Speaker talking in seminar with many of audiences for business meeting for key of success
Critical Race Theory (CRT) has been popularized and destructively misunderstood over the past two years. But first, what is it?
CRT is an academically credible set of analytic tools legal scholars created more than four decades ago to help judges, attorneys, expert witnesses, law students, and others in the Courts understand the role of race in the determination of judicial outcomes.
Scholars and legal practitioners who use CRT acknowledge the persistence and pervasiveness of racism in America; challenge claims of objectivity, colorblindness, and universal meritocracy; insist on full, accurate teachings of historical facts pertaining to race; and situate people of color as experts on our own experiences with racial injustice.
Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, an acclaimed law professor at both UCLA and Columbia University, made a significant contribution to CRT in the late 1980s by introducing “intersectionality” as a prism through which to understand how the convergence of racism, sexism, poverty, religious discrimination, homophobia, transphobia, and other social forces place Black women at particular vulnerability for the miscarriage of justice in the law. I will explain later why I specifically called out intersectionality from among the many tenets, propositions, and theses that comprise CRT.
The major takeaway is that CRT was created by legal scholars — mostly academicians of color — for the legal profession. It has since been imported into the social sciences and other academic fields. Noteworthy is that few of our nation’s law schools offer CRT courses. In fact, most students will complete three years of law school without reading anything about CRT.
I have taught a graduate-level CRT course at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Southern California annually over the past 13 years. My students, like most who are introduced to CRT at higher education institutions, are master’s and doctoral degree seekers, not undergraduates — and certainly not third graders.
CRT became a political grenade in the 2021 Virginia Governor’s race, as Republican Glenn Youngkin ran fear-mongering television commercials warning voters that Governor Terry McAuliffe, the Democrat incumbent, wanted to teach their children CRT in schools. Despite being untrue, it worked. Many uninformed voters said it was the most important issue in the race, yet few of those opponents could articulate a definition of CRT. The ridiculousness didn’t end in the Commonwealth of Virginia.
Education Week reports that 42 states have pending or fully-enacted bans on the teaching of CRT in K-12 schools. The biggest problem with this is that there’s practically no evidence that CRT is being taught to our nation’s schoolchildren. I have publicly and repeatedly called for someone, anyone to produce a confirmable list of 50 educators who are teaching CRT in elementary, middle, or high schools across America. No one has furnished any such list. Why? Because there aren’t 50.
So, why then is a thing that’s not happening been banned in such a rapid, widespread fashion? There are so many absurd explanations. I’ll offer just three here.
The murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery and the corresponding social unrest that ensued in summer 2020 forced a long overdue national conversation about structural and systemic racism. That racial reckoning not only occurred on the streets of America and in workplaces, but also in schools. There was a call to finally teach the full truth about our nation’s racial past and present. A lot of miseducated people who had only been taught a one-sided, sanitized version of U.S. history had a violent reaction to this that they took out on CRT.
That opponents outlawed something they hadn’t read is a second explanation for the CRT bans. “Tell me specifically which CRT writers you have read, and which articles of theirs informed your oppositional stance,” is a pair of questions I have posed to critics. They almost always fumble and ultimately fail to name specific scholars and pieces they’ve read. Or they name papers that have little to no CRT in them. Policymakers banning something they haven’t read is indisputably reckless.
A third explanation is the one that extends from education into business. CRT opponents typically conflate anything and everything pertaining to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) with CRT. They’re not the same.
Bans on the teaching of something not being taught in schools followed a September 2020 memo from the Trump Administration that instructed every federal agency “to identify all contracts or other agency spending related to any training on critical race theory, white privilege or any other training or propaganda effort that teaches or suggests either (1) that the United States is an inherently racist or evil country or (2) that any race or ethnicity is inherently racist or evil.”
The White House memo noted that “according to press reports” these ideals were being taught to government employees – neither specific media sources nor any other evidence that this was happening in any widespread fashion were furnished. Notwithstanding, federal agencies as well as public schools and universities across the country swiftly halted trainings on race specifically, and in some instances, DEI more broadly.
Increasingly, businesses are either creating or expanding DEI education for employees. Much of it is broadly focused on topics like implicit bias, ableism, gender discrimination, and heterosexism, to name a few topics. Occasionally, workshops focus specifically on race, racism, and racial equity. Their emphasis on race don’t automatically make those trainings CRT.
In many companies, teaching about intersectionality is on trend to help employees better understand how queer women of color or employees of color with disabilities, for example, uniquely experience their workplace settings because of the convergence of their multiple marginalized identities. While developed by a CRT expert, the manner in which intersectionality is taught in corporate trainings is a far departure from the complexity and criticality that Professor Crenshaw intended. Most intersectionality sessions are ‘CRT light’ at best, but really not even.
Chief diversity officers, HR professionals, consultants, and others who design and deliver DEI learning experiences to business professionals aren’t teaching complex academic concepts that legal scholars developed in the 1970s. Surely, employees would find such trainings too inaccessibly academic and insufficiently focused on solving practical business problems. It isn’t happening.
Leaders really need not worry at all about CRT making its way into their companies, government agencies, and other workplace settings. As is the case in K-12 schools, there won’t be anywhere near 50 people teaching CRT to American workers. DEI or racial equity trainings based explicitly on Critical Race Theory are too rare to warrant senseless corporate bans.
