the seventies, advanced the contentious idea that the law, rather than being a neutral system based on objective principles, operated to reinforce established social hierarchies. Another group of scholars found C.L.S. both intriguing and unsatisfying: here was a tool that allowed them to articulate the methods by which the legal system shored up inequality, but in a way that was more insightful about class than it was about race. (The "crits," as the C.L.S. adherents were known, had not "come to terms with the particularity of race," Crenshaw and her co-editors Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, and Kendall Thomas later noted, in the introduction to the 1995 anthology " Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement.")

The next defining moment in C.R.T.'s creation came in 1989, when a group that developed out of the Harvard seminars decided to hold a retreat at the University of Wisconsin, where David Trubek, a central figure in the C.L.S. movement, taught. Casting about for a way to describe what the retreat would address, Crenshaw referred to "new developments in critical race theory." The name was meant to situate the group at the intersection of C.L.S. and the intractable questions of race. Legal scholars such as Richard Delgado, Patricia Williams, Mari Matsuda, and Alan Freeman (attacks on C.R.T. have conveniently overlooked the fact that not all its founding scholars were Black) began publishing work in legal journals that furthered the discourse around race, power, and law.

Crenshaw contributed what became one of the best-known elements of C.R.T. in 1989, when she published an article in the University of Chicago Legal Forum titled "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics." Her central argument, about "intersectionality"-the way in which people who belong to more than one marginalized community can be overlooked by antidiscrimination law-was a distillation of the kinds of problems that C.R.T. addressed. These were problems that could not have been seen clearly unless there had been a civil-rights movement, but for which liberalism had no ready answer because, in large part, it had never really considered them. Her ideas about intersectionality as a legal blind spot now regularly feature in analyses not only of public policy but of literature, sociology, and history.

As C.R.T. began to take shape, Bell became more deeply involved in an ongoing push to diversify the Harvard law-school faculty. In 1990, he announced that he would take an unpaid leave to protest the fact that Harvard Law had never granted tenure to a Black woman. Since Bell's hiring, almost twenty years earlier, a few other Black men had joined the faculty, including Randall Kennedy and Charles Ogletree, in 1984 and 1989. But Bell, cajoled by younger feminist legal scholars, Crenshaw among them, came to recognize the unique burdens that went with being both Black and female.

That April, Bell spoke at a rally on campus, where he was introduced by the twenty-eight-year-old president of the Harvard Law Review, Barack Obama. In his comments, Obama said that Bell's "scholarship has opened up new vistas and new horizons and changed the standards of what legal writing is about." Bell told the crowd, "To be candid, I cannot afford a year or more without my law-school salary. But I cannot continue to urge students to take risks for what they believe if I do not practice my own precepts."

In 1991, Bell accepted a visiting professorship at the N.Y.U. law school, extended by John Sexton, the dean and a former student of Bell's. Harvard did not hire a Black woman and, in the third year of his protest, Bell refused to return, ending his tenure at the university. In 1998, Lani Guinier became the first woman of color to be given tenure at the law school.

Bell remained a visiting professor at N.Y.U. for the rest of his life, declining offers to become a tenured member of the faculty. He continued to speak and write on subjects relating to law and race, and some of his most important work during this period came in an unorthodox form. In the eighties, he had begun to write fiction and, in 1992, he published a collection of short stories, called " Faces at the Bottom of the Well." A Black female lawyer named Geneva Crenshaw, the protagonist of many of the stories, serves as Bell's alter ego. (Bell later told Kimberlé Crenshaw that he had "borrowed" her surname for the character, who was a composite of Black women lawyers who had influenced his thinking.) Kirkus Reviews noted that, despite some "lackluster writing," the stories offered "insight into the rage, frustration, and yearning of being black in America." The Times described the collection as "Jonathan Swift come to law school." But the book's subtitle, "The Permanence of Racism," garnered nearly as much attention as its literary merits.

The collection includes "The Space Traders," Bell's best-known piece of fiction. In the story, extraterrestrials land in the United States and make an offer: they will reverse the severe damage the nation has done to the environment, provide it with a clean energy source, and give it enough gold to resurrect the economy, which has been ruined by policies favoring the rich. In exchange, the aliens want the government to turn every Black person in the country over to them. A consensus emerges that the Administration should take the deal, on the ground that mandating that Black people leave is not all that different from drafting them to go to war. Whites largely support the measure. Jewish groups oppose it, as an echo of Nazism, but they are silenced when a tide of anti-Semitism sweeps the nation. A corporate coalition opposes the trade, because Black people make up so much of the consumer market. Businesses that supply law enforcement and the prison industry oppose it, too, recognizing the impact that the disappearance would have on their bottom line.

A Black member of the Administration decides that the only way to get white people to veto the proposal is to convince them that leaving with the aliens would be an entitlement that undeserving Blacks would achieve at their expense; his plan fails. The story ends with twenty million African Americans, arms linked by chains, preparing to leave "the New World as their forebears had arrived." The narrative is bleak, but it offers a trenchant commentary on the frailty of Black citizenship and the tentative nature of inclusion, and it echoes a theme of Bell's earlier work-that Black rights have been held hostage to white self-interest.

The late critic and essayist Stanley Crouch told me in 1997 about a panel he appeared on with Bell, in which he'd criticized Bell's dire forecasts. "He was clean. I'm looking at this beautiful chalk-gray suit he had on that cost about twelve hundred dollars, " Crouch told me. "I said to myself, 'There's something wrong with this.' For me having been involved with Friends of sncc and core thirty-five years ago, we'd be talking with guys from Mississippi back then who weren't as pessimistic." He added, "To hear that from him was the height of irresponsibility." In an essay titled "Dumb Bell Blues," Crouch wrote that Bell's theory of interest convergence undermined the importance of Black achievements in transforming American society. Whereas he regarded Bell's view as pessimism, to Bell it was hard-won realism. Imani Perry told me, "Even as he had a kind of skepticism about the prospect that racism would end, or that you'd get a just judicial order, he was still thinking about how you move the society, what will move, and what will be much harder to move."

Part of Bell's intent was simply to establish expectations. Crenshaw mentioned to me " Silent Covenants," a book on the legacy of Brown, which Bell published in 2004. In it, he describes a 2002 ceremony at Yale, at which Judge L. Robert Carter was awarded an honorary degree. When the university's president noted that Carter had been one of the attorneys who argued Brown, the crowd leaped to its feet in an ovation, which prompted Bell to wonder, "How could a decision that promised so much and, by its terms, accomplished so little have gained so hallowed a place among some of the nation's better-educated and most-successful individuals?"

"Silent Covenants" also features an alternative ruling in Brown. In this version, which was clearly informed by Bell's reconsideration of Hudson v. Leake County, the Court holds that enforcing integration would spark such discord that it would likely fail, so the Justices issue a mandate to make Black and white schools equal, and create a board of oversight to insure that school districts comply. Bell says in the book that he wrote the ruling when a friend asked him whether the Court could have framed its decision "differently from, and better than" the one it chose to hand down. His response is a rebuke to the Warren Court's ruling and also, implicitly, to the position taken by the man who gave Bell his job as an L.D.F. attorney-Thurgood Marshall, who had overseen the plaintiff's suit and sought integration as a remedy. Yet, Crenshaw said, "at the end of the day, if Bell had been on the Court, would he have written that opinion? Well, I highly doubt it." As she told me, "A lot of what Derrick would do would be intentionally provocative."

The 2008 election of Barack Obama to the Presidency, which inherently represented a validation of the civil-rights movement, seemed like a refutation of Bell's arguments. I knew Bell casually by that point-in 2001, I had interviewed him for an article on the L.D.F.'s legacy, and we had kept in touch. In August of 2008, during an e-mail exchange about James Baldwin 's birthday, our discussion turned to Obama's campaign. He suggested that Baldwin might have found the Senator too reticent and too moderate on matters of race. Bell himself was not much more encouraged. He wrote, "We can recognize this campaign as a significant moment like the civil rights protests, the 1963 March for Jobs and Justice in D.C., the Brown decision, so many more great moments that in retrospect promised much and, in the end, signified nothing except that the hostility and alienation toward black people continues in forms that frustrate thoughtful blacks and place the country ever closer to its premature demise."

I was struck by his ominous outlook, especially since someone Bell knew personally, and who had taught his work at the University of Chicago, stood to become the first Black President. I thought that his skepticism had turned into fatalism. But, a decade later, during the most reactionary moments of the Trump era, Bell's words seemed clarifying. On January 6th of this year, as a mob stormed the Capitol in an attempt to overturn a Presidential election, the words seemed nearly prophetic. It would not have surprised Bell that Obama's election and the strength of the Black electorate that helped him win are central factors in the current tide of white nationalism and voter suppression.

Bell did not live to see the election of Donald Trump, but, as his mention of the nation's "premature demise" suggests, he clearly understood that someone like him could come to power. Still, the current attacks on critical race theory have arrived decades too late to prevent its core tenets from entering the legal canon. The cohort of young legal scholars that Bell influenced went on to important positions in the academy, and many of them, including Crenshaw, Williams, Matsuda, and Cheryl Harris, have influenced subsequent generations of thinkers themselves. People who looked at the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and others and concluded that they were not anomalies but evidence that the system was functioning as it was designed to, were articulating the conclusion that Bell had drawn decades earlier. "The gap between words and reality in the American project-that is what critical race theory is, where it lies," Perry told me. The gap persists and, consequently, Bell's perspective retains its relevance. Even after his death, it has been far easier to disagree with him than to prove him wrong.

Vinay Harpalani told me, "Someone asked him once, 'What do you say about critical race theory?' " Bell first replied, "I don't know what that is," but then offered, "To me, it means telling the truth, even in the face of criticism." Harpalani added, "He was just telling his story. He was telling his truth, and that's what he wanted everyone to do. So, as far as Derrick Bell goes, that's probably what I think is important." ♦

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national association for the advancement of colored people

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As an attorney, Derrick Bell worked on many civil-rights cases, but his doubts about their impact launched a groundbreaking school of thought. The town of Harmony, Mississippi, which owes its origins to a small number of formerly enslaved Black people who bought land from former slaveholders after the Civil War, is nestled in Leake County, a perfectly square allotment in the center of the state.

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Critics of the Critical Race Theory believe that it distorts historical facts and would cause toxic behavior in classrooms. Critics believe that it would cause more of a racial divide than it would bring people to an understanding.

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Gloria Ladson-Billings is the former Kellner Family Distinguished Professor of Urban Education in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction and faculty affiliate in the Department of Educational Policy Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She was the 2005-2006 president of the American Educational Research Association (AERA). Ladson-Billings' research examines the pedagogical practices of teachers who are successful with African American students. She also investigates Critical Race Theory applications to education. She is the author of the critically acclaimed books The Dreamkeepers: Successful Teachers of African American Children and Crossing Over to Canaan: The Journey of New Teachers in Diverse Classrooms, and numerous journal articles and book chapters. She is the former editor of the American Educational Research Journal and a member of several editorial boards. Her work has won numerous scholarly awards including the H.I. Romnes Faculty Fellowship, the NAEd/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship, and the Palmer O. Johnson outstanding research award. During the 2003-2004 academic year, she was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. In fall of 2004, she received the George and Louise Spindler Award from the Council on Anthropology and Education for significant and ongoing contributions to the field of educational anthropology. She holds honorary degrees from Umeå University (Umeå Sweden), University of Massachusetts-Lowell, the University of Alicante (Alicante, Spain), the Erickson Institute (Chicago), and Morgan State University (Baltimore). She is a 2018 recipient of the AERA Distinguished Research Award, and she was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2018.

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Gloria Ladson-Billings - National Academy of Education

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Gloria Ladson-Billings is the former Kellner Family Distinguished Professor of Urban Education in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction and faculty affiliate in the Department of Educational Policy Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She was the 2005-2006 president of the American Educational Research Association (AERA).

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Linda Darling-Hammond says most people misunderstand the concept of critical race theory

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Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement. (1995). United States: New Press.

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Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement. (1995). United States: New Press.

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Critical Race Theory. (2023). Google Books. https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=lLXTyrlM59MC&oi=fnd&pg=PR11&dq=founders+of+critical+race+theory&ots=2CxU4Lgrgm&sig=o3pthbWA12v49cqCeGXByFgVAjE#v=onepage&q=founders%20of%20critical%20race%20theory&f=false

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https://apnews.com/article/florida-race-and-ethnicity-government-and-politics-education-74d0af6c52c0009ec3fa3ee9955b0a8d

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TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) - Florida's state Board of Education banned "critical race theory" from public school classrooms Thursday, adopting new rules it said would shield schoolchildren from curricula that could "distort historical events."

Florida's move was widely expected as a national debate intensifies about how race should be used as a lens in classrooms to examine the country's tumultuous history.

Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis appeared by video at the top of the board's meeting, urging its members, many of whom he appointed, to adopt the new measures he asserted would serve students with the facts rather than "trying to indoctrinate them with ideology."

The Black Lives Matter movement has helped bring contentious discussions about race to the forefront of American discourse, and classrooms have become a battleground. Supporters contend that federal law has preserved the unequal treatment of people on the basis of race and that the country was founded on the theft of land and labor.

Opponents of critical race theory say schoolchildren should not be taught that America is fundamentally racist. Governors and legislatures in Republican-led states around the country are considering or have signed into law bills that would limit how teachers can frame American history.

Both sides accuse the other of politicizing classroom instruction and violating the free speech rights of countless people by limiting the allowable points of view.

Florida law already requires schools to provide instruction on a host of fundamentals, including the Declaration of Independence, the Holocaust and African American history, but the topics have often been muddled. Current events, including the killings of Black people by police, have intensified debates.

Some have called for a "faithful" interpretation of U.S. history that honors the founding of the country - as a rebellion against oppressive British rule. But some Americans - particularly Blacks, Native Americans, Latinos and Asian Americans - argue that dissenting perspectives are often missing from text books and classroom discussions.

The new rules say classroom instruction "must be factual and objective, and may not suppress or distort significant historical events." It goes on to mention the Holocaust, slavery and the Civil War, as well as the civil rights movement and the contributions of Blacks, Hispanics and women to the country.

But it also makes specific mention of "theories that distort historical events" that are inconsistent with board policy, including any teaching that denies the Holocaust or espouses critical race theory, which the new rules say asserts "that racism is not merely the product of prejudice, but that racism is embedded in American society and its legal systems in order to uphold the supremacy of white persons."

During his brief appearance Thursday, DeSantis called it "outrageous" how some instructors are deviating from what he and others consider the fundamentals of history.

"Some of this stuff is, I think, really toxic," DeSantis told the school board. "I think it's going to cause a lot of divisions. I think it'll cause people to think of themselves more as a member of particular race based on skin color, rather than based on the content of their character and based on their hard work and what they're trying to accomplish in life."

The Florida Education Association had called on the board to reject the proposal.

The association, which represents teachers across Florida, called on the board to strip away inflammatory language from the proposed rules. A particular sore point was the use of "indoctrinate" in the rule, which the union says presents an overly negative view of classroom instruction. That word, however, remained in the rules adopted by the board.

"The job of educators is to challenge students with facts and allow them to question and think critically about information, and that's the antithesis of indoctrination," Cathy Boehme, a public policy advocate for the association, told the board. "No matter our color, background or ZIP Code, we want our kids to have an education that imparts honesty about who we are, integrity and how we treat others, and courage to do what's right."

More than two dozen members of the public spoke on the matter, their opinions divided and impassioned. The board meeting, held at a state college in Jacksonville, was briefly recessed when one speaker went over his time limit and began chanting in support of teachers.

One woman implored the board to reject the new rules, saying it was important for children to learn about how the legacies of slavery, segregation and Jim Crow still "created an uneven playing field for Black people."

Others spoke about how an individual's interpretation of history could reflect personal agendas and biases that could lead to the proselytization of children.

The new rules also forbids use of the 1619 Project, a classroom program spawned by a New York Times project that focuses on teaching about slavery and African American history. The project's name refers to the year popularly believed to be when slaves were first brought to colonial America.

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Florida bans 'critical race theory' from its classrooms

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Florida has become the latest state to ban "critical race theory" from its public schools. The state Board of Education adopted new rules Thursday to shield schoolchildren from curricula that it says could "distort historical events."

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Glenn Youngkin was elected governor of Virginia based in part on his anti-critical race theory platform. His 2021 campaign and others like it continue a long-standing conservative disinformation campaign of falsehoods, half-truths and exaggerations designed to create, mobilize and exploit anxiety around white status to secure political power. The problem is, these lies work, and that shows that liberals have a lot of work to do if they want to come up with a successful countermessage.

Conservatives have spent close to a century galvanizing white voters around the "dangerous" idea of racial equality. When such disingenuous rhetoric turns into reality, the end result is the criminalization of educational programs that promote racial equality. Youngkin, who pledged to "ban critical race theory on Day One," frequently repeated this promise at his "Parents Matter" rallies across the state in the final months of the campaign.

But in his campaigning, he and others misrepresented what critical race theory (CRT) actually is: a specialized intellectual field established in the 1980s by legal scholars Kimberlé Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda and Stephanie Phillips that emphasizes the unique historical role that legal systems play in upholding and producing racial inequalities in the U.S.

Conservatives instead framed CRT as nearly anything taught in schools that would discuss racial inequality. Youngkin's appeals targeted white suburban voters by creating fears of these kinds of lessons. He promised to implement the supposedly color-blind values of Martin Luther King, Jr., replace the entire Virginia board of education and install a curriculum based on the 1776 Project, an education initiative by Donald Trump that has been heavily criticized by historians for trafficking in jingoistic mythology.

Democrats have not successfully countered this disinformation campaign or accurately reflected on its history. Indeed, in response to charges of reverse racism and the subversion of parent rights and parental say, Democrats argued that none of the things criticized by Republicans are actually part of CRT. Clearly, these kinds of logical appeals are not working.

This is in part because campaigns such as Youngkin's are built on a legacy of lies dating back to the 1950s and 1960s. Our research demonstrates that conservative fearmongering over CRT reuses a set of scare tactics that equate racial justice with Communism that originated during the cold war. Conservative politician George Wallace once called the Civil Rights Act of 1964 "a fraud, a sham, and a hoax" and likened it to the Communist Manifesto. Indeed, whereas today's conservatives strategically misuse King's values to justify colorblindness in the service of inequality, their 1950s predecessors labeled King an "outside agitator" and used fears of Communism to rationalize physical violence against civil rights groups.

Even in a post-Soviet world, fears of Communism are evergreen. On May 24, 2021, Christopher Rufo, a key figure in the anti-CRT movement, tweeted that "American schools haven't 'whitewashed' history; they've 'redwashed' it." The 1776 Project PAC, which opposes CRT and backed candidates in 58 races around the country, argues that advocates of racial justice "believe we need to undo the cornerstones of American society including classical liberalism, legal reasoning, and capitalism in order to promote their version of cultural Marxism based on race rather than class."

Republican think tanks, thought leaders, media figures and politicians such as Youngkin draw on this legacy to brand any diversity, equity and social justice initiative as the dangerous (and Communist) "critical race theory."

Conservative anti-CRT rhetoric and the accompanying bills introduced and enacted by Republican state legislatures across the country constitute a disinformation campaign designed to manufacture white grievance in the service of white power. These policies reveal the need for researchers and scholars concerned with the quality of democratic debate to treat white supremacy as a disinformation campaign and to incorporate an honest accounting of America's racial history and legacy of present-day inequality into all levels of education.

Anti-CRT efforts offer a sweeping, bad-faith indictment of any attempt to do so on the grounds that it is "reverse racism," will make white kids feel bad for being white and will further divide the nation.

These claims are not true, but many white people believe them because of a systematic disinformation campaign carried out by Republican politicians, media and thought leaders. For example, conservative viewpoints on CRT dominate search returns, as one of us (Tripodi) has testified to the U.S. Senate; this is the product of a concerted campaign to shape publicly available information. Search "What is CRT?" on YouTube, and the content with the most engagement is from PragerU, a nonuniversity whose goal is to spread conservative views and values. Produced just last year, this five-minute explainer video has almost two million views.

Elections never depend on a single factor, and it's not unusual for the party that captures the presidency to lose ground. That said, the perceived success of conservatives' anti-CRT campaign is likely to further legitimate explicit appeals to white people such as those famously used by Trump. This will probably have long-lasting consequences. It further organizes U.S. politics around hardened racial and ethnic coalitions: a majority-white Republican Party and a multiethnic, multiracial Democratic Party. The Republican Party promises to maintain white people's status at the top of the social hierarchy, and anti-CRT rhetoric conveys that this is justifiable.

The perceived success of anti-CRT campaigns also jeopardizes any meaningful discussions of systemic inequality as part of public school education. As of March 2022, 16 states had passed anti-CRT legislation, and another 19 were considering similar bills or policies. These bills have the practical effect of preventing even tacit acknowledgment of racism or sexism. A bill passed by the Wisconsin Assembly, for instance, bans any books, educational materials or classroom discussions that include terms such as "racial prejudice," "patriarchy," "structural inequality," "intersectionality" or, ironically, "critical self-reflection." With this rule in place, it is hard to see how the Civil Rights Movement, women's suffrage, or any number of events in American history could be discussed at all, let alone in depth. Indeed, such legislation may effectively "chill" the teaching of race by teachers scared to run afoul of conservative politics.

Many white voters are reacting en masse to fears that children will be taught about white privilege and white supremacy, even as conservative pundits and politicians rely on tried-and-true anxieties over Communism to paint antiracist efforts as a threat to capitalism and America as a whole. Unfortunately, we know from history that white racial mobilization is a potent force, both at the ballot box and in attempts to subvert it.

This disinformation campaign must be directly confronted. Rather than dismissing manufactured concerns over CRT as fake, Democrats should embrace the robust teaching of America's racial history in our public schools and make an affirmative case for why it matters for American values of fairness, equality and justice. Democrats should then focus on articulating how attacks on CRT are meant to divide people of all races who otherwise share interests. Rather than dismissing these attacks as isolated incidents, Democrats should mount their own sustained and coherent campaign to argue affirmatively for diversity, equity and inclusion programs and for complementary efforts such as the 1619 Project.

Conservatives are unified around anti-CRT rhetoric. Now it is time for Democrats to form the same united front, to own that racism is real and to call out conservative legislative efforts designed to outlaw the teaching of racial inequality for what they are: a fitting example of how legal systems uphold racial inequality in the U.S. This, of course, is exactly what CRT is trying to point out.

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Daniel Kreiss, Alice Marwick, Francesca Bolla Tripodi

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The Anti-Critical Race Theory Movement Will Profoundly Affect Public Education

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Glenn Youngkin was elected governor of Virginia based in part on his anti-critical race theory platform. His 2021 campaign and others like it continue a long-standing conservative disinformation campaign of falsehoods, half-truths and exaggerations designed to create, mobilize and exploit anxiety around white status to secure political power.

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Critical Theory suggests that oppressed people have been conditioned to believe that systems that are designed to work for them are systems that keep them oppressed. "Critical Theory holds that institutionalized oppression of groups of people in a society - cultural, ethnic, racial, and gender groups-is often supported by the oppressed peoples themselves, who believe the system to be in their own best interests." (Owens & Valesky)

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Critical Race Theory adds an additional component to Critical Race Theory as it addresses the achievement and opportunity gaps in education.

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Critical race theory: Experts break down what it actually means

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What is Critical Theory? | Definition, History, and Examples from Pedagogy of the Oppressed