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The True Story of Critical Race Theory | The United States of Anxiety | WNYC Studios

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Is racism a permanent fixture of society? Jelani Cobb, staff writer for The New Yorker, unravels the history of Derrick Bell’s quest to answer that question.

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This is one of the best series on the subject. It was part of the Guide to counter narratives on CRT.

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Critical Race Theory (CRT) is a body of legal scholarship that investigates how racial power reconstituted itself in the era following the Civil Rights Movement. Although legislative victories of the Civil Rights Movement fueled optimism about U.S. race relations, the fall of Jim Crow segregation was not enough to eliminate racial inequality and antiblack racism. In the 1980s and 1990s, a network of law professors, mostly scholars of color, began to document how the law continued to sustain and perpetuate unequal power relations. This body of work emerged as Critical Race Theory, a rigorous examination of how the law constructs and sustains racial power and subordination.

“Critical Race Theory,” as it is used today, is a disinformation campaign carefully orchestrated to stir white opposition to anti-racist education and racial reform in the workplace. In the aftermath of international unrest, following the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, rightwing formations launched a crusade to counteract the racial reckoning that appeared to elevate the consciousness and activism of a significant segment of the non-Black population.

La TaSha Levy

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Kimberle Williams Crenshaw

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Intersectionality | African American Policy Forum | United States

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The African American Policy Forum is home to the SayHerName Campaign and an innovative think tank that connects academics, activists, and policy-makers to promote efforts to dismantle structural inequality. We utilize new ideas and innovative perspectives to transform public discourse and policy.

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This is an excellent video from PBS on critical race theory that we've been sharing with pastors and others to better inform (from Nicole Hewitt)

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WATCH: Answering your questions on critical race theory

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Guide to counter narrating the attacks on Critical Race Theory

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Counter-Narrating the Attacks on Critical Race Theory

While President Biden rescinded the executive order banning racial equity training and replaced it with one to advance racial equity, opponents to racial justice have introduced upwards of 20 state legislative bills, some passed, that would ban racial equity work in government and education on race in schools. Versions of this argument have now passed as legislation and are already becoming a central debate in countless school districts across the country.

The bills themselves are all vulnerable to court challenges (President Trump's Executive Order was blocked by a federal judge), but the danger to racial equity is not at the level of policy, but rather narrative. Using slogans like "Stop Racism. Stop Hate" this Orwellian effort to frame the discussion of racism to be racism against white people is undermining the momentum recently gained by the racial justice movement.

Download this guide to craft your response to these attacks, whether you are a parent, activist, or government worker.

And contact Race Forward atmedia@raceforward.org if you want to work with Race Forward's team to develop (and potentially pitch) your story in support of education and training on systemic racism.

Resources

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While President Biden rescinded the executive order banning racial equity training and replaced it with one to advance racial equity, opponents to racial justice have introduced upwards of 20 state legislative bills, some passed, that would ban racial equity work in government and education on race in schools.

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Pundits and politicians have created their own definition for the term, and then set about attacking it.

The United States is not in the midst of a "culture war" over race and racism. The animating force of our current conflict is not our differing values, beliefs, moral codes, or practices. The American people aren't divided. The American people are being divided.

Republican operatives have buried the actual definition of critical race theory: "a way of looking at law's role platforming, facilitating, producing, and even insulating racial inequality in our country," as the law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, who helped coin the term, recently defined it. Instead, the attacks on critical race theory are based on made-up definitions and descriptors. "Critical race theory says every white person is a racist," Senator Ted Cruz has said. "It basically teaches that certain children are inherently bad people because of the color of their skin," said the Alabama state legislator Chris Pringle.

There are differing points of view about race and racism. But what we are seeing and hearing on news shows, in school-district meetings, in op-ed pages, in legislative halls, and in social-media feeds aren't multiple sides with differing points of view. There's only one side in our so-called culture war right now.
Conor Friedersdorf: Critical race theory is making both parties flip-flop
The Republican operatives, who dismiss the expositions of critical race theorists and anti-racists in order to define critical race theory and anti-racism, and then attack those definitions, are effectively debating themselves. They have conjured an imagined monster to scare the American people and project themselves as the nation's defenders from that fictional monster.

The evangelist Pat Robertson recently called critical race theory "a monstrous evil." And over the past year, that "monstrous evil" has supposedly been growing many legs. First, Republicans pointed to Black Lives Matter demonstrators. Three days after George Floyd's murder last year, President Donald Trump recast the largely peaceful demonstrators as violent and dishonorable "THUGS." By the end of July, Trump had framed them as "anarchists who hate our country."

Then "cancel culture" was targeted. At the Republican National Convention in August, Trump blasted "cancel culture" as seeking to coerce Americans "into saying what you know to be false and scare you out of saying what you know to be true."

Next came attacks on the 1619 Project and American history. "Despite the virtues and accomplishments of this Nation, many students are now taught in school to hate their own country, and to believe that the men and women who built it were not heroes, but rather villains," read Trump's executive order on November 2, establishing the President's Advisory 1776 Commission.

And now the Black Lives Matter demonstrators, cancel culture, the 1619 Project, American history, and anti-racist education are presented to the public as the many legs of the "monstrous evil" of critical race theory that's purportedly coming to harm white children. The language echoes the rhetoric used to demonize desegregation after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, in 1954.

In the 1950s and '60s, the conservators of racism organized to keep Black kids out of all-white schools. Today, they are trying to get critical race theory out of American schools. "Instead of helping young people discover that America is the greatest, most tolerant, and most generous nation in history, [critical race theory] teaches them that America is systemically evil and that the hearts of our people are full of hatred and malice," Trump wrote in an op-ed on June 18.

After it was cited 132 times on Fox News shows in 2020, critical race theory became a conservative obsession this year. Its mentions on Fox News practically doubled month after month: It was referred to 51 times in February, 139 times in March, 314 times in April, 589 times in May, and 737 times in just the first three weeks of June. As of June 29, 26 states had introduced legislation or other state-level actions to "restrict teaching critical race theory or limit how teachers can discuss racism and sexism," according to Education Week, and nine had implemented such bans.

I have been called the father of critical race theory, although I was born in 1982, and critical race theory was born in 1981. Over the past few months, I have seldom stopped to answer the critiques of critical race theory or of my own work, because the more I've studied these critiques, the more I've concluded that these critics aren't arguing against me. They aren't arguing against anti-racist thinkers. They aren't arguing against critical race theorists. These critics are arguing against themselves.
Read: The GOP's 'critical race theory' obsession
What happens when a politician falsely proclaims what you think, and then criticizes that proclamation? Is she really critiquing your ideas-or her own? If a writer decides what both sides of an argument are stating, is he really engaging in an argument with another writer, or is he engaging in an argument with himself?

Take the journalist Matthew Yglesias. In February, in The Washington Post, he wrote that I think that "any racial gap simply is racist by definition; any policy that maintains such a gap is a racist policy; and-most debatably-any intellectual explanation of its existence (sociological, cultural and so on) is also racist." But nowhere have I written that the racial gap is racist: The policies and practices causing the racial gap are racist. Nowhere have I stated that any intellectual explanation of the existence of a racial gap is racist. Only intellectual explanations of a racial gap that point to the superiority or inferiority of a racial group are racist.

Was Yglesias really arguing against me, or was he arguing against himself? What about the columnist Ross Douthat? In a recent op-ed in The New York Times, he did what GOP thinkers keep doing to Americans striving to construct an equitable and just society: re-create us as extremists, as monsters to be feared for speaking out against racism. Douthat accused me of "ideological extremism that embarrasses clever liberals," comparing me to the late Rush Limbaugh. I've spent my career writing evidence-based historical scholarship and demonstrating my willingness to be vulnerable; Limbaugh had no interest in being self-critical, and for decades attacked truth and facts and evidence.

Douthat claimed that I have a "Manichaean vision of public policy, in which all policymaking is either racist or antiracist, all racial disparities are the result of racism-and the measurement of any outcome short of perfect 'equity' may be a form of structural racism itself."

Where did he get perfect equity? In How to Be an Antiracist, I define racial equity as a state "when two or more racial groups are standing on a relatively equal footing." I proposed that an example of racial equity would be "if there were relatively equitable percentages" of racial groups "living in owner-occupied homes in the forties, seventies, or, better, nineties." By contrast, in 2014, 71 percent of white families lived in owner-occupied homes, compared with 45 percent of Latino families and 41 percent of Black families. That's racial inequity.

What we write doesn't matter to the people arguing with themselves. It doesn't matter that I consistently challenge Manichaean racial visions of inherently good or evil people or policy making. It doesn't matter that I don't write about policy making being good or evil, or that I write about the equitable or inequitable outcome of policies. It doesn't matter that I've urged us toward relative equity, and not toward perfect equity.

If you want to understand why I've made these arguments, you first need to recognize that for decades, right-wing thinkers and judges have argued that policies that lead to racial inequities are "not racist" or are "race neutral." That was the position of the conservative Supreme Court justices who recently upheld Arizona's voting-restriction policies. Those who wish to conserve racial inequity want us to focus on intent-which is hard to prove-rather than the outcome of inequity, which is rather easy to prove. Case in point: GOP state legislators are claiming that the 28 laws they've enacted in 17 states as of June 21 are about election security, even though voter fraud is a practically nonexistent problem. They claim that these laws aren't intended to make it harder for Black voters or members of other minority groups to cast ballots, even as experts find that's precisely what such laws have done in the past, and predict that's likely what these new laws will do as well.
Jarvis R. Givens: What's missing from the discourse about anti-racist teaching
These critics aren't just making up their claims as they go along. They are making up the sources of their criticism as they go along. Douthat argues that work like mine "extends structural analysis beyond what it can reasonably bear, into territory where white supremacy supposedly explains Asian American success on the SAT." Who is giving this explanation other than Douthat? I'm surely not. I point to other explanations, including the history of highly educated Asian immigrants and the concentration of score-boosting test-prep companies in Asian (and white) neighborhoods.

White supremacy does explain why more than three-quarters of the perpetrators of anti-Asian hate crimes and incidents before and during the pandemic have been white. Asian American success as measured by test scores, education, and income should not erase the impact of structural racism on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. This group now has the highest income inequality of any racial group in the United States. Asian Americans in New York experienced the highest surge of unemployment of any racial group during the pandemic. Do the critics of critical race theory want us to think of the AAPI community as not just a "model minority," but a model monolith? Showcasing AAPIs to maintain the fiction of a postracial society ends up erasing Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.

Critical race theory has been falsely labeled as anti-Asian. Helen Raleigh, an Asian American entrepreneur, defined critical race theory as a "divisive discriminatory ideology that judges people on the basis of their skin color" in Newsweek. "It is my practice to ignore critics who have not read the work and who are not interested in honest exchange," responded one of the three Asian American founders of critical race theory, Mari Matsuda, a law professor at the University of Hawaii. "But I do want to say this for the record: Asian Americans are at the center of CRT analysis and have been from the start."

How should thinkers respond to monstrous lies? Should we mostly ignore the critics as Matsuda has, as I have? Because restating facts over and over again gets old. Reciting your own work over and over again to critics who either haven't read what they are criticizing or are purposefully distorting it gets old. And talking with people who have created a monologue with two points of view, theirs and what they impute to you, gets old.

But democracy needs dialogue. And dialogue necessitates seeking to know what a person is saying in order to offer informed critiques.

As a scholar, I know that nothing is more useful than criticism to improve my scholarship. As a human being, I know that nothing is more constructive than criticism to improve my humanity. I've chronicled how criticism and critics have been a driving force on my journey to be anti-racist, to confront my own racist, sexist, homophobic, and classist ideas-and their intersections. Constructive criticism often hurts, but like painful medical treatments, it can be lifesaving; it can be nation-saving.

But what's happening now is something entirely different and destructive-not constructive. This isn't a "culture war." This isn't even an "argument." This isn't even "criticism." This is critics arguing with themselves.

​When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

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actual definition of critical race theory

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alabama state legislator chris pringle.there

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intellectual explanation of its existence

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intellectual explanation of the existence of a racial gap

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There Is No Debate Over Critical Race Theory

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Pundits and politicians have created their own definition for the term, and then set about attacking it.

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Passcode:  i3s.!@v%

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Video Conferencing, Web Conferencing, Webinars, Screen Sharing

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Zoom is the leader in modern enterprise video communications, with an easy, reliable cloud platform for video and audio conferencing, chat, and webinars across mobile, desktop, and room systems. Zoom Rooms is the original software-based conference room solution used around the world in board, conference, huddle, and training rooms, as well as executive offices and classrooms. Founded in 2011, Zoom helps businesses and organizations bring their teams together in a frictionless environment to get more done.

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Meet Christopher Rufo...the man who made all of this up.

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Meet Christopher Rufo...the man who made all of this up.

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Remote work turned out to be advantageous for people looking to leak information to reporters. Instructions that once might have been given in conversation now often had to be written down and beamed from one home office to another. Holding a large meeting on Zoom often required e-mailing supporting notes and materials-more documents to leak. Before the pandemic, if you thought that an anti-racism seminar at your workplace had gone awry, you had to be both brave and sneaky to record it. At home, it was so much easier. Zoom allowed you to record and take screenshots, and if you were worried that such actions could be traced you could use your cell phone, or your spouse's cell phone, or your friend's. Institutions that had previously seemed impenetrable have been pried open: Amazon, the I.R.S., the U.S. Treasury. But some less obviously tectonic leaks have had a more direct political effect, as was the case in July, 2020, when an employee of the city of Seattle documented an anti-bias training session and sent the evidence to a journalist named Christopher F. Rufo, who read it and recognized a political opportunity.

Rufo, thirty-six, was at once an unconventional and a savvy choice for the leaker to select. Raised by Italian immigrants in Sacramento and educated at Georgetown, Rufo had spent his twenties and early thirties working as a documentary filmmaker, largely overseas, making touristic projects such as "Roughing It: Mongolia," and "Diamond in the Dunes," about a joint Uyghur-Han baseball team in the Chinese province of Xinjiang. In 2015, Rufo began work on a film for PBS that traced the experience of poverty in three American cities, and in the course of filming Rufo became convinced that poverty was not something that could be alleviated with a policy lever but was deeply embedded in "social, familial, even psychological" dynamics, and his politics became more explicitly conservative. Returning home to Seattle, where his wife worked for Microsoft, Rufo got a small grant from a regional, conservative think tank to report on homelessness, and then ran an unsuccessful campaign for city council, in 2018. His work so outraged Seattle's homelessness activists that, during his election campaign, someone plastered his photo and home address on utility poles around his neighborhood. When Rufo received the anti-bias documents from the city of Seattle, he knew how to spot political kindling. These days, "I'm a brawler," Rufo told me cheerfully.

Through FOIA requests, Rufo turned up slideshows and curricula for the Seattle anti-racism seminars. Under the auspices of the city's Office for Civil Rights, employees across many departments were being divided up by race for implicit-bias training. ("Welcome: Internalized Racial Superiority for White People," read one introductory slide, over an image of the Seattle skyline.) "What do we do in white people space?" read a second slide. One bullet point suggested that the attendees would be "working through emotions that often come up for white people like sadness, shame, paralysis, confusion, denial." Another bullet point emphasized "retraining," learning new "ways of seeing that are hidden from us in white supremacy." A different slide listed supposed expressions of internalized white supremacy, including perfectionism, objectivity, and individualism. Rufo summarized his findings in an article for the Web site of City Journal, the magazine of the center-right Manhattan Institute: "Under the banner of 'antiracism,' Seattle's Office of Civil Rights is now explicitly endorsing principles of segregationism, group-based guilt, and race essentialism-ugly concepts that should have been left behind a century ago."

The story was a phenomenon and helped to generate more leaks from across the country. Marooned at home, civil servants recorded and photographed their own anti-racism training sessions and sent the evidence to Rufo. Reading through these documents, and others, Rufo noticed that they tended to cite a small set of popular anti-racism books, by authors such as Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo. Rufo read the footnotes in those books, and found that they pointed to academic scholarship from the nineteen-nineties, by a group of legal scholars who referred to their work as critical race theory, in particular Kimberlé Crenshaw and Derrick Bell. These scholars argued that the white supremacy of the past lived on in the laws and societal rules of the present. As Crenshaw recently explained, critical race theory found that "the so-called American dilemma was not simply a matter of prejudice but a matter of structured disadvantages that stretched across American society."

This inquiry, into the footnotes and citations in the documents he'd been sent, formed the basis for an idea that has organized cultural politics this spring: that the anti-racism seminars did not just represent a progressive view on race but that they were expressions of a distinct ideology-critical race theory-with radical roots. If people were upset about the seminars, Rufo wanted them also to notice "critical race theory" operating behind the curtain. Following the trail back through the citations in the legal scholars' texts, Rufo thought that he could detect the seed of their ideas in radical, often explicitly Marxist, critical-theory texts from the generation of 1968. (Crenshaw said that this was a selective, "red-baiting" account of critical race theory's origins, which overlooked less divisive influences such as Martin Luther King, Jr.) But Rufo believed that he could detect a single lineage, and that the same concepts and terms that organized discussions among white employees of the city of Seattle, or the anti-racism seminars at Sandia National Laboratories, were present a half century ago. "Look at Angela Davis-you see all of the key terms," Rufo said. Davis had been Herbert Marcuse's doctoral student, and Rufo had been reading her writing from the late sixties to the mid-seventies. He felt as if he had begun with a branch and discovered the root. If financial regulators in Washington were attending seminars in which they read Kendi's writing that anti-racism was not possible without anti-capitalism, then maybe that was more than casual talk.

As Rufo eventually came to see it, conservatives engaged in the culture war had been fighting against the same progressive racial ideology since late in the Obama years, without ever being able to describe it effectively. "We've needed new language for these issues," Rufo told me, when I first wrote to him, late in May. " 'Political correctness' is a dated term and, more importantly, doesn't apply anymore. It's not that elites are enforcing a set of manners and cultural limits, they're seeking to reengineer the foundation of human psychology and social institutions through the new politics of race, It's much more invasive than mere 'correctness,' which is a mechanism of social control, but not the heart of what's happening. The other frames are wrong, too: 'cancel culture' is a vacuous term and doesn't translate into a political program; 'woke' is a good epithet, but it's too broad, too terminal, too easily brushed aside. 'Critical race theory' is the perfect villain," Rufo wrote.

He thought that the phrase was a better description of what conservatives were opposing, but it also seemed like a promising political weapon. "Its connotations are all negative to most middle-class Americans, including racial minorities, who see the world as 'creative' rather than 'critical,' 'individual' rather than 'racial,' 'practical' rather than 'theoretical.' Strung together, the phrase 'critical race theory' connotes hostile, academic, divisive, race-obsessed, poisonous, elitist, anti-American." Most perfect of all, Rufo continued, critical race theory is not "an externally applied pejorative." Instead, "it's the label the critical race theorists chose themselves."

Last summer, Rufo published several more pieces for City Journal, and, on September 2nd, he appeared on "Tucker Carlson Tonight." Rufo had prepared a three-minute monologue, to be uploaded to a teleprompter at a Seattle studio, and he had practiced carefully enough that when a teleprompter wasn't available he still remembered what to say. On air, set against the deep-blue background of Fox News, he told Carlson, "It's absolutely astonishing how critical race theory"-he said those three words slowly, for emphasis-"has pervaded every aspect of the federal government." Carlson's face retracted into a familiar pinched squint while Rufo recounted several of his articles. Then he said what he'd come to say: "Conservatives need to wake up. This is an existential threat to the United States. And the bureaucracy, even under Trump, is being weaponized against core American values. And I'd like to make it explicit: The President and the White House-it's within their authority to immediately issue an executive order to abolish critical-race-theory training from the federal government. And I call on the President to immediately issue this executive order-to stamp out this destructive, divisive, pseudoscientific ideology."

The next morning, Rufo was home with his wife and two sons when he got a phone call from a 202 area code. The man on the other end, Rufo recalled, said, " 'Chris, this is Mark Meadows, chief of staff, reaching out on behalf of the President. He saw your segment on 'Tucker' last night, and he's instructed me to take action." Soon after, Rufo flew to Washington, D.C., to assist in drafting an executive order, issued by the White House in late September, that limited how contractors providing federal diversity seminars could talk about race. "This entire movement came from nothing," Rufo wrote to me recently, as the conservative campaign against critical race theory consumed Twitter each morning and Fox News each night. But the truth is more specific than that. Really, it came from him.

Last Thursday, I travelled to visit Rufo at home in Gig Harbor, Washington, a small city on the Puget Sound with the faint but ineradicable atmosphere of early retirement-of pier-side low-exertion midmorning yoga classes. Rufo has a thin, brown beard and an inquisitive, outdoorsy manner, and when we met for lunch on a local café's veranda he spoke about his political commitments (to conservatism against critical race theory) loudly enough for those around us to hear. Rufo and his wife, Suphatra, a computer programmer at Amazon Web Services who emigrated from Thailand in elementary school, moved to Gig Harbor last year, in part to get away from the intense political climate that had coalesced around him in Seattle. The move had coincided with his increasing prominence, and so Gig Harbor had not been as professionally isolating as he had at first feared. Wearing a gray flannel shirt and dark jeans, Rufo showed me the soundproofed home studio he'd recently built, with a hookup to send a broadcast-quality signal to Fox News.

Since his appearance on "Tucker Carlson Tonight" last fall, Rufo's rise had matched that of the movement against critical race theory. He'd become a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, for which he had written more than two dozen document-based articles-mostly about anti-bias training in the government, schools, and corporations-which, he told me, had together accrued more than two hundred and fifty million impressions online. ("That's a lot," he said.) Carlson has been an especially effective ally; he relied on Rufo's reporting for an hour-long episode this spring on "woke education," and invited Rufo to join as a segment guest. Conservatives in state legislatures across the country have proposed (and, in some cases, passed) legislation banning or restricting critical-race-theory instruction or seminars; Rufo has advised on the language for more than ten bills. When Ron DeSantis and Tom Cotton have tweeted about critical race theory, they have borrowed Rufo's phrases. He has travelled to Washington, D.C., to speak to an audience of two dozen members of Congress, and mentioned in passing that earlier in May he'd had drinks with Ted Cruz. In the 2016 Presidential election, Rufo had cast a dissenter's vote for Gary Johnson. In 2020, he voted to reëlect Trump. Rufo said, "I mean, how can you not? It would have seemed rude and ungrateful."

Rufo's new position did not give him just a view up, into the world of Republican power, but down, into the mounting outrage at anti-racism programs across the country. Rufo set up a tip line last October, and has so far received thousands of tips, many of which he thought were substantive. (An assistant does the culling.) From among this pile, he'd discovered that third graders in Cupertino, California, were being asked to rank themselves and their classmates according to their privilege; he also learned about a three-day whiteness retreat for white male executives at Lockheed Martin and an initiative at Disney urging executives to "decolonize their bookshelves." Some of the outrage appeared to have been ginned up by local political actors-a particularly combative and high-profile anti-C.R.T. parents' group in Loudoun County was organized by a former Trump Justice Department official-but it was nonetheless deeply felt. In Loudoun, one parent had said, "If you spend millions to call people in our community racist, you better be able to prove it."

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How a Conservative Activist Invented the Conflict Over Critical Race Theory

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Remote work turned out to be advantageous for people looking to leak information to reporters. Instructions that once might have been given in conversation now often had to be written down and beamed from one home office to another. Holding a large meeting on Zoom often required e-mailing supporting notes and materials-more documents to leak.

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I've Been a Critical Race Theorist for over 30 Years: Our Opponents Are Just Proving Our Point for Us by Gary Peller

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I've Been a Critical Race Theorist for over 30 Years: Our Opponents Are Just Proving Our Point for Us by Gary Peller

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CRT is not a racialist ideology that declares all whites to be privileged oppressors, and CRT is not taught in public schools.

But over the past nine months or so, first slowly in right-wing media conversation and now quickly in state houses and even mainstream newspapers, conservative activists have branded all race reform efforts in education and employment as CRT-a disinformation campaign designed to rally disaffected middle- and working-class white people against progressive change.

If you understand what CRT actually is, though, it's easy to see that it has nothing to do with the cartoonish picture of reverse racism that its critics depict. And, more importantly, CRT is a pretty good lens for understanding why the campaign against it has been able to spread so fast.

CRT, in the real world, describes the diverse work of a small group of scholars who write about the shortcomings of conventional civil rights approaches to understanding and transforming racial power in American society. It's a complex critique that wouldn't fit easily into a K-12 curriculum. Even law students find the ideas challenging; we ourselves struggle to put it in understandable terms. We embrace no simple or orthodox set of principles, so no one can really be "trained" in CRT. And if teachers were able to teach such analytically difficult ideas to public school students, it should be a cause for wild celebration, not denunciation.

The common starting point of our analysis is that racial power was not eliminated by the successes of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. That movement succeeded in ending the system of blatant segregation reflected in the "Whites Only" and "Colored" signs that once marked everyday life in America-but in its wake, in the 70s and the 80s, racial-justice reform in countless institutions was halted by old-guard resistance.

For example, as a first-year law teacher in the early 1980s, I served on the University of Virginia Law School admissions committee. UVA had been regularly admitting a tiny number of Black students for some 15 years by then. But some of my colleagues serving on the admissions committee were the very same people who had administered the school when it was segregated. The rules had changed, but they were still in charge. So, there they were, decades after formal desegregation, insisting categorically that all graduates of historically Black institutions were unprepared for the rigors of law study at such an elite school like Virginia, and voting against their admission.

The same story was playing out in institution after institution. The "Whites Only" signs were gone, but the racial power remained in a myriad of social practices-now couched in the language of race-neutrality, such as the old guard administrators' professed concerns about "standards," and their ideas about what those standards should be.

CRT was first articulated in the 1980s by a new generation of scholars who confronted this kind of racial power in the universities we attended and in the law schools where we would eventually teach. As American constitutional law embraced "colorblindness" as the ideal of racial justice, we focused on all the ways that racial power was exercised in supposedly "colorblind" ways. And while we have a number of different approaches and beliefs, our shared goal-broadly speaking-is to understand how those subtler racial power structures work, how they often pose as "neutral" institutions in law and society, and how to undo the injustices they've been causing.

From the viewpoint of traditional liberal thinking, the problem of "civil rights" was that the policy of racial integration was never implemented strongly enough. But, from a critical perspective, Black students getting admitted into mainstream institutions wasn't enough to achieve racial equality-because once inside the gates, they confronted norms organizing what was taught and how it was taught that had been created exclusively by whites operating in all-white institutions. There were, or could be, racial power dynamics embedded even in what was called "knowledge" in academia or "neutrality" in law. Rather than seeing "racism" as an irrational deviation from rationality, we began to explore how liberal categories of reason and neutrality themselves might bear the marks of history and struggle, including racial and other forms of social power.

Critical race theorists analyze social practices-and the law is a social practice-in terms of how they help to construct or maintain the subordination of the Black community. We reject "colorblindness" as an ideal because being conscious about race is the only way to tell whether the situation of the Black community is improving or not. As appealing as colorblindness might sound to some, it's also dangerous: It can lull decision-makers, wrongly, to assume that once they no longer explicitly discriminate along racial lines in admissions or hiring, then racial power no longer plays a part in social life.

So, in thinking about police reform, a CRT perspective would focus on the historical relations between the community and the police, rather than simply on the idea of neutral enforcement of rules like probable cause requirements. (The idea of imposing race-neutral standards of "reasonableness" on police is hollow in the actual context of white suburban police officers sealed off in high-tech patrol cars patrolling the urban streets of Black neighborhoods.) Similarly, to counter claims that "objective" market forces explain the continuing wealth inequities between Black and white America, a CRT perspective would highlight the long history of discrimination-in employment, in real estate, in education and healthcare-that built and still underlies the economy we have today.

We likewise question the traditional ways that liberals have defended affirmative action as a useful exception to a presumed race-blind ideal of "merit." To us, the very definitions of merit reflect racial and other forms of social power.

Asking critical questions about widely shared values always makes people uncomfortable, and understandably so. The opponents of CRT seize upon our critique of the ideology of colorblindness to charge that we are divisive-or, as Ted Cruz put it, that we are in fact racist. But colorblindness is an empty ideal that works to ensure confirmation of its own premises: If one is not permitted to see the social consequences of policies in terms of race, then the disparate racial effects of policies simply become invisible. Racialized police violence disappears when no racial statistics are kept on police interactions. Racial redlining looks like simple risk-based pricing if one doesn't look at the racialized ZIP code results. The way to end racial subordination is to end it in fact, not to define it away.

In contrast to being racially divisive, the "critical" part of CRT holds that there is no objective and neutral idea of merit that could explain the distribution of wealth, power, and prestige in America. The unfairness extends to whites as well as to Blacks, and to all those whose place on the hierarchies of American life are supposedly legitimated by ways that "merit" is defined by the professional classes.

CRT is a powerful lens for understanding the racial dynamics of the current cultural situation. The campaign against CRT has spread so fast in large part because of how narrowly traditional civil rights approaches comprehended racial power. As the civil rights "revolution" of the 1960s was institutionalized in American cultural understanding, whites were taught to understand racism simplistically in terms of bad individuals who carry around racist ideas. The "redneck" Southern sheriff became the consensus villain for mainstream America.

But such a simplistic analysis of racial power meant that there was never a national reckoning with the subtle and systemic effects of American apartheid, as they marked schools and workplaces over multiple generations. And if racism means identifying bad actors, as the conventional image holds, then whites are understandably anxious that renewed attention to all these forms of institutionalized racial power means that they will be blamed and shamed.

It makes sense that the depictions of CRT by its opponents bear so little resemblance to our actual work and ideas. Like the invocation of Willie Horton in the 1980s and affirmative action after that, the point of those who seek to ban what they call "CRT" is not to contest our vision of racial justice, or to debate our social critique. It is instead to tap into a dependable reservoir of racial anxiety among whites. This is a political strategy that has worked for as long as any of us can remember, and CRT simply serves as the convenient face of the campaign today-a soft target.

The multiracial, multigenerational popular mobilization in the wake of the murder of George Floyd last summer is a sign that the old strategy is weakening. And, while it is a lie that CRT itself is being taught to elementary and high school students, it is likely true that many teachers and administrators in school systems across the country have been motivated since George Floyd's murder to include themes of racial justice in their schools.

This basic effort to tell the truth-the inspiring as well as the ugly-about American history and government must be encouraged, not denounced. Most readers can recall in their own educations the tired and idealized cartoons of civics and American history that has held sway for generations in American schools. It is a good thing that teachers and other school officials are trying to change that by taking a more thoughtful and accurate approach to our history, and being more honest about what needs fixing. And as they do, it's worth bearing in mind that what's really under attack right now isn't the bogeyman of "critical race theory"- it's the modest and long overdue change being ushered in by teachers and school administrators. They may never have heard of CRT, but they intuitively understand why it exists-and rightfully see the absurdity of the conservative charge that teaching about racism is itself racist.

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Opinion | I've Been a Critical Race Theorist for 30 Years. Our Opponents Are Just Proving Our Point For Us.

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CRT is not a racialist ideology that declares all whites to be privileged oppressors, and CRT is not taught in public schools. But over the past nine months or so, first slowly in right-wing media conversation and now quickly in state houses and even mainstream newspapers, conservative activists have branded all race reform efforts in education and employment as CRT-a disinformation campaign designed to rally disaffected middle- and working-class white people against progressive change.

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Podcast: Critical Race Theory Has Been Around for 30 Years: Why It's a Powder Keg Now

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Podcast: Critical Race Theory Has Been Around for 30 Years: Why It's a Powder Keg Now

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If you've been tuned in to the culture war at all in the last six to 12 months, you've probably heard a lot about "critical race theory." You've probably heard less about what it actually is. We asked a critical race theorist.

"We had social inequality of serious dimensions ... even after the victories of the civil rights movement in the embrace of a so-called colorblind society," said law professor Cheryl Harris of the University of California, Los Angeles. "And we wanted to ask, what is the role of law in that? Is this an enforcement problem?"

CRT, as it's sometimes called, posits that racism is not just perpetuated by individuals, it's embedded into our institutions. But Harris said recent Republican efforts to ban CRT from schools aren't really about those decades-old discussions, but an effort to create a political "boogeyman." Some conservative thinkers have said as much.

On today's show, we'll go deep with Harris on the nuances of what CRT is and isn't, and what the recent controversy around systemic racism in schools has to do with the voting restrictions we talked about last week.

Later in the show, we'll talk about California's new rental-assistance program, Juneteenth commercialization and the economic conditions that would cause the rich not to get richer. (Spoiler alert: There really aren't any.) Plus we'll hear from a listener who is celebrating becoming debt-free.

When you're done listening, tell your Echo device to "make me smart" for our daily explainers. This week, we're explaining conservatorship, the Blue Angels and "The Fast and the Furious." You can hear them all here. And don't forget to subscribe to our newsletter! You can find the latest issue here.

Here's everything we talked about today:

Finally: We need your voice memos! Tell us what you think of the show or ask a question for Kai Ryssdal and Molly Wood to answer! Here's how to do it.

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What critical race theory is (and isn't) - Make Me Smart from Marketplace

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If you've been tuned in to the culture war at all in the last six to 12 months, you've probably heard a lot about "critical race theory." You've probably heard less about what it actually is. We asked a critical race theorist. "We had social inequality of serious dimensions ...

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Derrick Bell (founding scholar of CRT) uses storytelling, critique and excerpts to show what CRT is.

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Copyright (c) 1995 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois; Derrick A. Bell

In this essay, originally delivered as a David C. Baum Memorial Lecture on Civil Liberties and Civil Rights at the University of Illinois College of Law, Professor Bell begins by discussing the recent debate surrounding The Bell Curve, and utilizing the tools of critical race theory, he offers an alternative explanation as to why the book's authors decided to publish rejected theories of black inferiority. Professor Bell then discusses the origins of critical race theory, what the theory is, what the theory ought to be, and the critics' attack of the theory. He concludes with stories about black struggle in America, stories which Professor Bell believes accurately depict the ongoing racist efforts to prevent black success.

As I see it, critical race theory recognizes that revolutionizing a culture begins with the radical assessment of it.

Radical assessment can encompass illustration, anecdote, allegory, and imagination, as well as analysis of applicable doctrine and authorities. At the outset, I want to utilize all of these techniques to comment on a contemporary phenomenon: The Bell Curve.

This thesis has been criticized as the rehashing of views long-ago rejected by virtually all experts in the field. There is, critics maintain, no basis for a finding that intelligence is inherited and, indeed, no accepted definition of the vague term "intelligence." There is, on the other hand, a depressingly strong and invariant correlation between resources and race in this country, and resources and success-including success in taking I.Q. tests. These are settled facts.

It is not difficult to imagine that the authors were aware of the generally accepted findings regarding the lack of any connection between race and intelligence. Suppose, as well, that recognizing the debilitating effects of discrimination and exclusion on African Americans, they devised an "oppression factor" and, adding it to existing data, discovered that there was indeed a discernible racial difference in intelligence measured by I.Q. tests. However, when the I.Q. data playing field was leveled via the "oppression factors," contrary to their own expectations, they discovered that blacks performed fifteen points higher than whites. Quite likely, they disbelieved and thus reviewed painstakingly their data several times. Each time they did so, the conclusion *895 that they (perhaps) did not want became ever more certain. It was beyond denial. There was an answer beyond simple faith that explained why blacks survived two centuries of the world's most destructive slavery and a century of utter subordination under segregation: Black people are simply smarter than whites.

What would they do with this information? Its release would almost certainly throw the country into turmoil. Let me explain. As history indicates all too well, blacks have suffered greatly as a result of discrimination undergirded and often justified by the general belief in black inferiority. But history shows with equal clarity, though it is less frequently acknowledged, that indications of black success and thus possible black superiority result in racist outrage. Most of the many race riots in this nation's history were sparked by white outrage over black success.

A debate raged in Florida over a bill intended to compensate black victims for losses suffered more than seventy years ago, when the Klan absolutely destroyed a thriving black town called Rosewood-murdering, raping, pillaging, and finally burning all the property in sight. Denial is the usual response to even such well-documented racist rampages. State officials who opposed the measure noted that the statute of limitations had expired, and that "compensation would be 'bad for the county and bad for our state' because it would encourage similar claims."

In more recent times, discrimination aimed at skilled or talented blacks is a well-understood fact of life in the black community. Dozens *896 of able and ambitious blacks were interviewed by journalist Ellis Cose in his book, The Rage of a Privileged Class. They complained bitterly:

When I arrived, [the first Black hired], the white faculty members were friendly and supportive. They smiled at me a lot and offered help and advice. When they saw how much time I spent helping minority students and how I struggled with my first writing, they seemed pleased. It was patronizing, but the general opinion seemed to be that they had done well to hire me. They felt good about having lifted up one of the downtrodden. And they congratulated themselves for their affirmative-action policies.

At first, the white professor feels good about hiring the minority. It shows how liberal the white is, and the minority is assumed to *897 want nothing more than to scrape by in the rarefied world they both inhabit. But the minority does not just scrape by, is not eternally grateful, and indeed starts to surpass the white professor. This is disturbing; things weren't meant to go that way. The strain between former belief and current reality is reduced by reinterpreting the current reality. The minority has a fatal flaw. Pass it on.

Finally, Dr. Herrnstein and Mr. Murray may have feared that, even if they were to convince a reluctant America of blacks' superior intelligence and ability-much of which has been smothered by racial discrimination-that reality may have opened the question for many whites as to whether they had not been similarly disadvantaged on the *898 basis of class. Such a long-overdue revelation could well spark serious political unrest and perhaps a rebellion.
II. THE ONGOING DEBATE OVER THE LEGITIMACY OF CRITICAL RACE THEORY
Critical race theory writing and lecturing is characterized by frequent use of the first person, storytelling, narrative, allegory, interdisciplinary treatment of law, and the unapologetic use of creativity. The work is often disruptive because its commitment to anti-racism goes well beyond civil rights, integration, affirmative action, and other liberal measures. This is not to say that critical race theory adherents automatically or uniformly "trash" liberal ideology and method (as many adherents of critical legal studies do). Rather, they are highly suspicious of the liberal agenda, distrust its method, and want to retain what they see as a valuable strain of egalitarianism which may exist despite, and not because of, liberalism.

Consider how the two groups view the law. Duke English Professor Stanley Fish explains the critical legal studies view of legal precedent as not *900 a formal mechanism for determining outcomes in a neutral fashion-as traditional legal scholars maintain-but is rather a ramshackle ad hoc affair whose ill-fitting joints are soldered together by suspect rhetorical gestures, leaps of illogic, and special pleading tricked up as general rules, all in the service of a decidedly partisan agenda that wants to wrap itself in the mantle and majesty of law.

Although critical race theory is not cohesive, it is at least committed. As John Calmore observes, "almost all the critical race theory literature seems to embrace the ideology of antisubordination in some *901 form." It is our hope that scholarly resistance will lay the groundwork for wide-scale resistance. We believe that standards and institutions created by and fortifying white power ought to be resisted. Decontextualization, in our view, too often masks unregulated-even unrecognized-power. We insist, for example, that abstraction, put forth as "rational" or "objective" truth, smuggles the privileged choice of the privileged to depersonify their claims and then pass them off as the universal authority and the universal good. To counter such assumptions, we try to bring to legal scholarship an experientially grounded, oppositionally expressed, and transformatively aspirational concern with race and other socially constructed hierarchies. John Calmore puts it well:

Professor Charles Lawrence speaks for many critical race theory adherents when he disagrees with the notion that laws are or can be written from a neutral perspective. Lawrence asserts that such a neutral perspective does not, and cannot, exist-that we all speak from a particular point of view, from what he calls a "positioned perspective." The problem is that not all positioned perspectives are equally valued, equally heard, or equally included. From the perspective of critical race theory, some positions have historically been oppressed, distorted, ignored, silenced, destroyed, appropriated, commodified, and marginalized-and all of this, not accidentally. Conversely, the law simultaneously and systematically privileges subjects who are white.

Critical race theorists strive for a specific, more egalitarian, state of affairs. We seek to empower and include traditionally excluded views and see all-inclusiveness as the ideal because of our belief in collective wisdom . For example, in a recent debate over "hate speech," both Chuck Lawrence and Mari Matsuda made the point *902 that being committed to "free speech" may seem like a neutral principle, but it is not. Thus, proclaiming that "I am committed equally to allowing free speech for the KKK and 2LiveCrew" is a non-neutral value judgment, one that asserts that the freedom to say hateful things is more important than the freedom to be free from the victimization, stigma, and humiliation that hate speech entails.

Probably my best known story is The Space Traders, which I wrote to convince a resisting class that the patterns of sacrificing black rights to further white interests, so present in American history, pose a continuing threat. In the story, as at least some of you know, aliens from outer space visit this country on New Year's Day in the year 2000. They promise wealth in the form of gold, environmental-cleansing material, and a substitute for fossil fuels. If accepted, their gold and space-age technology will guarantee another century of prosperity for the nation. In return for these wares, the space traders want to take back to their home star all black people. Given two weeks to *903 decide, Americans in a variety of settings debate the trade offer. Finally, in a referendum vote, they opt for the trade by a seventy to thirty percentage. The story ends:

The last Martin Luther King holiday the nation would ever observe dawned on an extraordinary sight. In the night, the Space Traders had drawn their strange ships right up to the beaches and discharged their cargoes of gold, minerals, and machinery, leaving vast empty holds. Crowded on the beaches were the inductees, some twenty million silent black men, women, and children, including babes in arms. As the sun rose, the Space Traders directed them, first, to strip off all but a single undergarment; then, to line up; and finally, to enter those holds which yawned in the morning light like Milton's "darkness visible." The inductees looked fearfully behind them. But, on the dunes above the beaches, guns at the ready, stood U.S. guards. There was no escape, no alternative. Heads bowed, arms now linked by slender chains, black people left the New World as their forbears [sic] had arrived.

Let us further consider another phenomenon. Whites in this society seem so willing to accept their own subordination to other whites because of class and social barriers, yet they portray so much hostility toward blacks. The historian, C. Vann Woodward, put the issue well when he wondered how much racism must exist in the bosom of a *904 white man who feels superior to a black while working at a black man's wages. I have suggested that in this country (which views property ownership as a measure of worth), many whites with relatively little property of the traditional kind-money, securities, and land-see their whiteness as a property right.

In the 1930s, some years after my mother's family became part of the great river of Black migration that flowed north, my Mississippi-born grandmother was confronted with the harsh matter of economic survival for herself and her two daughters. Having separated from my grandfather, who himself was trapped on the fringes of economic marginality, she took one long hard look at her choices and presented herself for employment at a major retail store in Chicago's central business district. This decision would have been unremarkable for a white woman in similar circumstances, but for my grandmother, it was an act of both great daring and self-denial, for in so doing she was presenting herself as a white woman. In the parlance of racist America, she was "passing."

Her fair skin, straight hair, and aquiline features had not spared her from the life of sharecropping into which she had been born in anywhere/nowhere, Mississippi-the outskirts of Yazoo City. But in the burgeoning landscape of urban America, anonymity was possible for a Black person with "white" features. She was transgressing boundaries, crossing borders, spinning on margins, traveling between dualities of Manichean space, rigidly bifurcated into light/dark, good/bad, white/Black. No longer immediately identifiable as "Lula's daughter," she could thus enter the white world, albeit on a false passport, not merely passing, but trespassing.

Every day my grandmother rose from her bed in her house in a Black enclave on the south side of Chicago, sent her children off to a Black school, boarded a bus full of Black passengers, and rode to work. No one at her job ever asked if she was Black; the question was unthinkable. By virtue of the employment practices *905 of the "fine establishment" in which she worked, she could not have been. Catering to the upper-middle class, understated tastes required that Blacks not be allowed.

She quietly went about her clerical tasks, not once revealing her true identity. She listened to the women with whom she worked discuss their worries-their children's illnesses, their husband's disappointments, their boyfriends' infidelities-all of the mundane yet critical things that made up their lives. She came to know them but they did not know her, for my grandmother occupied a completely different place. That place-where white supremacy and economic domination meet-was unknown turf to her white co-workers. They remained oblivious to the worlds within worlds that existed just beyond the edge of their awareness and yet were present in their very midst.

Each evening, my grandmother, tired and worn, retraced her steps home, laid aside her mask, and reentered herself. Day in and day out, she made herself invisible, then visible again, for a price too inconsequential to do more than barely sustain her family and at a cost too precious to conceive. She left the job some years later, finding the strain too much to bear.

From time to time, as I later sat with her, she would recollect that period, and the cloud of some painful memory would pass across her face. Her voice would remain subdued, as if to contain the still remembered tension. On rare occasions she would wince, recalling some particularly racist comment made in her presence because of her presumed, shared group affiliation. Whatever retort might have been called for had been suppressed long before it reached her lips, for the price of her family's well-being was her silence. Accepting the risk of self-annihilation was the only way to survive.

Professor Harris conveys to her white readers what those who are black already know, namely, that her grandmother's story is far from unique. Indeed, there are many who crossed the color line never to return. Passing is well known among black people in the United States and is a feature of race subordination in all societies structured on white supremacy. Notwithstanding the purported benefits of black heritage in an era of affirmative action, passing is not an obsolete phenomenon that has slipped into history.

Harris's grandmother's story illustrates the valorization of whiteness as treasured property in a society structured on racial castes. In ways so embedded that they are rarely apparent, the set of assumptions, privileges, and benefits that accompany the status of being white have become a valuable asset that whites sought to protect and that those who passed sought to attain-by fraud if necessary. Whites have come to expect and rely on these benefits, and over time these expectations have been affirmed, legitimated, and protected by the law. Even though the law is neither uniform nor explicit in all instances, in protecting settled expectations based on white privileges, American law has recognized a property interest in whiteness that, although unacknowledged, now forms the background against which legal disputes are framed, argued, and adjudicated.

As Harris's article illustrates, critical race theory writing embraces an experientially grounded, oppositionally expressed, and transformatively aspirational concern with race and other socially constructed hierarchies. Indeed, even a critical race theory critic finds that the "clearest unifying theme" of the writing is "a call for a change of perspective, specifically, a demand that racial problems be viewed from the perspective of minority groups, rather than a white *907 perspective." We use a number of different voices, but all recognize that the American social order is maintained and perpetuated by racial subordination. The narrative voice, the teller, is important to critical race theory in a way not understandable by those whose voices are tacitly deemed legitimate and authoritarian. The voice exposes, tells and retells, signals resistance and caring, and reiterates what kind of power is feared most-the power of commitment to change.

In one of the major critiques by Daniel Farber and Suzanna Sherry, the authors urge the storytellers in critical race theory to tell stories that are more "accurate" and "typical," that "articulate the legal relevance of the stories," and that "include an analytic dimension." The authors seem unaware of the bizarre irony in their pronouncement that " w e know of no work on critical race theory that discusses psychological or other social science studies supporting the existence of a voice of color."

They do not tell us just what such a study would look like, and why centuries of testimony by people of color regarding their experiences, including individuals like Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Charles Wright, and Toni Morrison, are not measure enough. But Farber and Sherry "find little support for the general claim that traditional [academic] standards are inherently unfair to work by women and minorities," and contend that "creating literature has little nexus with the specific institutional traits of law schools." They urge critical *908 race theory writers to include more "traditional" scholarship in their approach.

Perhaps critical race theory's most politically damaging critic is Randall Kennedy, whose blackness lends his critique a super legitimacy inversely proportional to the illegitimacy bequeathed to critical race theory. Kennedy notes the "insurgent" quality of minority scholars whose "impatience" has succeeded in making the race question a burning issue as never before in legal academia. But, he says, the writings of critical race theory reveal "significant deficiencies"; they "fail to support persuasively their claims of racial exclusion or their claims that legal academic scholars of color produce a racially distinctive brand of scholarship."

Kennedy adds to his critique by severely criticizing critical race theory's race-conscious perspective. When a black scholar at a prominent law school tells anyone who will listen that other folks of color are deluded about being excluded on the basis of their race; when a black scholar argues against race-conscious legal remedies or hiring policies; when a black scholar contends that there is no hidden "white" normativity or perspective but rather a meritocratic normativity (the companion claim to the claim that there is no minority perspective); when a black scholar says these things, all who rarely listen to scholars of color sit up and take notice. And take notes. And turn those notes into more fuel for the legitimacy debate that has always attended renegade movements. And critical race theory is renegade in the best sense of the word. Having drawn on the experience of the failed Second Reconstruction, how ironic and scary it is that the twentieth century draws to a close with racial hostility in full cry just as it was at the end of the nineteenth century.
III. BLACK ART IN A WHITE LAND
It was in the early years of African slavery, after the point where the nation decided that slaves were essential for the exploitation of the land's natural resources, but before the techniques of enslavement had been perfected. As a part of the subjugation process, newly arrived *909 Africans-those who had survived the dreaded middle-passage-were separated from those of the same tribe. They were barred from using their native language or practicing their customs. While required to learn sufficient English to understand the white masters who would rule their lives, penalties for actually learning to read and write were severe. Despite the dangers, we know that many of the enslaved did acquire basic literacy skills. The Bible was often their primer as well as the primary access to their adopted religion, Christianity.

The Africans were allowed to sing. It is said that many had voices that were pleasant to the ear, and their singing in the evening after a day of hard labor in the fields or in the master's house, seemed an innocent relaxation for the slaves and those who owned them. It was a long time before the masters learned, if they ever did, that the slaves used their songs as a means of communication: giving warning, conveying information about escapes planned and carried out, and simply for uplifting the spirit and fortifying the soul. It was even longer before the Spirituals were recognized as a theology in song, a new interpretation of Christianity, one far closer to the original than that practiced by those who hoped the Bible would serve as a tool of pacification, not enlightenment.

Need it be said that fortunes were made through the utilization and often the corruption of the slave melodies? Need it be said that those who originated this music seldom benefitted financially from *910 their creations? There is no surprise here. A nation built on the backs of black labor would have little difficulty profiting from the product of black minds and hearts.

I hope that those doing critical race theory, when reviewing these critiques, will consider the source. As to a response, a sad smile of sympathy may suffice. For those who press harder for explanations, both Beethoven and Louie Armstrong are available for quotation. When questioned about the meaning of his late quartets, Beethoven dismissed the critics with a prediction: "it was not written for you, but for a later age." And when asked for the meaning of jazz, Armstrong warned, "Man, if you don't know, don't mess with it."

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DERRICK A. BELL: WHO'S AFRAID OF CRITICAL RACE THEORY?

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Copyright (c) 1995 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois; Derrick A. Bell In this essay, originally delivered as a David C.

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Whiteness As Property (Abstract) by Cheryl Harris

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Whiteness As Property (Abstract) by Cheryl Harris

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This is a brief summary of the relatively long article

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Details

Cheryl I. Harris

Parent Category: Stereotype, Bias, Racism

Category: Whiteness and White Privilege

Hits: 7547

excerpted from: Cheryl I. Harris, Whiteness as Property, 106 Harvard Law Review 1709 (June, 1993) (335 Footnotes) ( Full Document)

In the 1930s, some years after my mother's family became part of the great river of Black migration that flowed north, my Mississippi-born grandmother was confronted with the harsh matter of economic survival for herself and her two daughters. Having separated from my grandfather, who himself was trapped on the fringes of economic marginality, she took one long hard look at her choices and presented herself for employment at a major retail store in Chicago's central business district. This decision would have been unremarkable for a white woman in similar circumstances, but for my grandmother, it was an act of both great daring and self-denial, for in so doing she was presenting herself as a white woman. In the parlance of racist America, she was "passing."

Her fair skin, straight hair, and aquiline features had not spared her from the life of sharecropping into which she had been born in anywhere/nowhere, Mississippi - the outskirts of Yazoo City. But in the burgeoning landscape of urban America, anonymity was possible for a Black person with "white" features. She was transgressing boundaries, crossing borders, spinning on margins, traveling between dualities of Manichean space, rigidly bifurcated into light/dark, good/bad, white/Black. No longer immediately identifiable as "Lula's daughter," she could thus enter the white world, albeit on a false passport, not merely passing, but trespassing.

Every day my grandmother rose from her bed in her house in a Black enclave on the south side of Chicago, sent her children off to a Black school, boarded a bus full of Black passengers, and rode to work. No one at her job ever asked if she was Black; the question was unthinkable. By virtue of the employment practices of the "fine establishment" in which she worked, she could not have been. Catering to the upper-middle class, understated tastes required that Blacks not be allowed.

She quietly went about her clerical tasks, not once revealing her true identity. She listened to the women with whom she worked discuss their worries - their children's illnesses, their husband's disappointments, their boyfriends' infidelities - all of the mundane yet critical things that made up their lives. She came to know them but they did not know her, for my grandmother occupied a completely different place. That place - where white supremacy and economic domination meet - was unknown turf to her white co-workers. They remained oblivious to the worlds within worlds that existed just beyond the edge of their awareness and yet were present in their very midst.

Each evening, my grandmother, tired and worn, retraced her steps home, laid aside her mask, and reentered herself. Day in and day out, she made herself invisible, then visible again, for a price too inconsequential to do more than barely sustain her family and at a cost too precious to conceive. She left the job some years later, finding the strain too much to bear.

From time to time, as I later sat with her, she would recollect that period, and the cloud of some painful memory would pass across her face. Her voice would remain subdued, as if to contain the still remembered tension. On rare occasions she would wince, recalling some particularly racist comment made in her presence because of her presumed, shared group affiliation. Whatever retort might have been called for had been suppressed long before it reached her lips, for the price of her family's well-being was her silence. Accepting the risk of self-annihilation was the only way to survive.

Although she never would have stated it this way, the clear and ringing denunciations of racism she delivered from her chair when advanced arthritis had rendered her unable to work were informed by those experiences. The fact that self-denial had been a logical choice and had made her complicit in her own oppression at times fed the fire in her eyes when she confronted some daily outrage inflicted on Black people. Later, these painful memories forged her total identification with the civil rights movement. Learning about the world at her knee as I did, these experiences also came to inform my outlook and my understanding of the world.

My grandmother's story is far from unique. Indeed, there are many who crossed the color line never to return. Passing is well-known among Black people in the United States and is a feature of race subordination in all societies structured on white supremacy. Notwithstanding the purported benefits of Black heritage in an era of affirmative action, passing is not an obsolete phenomenon that has slipped into history.

The persistence of passing is related to the historical and continuing pattern of white racial domination and economic exploitation that has given passing a certain economic logic. It was a given to my grandmother that being white automatically ensured higher economic returns in the short term, as well as greater economic, political, and social security in the long run. Becoming white meant gaining access to a whole set of public and private privileges that materially and permanently guaranteed basic subsistence needs and, therefore, survival. Becoming white increased the possibility of controlling critical aspects of one's life rather than being the object of others' domination.

My grandmother's story illustrates the valorization of whiteness as treasured property in a society structured on racial caste. In ways so embedded that it is rarely apparent, the set of assumptions, privileges, and benefits that accompany the status of being white have become a valuable asset that whites sought to protect and that those who passed sought to attain - by fraud if necessary. Whites have come to expect and rely on these benefits, and over time these expectations have been affirmed, legitimated, and protected by the law. Even though the law is neither uniform nor explicit in all instances, in protecting settled expectations based on white privilege, American law has recognized a property interest in whiteness that, although unacknowledged, now forms the background against which legal disputes are framed, argued, and adjudicated.

My Article investigates the relationships between concepts of race and property and reflects on how rights in property are contingent on, intertwined with, and conflated with race. Through this entangled relationship between race and property, historical forms of domination have evolved to reproduce subordination in the present.

In Part II, I examine the emergence of whiteness as property and trace the evolution of whiteness from color to race to status to property as a progression historically rooted in white supremacy and economic hegemony over Black and Native American peoples. The origins of whiteness as property lie in the parallel systems of domination of Black and Native American peoples out of which were created racially contingent forms of property and property rights. I further argue that whiteness shares the critical characteristics of property even as the meaning of property has changed over time. In particular, whiteness and property share a common premise - a conceptual nucleus - of a right to exclude. This conceptual nucleus has proven to be a powerful center around which whiteness as property has taken shape. Following the period of slavery and conquest, white identity became the basis of racialized privilege that was ratified and legitimated in law as a type of status property. After legalized segregation was overturned, whiteness as property evolved into a more modern form through the law's ratification of the settled expectations of relative white privilege as a legitimate and natural baseline.

Part III examines the two forms of whiteness as property - status property and modern property - that are the submerged text of two paradigmatic cases on the race question in American law, Plessy v. Ferguson and Brown v. Board of Education. As legal history, they illustrate an important transition from old to new forms of whiteness as property. Although these cases take opposite interpretive stances regarding the constitutional legitimacy of legalized racial segregation, the property interest in whiteness was transformed, but not discarded, in the Court's new equal protection jurisprudence.

Part IV considers the persistence of whiteness as property. I first examine how subordination is reinstituted through modern conceptions of race and identity embraced in law. Whiteness as property has taken on more subtle forms, but retains its core characteristic - the legal legitimation of expectations of power and control that enshrine the status quo as a neutral baseline, while masking the maintenance of white privilege and domination. I further identify the property interest in whiteness as the unspoken center of current polarities around the issue of affirmative action. As a legacy of slavery and de jure and de facto race segregation, the concept of a protectable property interest in whiteness permeates affirmative action doctrine in a manner illustrated by the reasoning of three important affirmative action cases - Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, City of Richmond v. J.A. Croson & Co., and Wygant v. Jackson Board of Education.

Finally, in Part V, I offer preliminary thoughts on a way out of the conundrum created by protecting whiteness as a property interest. I suggest that affirmative action, properly conceived and reconstructed, would de-legitimate the property interest in whiteness. I do not offer here a complete reformulation of affirmative action, but suggest that focusing on the distortions created by the property interest in whiteness would provoke different questions and open alternative perspectives on the affirmative action debate. The inability to see affirmative action as more than a search for the "blameworthy" among "innocent" individuals is tied to the inability to see the property interest in whiteness. Thus reconstructed, affirmative action would challenge the characterization of the unfettered right to exclude as a legitimate aspect of identity and property.

. . .

Whiteness as property has carried and produced a heavy legacy. It is a ghost that has haunted the political and legal domains in which claims for justice have been inadequately addressed for far too long. Only rarely declaring its presence, it has warped efforts to remediate racial exploitation. It has blinded society to the systems of domination that work against so many by retaining an unvarying focus on vestiges of systemic racialized privilege that subordinates those perceived as a particularized few - the "others." It has thwarted not only conceptions of racial justice but also conceptions of property that embrace more equitable possibilities. In protecting the property interest in whiteness, property is assumed to be no more than the right to prohibit infringement on settled expectations, ignoring countervailing equitable claims that are predicated on a right to inclusion. It is long past time to put the property interest in whiteness to rest. Affirmative action can assist in that task. Affirmative action, if properly conceived and implemented, is not only consistent with norms of equality, but is essential to shedding the legacy of oppression.

Assistant Professor of Law, Chicago-Kent College of Law, Illinois Institute of Technology; B.A. 1973, Wellesley College; J.D. 1978, Northwestern University.

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descendants of african enslaved in the united states

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Details Cheryl I. Harris Parent Category: Stereotype, Bias, Racism Category: Whiteness and White Privilege Hits: 7547 excerpted from: Cheryl I. Harris, Whiteness as Property, 106 Harvard Law Review 1709 (June, 1993) (335 Footnotes) ( Full Document) In the 1930s, some years after my mother's family became part of the great river of Black migration that flowed north, my Mississippi-born grandmother was confronted with the harsh matter of economic survival for herself and her two daughters.

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Whiteness As Property (FULL) by Cheryl Harris 

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Whiteness As Property (FULL) by Cheryl Harris 

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Full document.

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SouthLake: Inside a critical race theory battle 

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SouthLake: Inside a critical race theory battle 

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Southlake podcast: Inside a critical race theory battle - NBC News

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The "Southlake" podcast hosted by Mike Hixenbaugh and Antonia Hylton tells the story of how a Texas suburb became the center of a critical race theory battle.

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Passcode: k=HaN^2g

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