Document Type

Article

Publication Date

8-2-2024

Abstract

Recent attacks on Critical Race Theory (CRT) have caused wide ranging discussions about CRT in a diverse number of disciplines, throughout all grade levels, and around the world in media. While CRT adherents have long wished for more engagement with CRT, the recent firestorm of attacks has been surprising at best, and horribly worrisome and frightening at worst. Efforts to ban CRT in schools, while likely not having much effect given the improbability that CRT is taught in any K-12 schools, have politicized CRT in new ways (though like all education, it was always political). Moreover, this engagement is clearly not in ways that many of us writing in or about this tradition imagined, yet the increasing politicization of CRT has raised interest in the theory well beyond the colleges, universities, and graduate and professional schools where it was, at best, occasionally taught. Arguably, conservatives created a debate where there is none and was none. Or, as Donald Earl Collins puts it, this is a discussion not about CRT, but rather about “critical race fact.”

This Article sets out to defend CRT from the criticisms levied by conservative and Republican politicians in the United States as well as other pundits and pontificators. These criticisms have always existed, but they have now been taken up in popular media in a confusing menagerie of political fervor. Of course, the criticisms of CRT are almost always based on a misunderstanding of the idea. Each Part takes up a different criticism and presents evidence that the criticism is simply not true by using both what critical race theorists have written, as well as what others who have experience teaching it in the United States’ schools, colleges, and universities have claimed. It is possible, one supposes, that the country’s alleged critical-race-teaching kindergarten teachers are covertly inserting CRT into our five-year-olds’ lessons on colors, but this seems unlikely.

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