To the editor(s) I've tried to attach a number of graphics/visuals that would make the piece more appealing, such as artist Jonathan Harris's powerful "whitewash" poster which would be right on the first page. However, while I've copied the URL's for the other graphics, the URL link works for a while but soon come up up as "URL expired". I'm hoping that you or another editor knows how to recover the links ? and I've used Harris's at last 3 times with his ok for presentations and I'v received the ok to use cartoons from 2 other artists.
Please make sure if you decide to use the piece that I get a look before it's published. keith brooks
I Used Critical Race Theory For 23 years in the New York City Public High Schools--
and Didn't Even Know it !
The most blatent and outrageous example of white supremacist racism today is the crusade led by white supremacists like Florida Governor De Santis, Texas governor Abbot, donald trump, right-wing propagandist Christopher Rufo and others to erase and suppress the role of white supremacist racism in U.S. history--as well as today.
Spurred on by the 1960's civil rights movement, much of the criticism of the U.S. history taught in our schools has come from progressive minded liberal and left forces, in outstanding works like James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me and Teaching What Really Happened, Howard Zinn's A People's History of the U.S., Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz's An Indigenous People's History of the U.S., Ronald Takaki's Strangers From A Different Shore and Paul Ortiz's An African American and LatinX History of the United States and others. Of course, there were precursors that challenged the mainstream narratives such as Carter G. Woodson's the Miseducation of the Negro, W.E.B Dubois masterly Black Reconstruction,Labor's Untold Story by Richard Boyer, C.W Mills' The Power Elite, and Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee among them. These books document with ample evidence that much of the hard truths of U.S. history--the enslavement of millions of Africans, the near genocides of the indigenous populations of the Americas, and more, have been hidden or lied about, downplayed or distorted. But we now have an onslaught of counterattacks coming from right wing forces that too much of that suppressed history has been taught and must be censored and outright banned from our schools!
I taught for 23 years in the New York City public high schools with a Master of Science degree in Urban Multi Cultural Education. Licensed in social studies, I also taught all the academic subjects-social studies, science, reading, writing and math in an alternative high school GED program geared to students who for various reasons did not make it through the mainstream system. I was a 2008 teacher of the year at a site in Brooklyn and faculty advisor to the Black student group there. I also taught Adult Ed at night for seven years, and years before, I taught psychology from an interdisciplinary point of view for four years at Richmond College (since incorporated into the College of Staten Island.) And I taught for two years at Alternate U., part of the 1960's free university movement.
Much of what I and others taught--and still teach-- is under attack and demonized as Critical RaceTheory (CRT) by right wing forces. Teaching about the major role white supremacy has played throughout U.S. history, down to today, has now actually been made illegal in many states. Official directives have been issued that racism can only be taught as individual attitudes and prejudices, thus denying its structural, systemic and institution al realities.Even though I retired in 2015, this makes me angry and want to fight back, encouraging resistance in every possible way. It makes me want to join with others to go leafleting in front of high schools and junior highs encouraging students, teachers and parents to resist. It is the reason I'm writing this essay, hoping to provide more ammunition in countering and exposing the demagogic duplicity of the fascist dictator wannabees like Trump and De Santis. And I'll be sharing some of my most effective lessons, hoping they might be put to some use in a growing resistance.
The attack is only secondarily an attack on CRT; its not-so-hidden primary agenda is about suppressing teaching the truths of U.S. history, a formula for the further stupidification of education and obliteration of the very basics of critical thinking. And my hope in this essay, a primer of sorts, is to go beyond "preaching to the choir" in reaching those who are confused and might even be somewhat taken in by the widespread disinformation campaign inspired by right wing con man Christopher Rufo and largely promoted by right wing radio and TV talk show hosts like Tucker Carlson.
Part of that campaign is the lie that CRT is taught in the grade schools. A common reaction by many in response is to correctly point out that CRT is only taught in graduate and law schools. But I think that response misses the essence of what the anti-CRT attack is really all about.
First and foremost the anti-CRT campaign is a pretext and a cover, an excuse, to whitewash, suppress and erase the teaching of the real history of the U.S. And make no mistake: a lot more is at stake here than the subversive mutilation of teaching the truths of American history in our schools. The attacks on CRT are clearly part of a larger ongoing crusade, part of the growing right wing counter-attacks on the rights of women, voting rights, affirmative action LBGTQI+ people, immigrants, and freedom of speech, along with censoring and whitewashing U.S. history. As stated bythe editors at Rethinking Schools, whichpublishes social justice education materials in the United States, "The anti-CRT campaign echoes the Big Lie that Trump won the election. It is the curricular counterpart to the wave of voter suppression laws promoted by the same far-right political forces that have tried to rewrite the history of the 2020 election and cover up the attempted coup on Jan. 6".
This is a 3 part essay:: first a brief summary of what CRT is, who is attacking it and why, second, examples drawn from my teaching of "How I used CRT without even knowing it" and then finally a conclusion where I offer my views on resisting this major effort to roll back the gains that have been made over the last 75 years or so in exposing the truths about the role of white supremacy and racism in U.S. history.
Sections : Part 1
1. Introduction 2. CRT : What Didn't I Know? 3. What is CRT and Where Did It Come From ? 4.The Right Wing Propagandist Leading the Anti-CRT Crusade : Christopher Rufo5. A Most Revealing Interview with Rufo 6. Why Is CRT Under Attack Now ? 7. "White Supremacy is the Water, Not the Shark"
"I Used Critical Race Theory (CRT) for 23 Years in the NYC Public High Schools--and Didn't Even Know It !"
So What Didn't I Know ?
1. I didn't know Critical Race theory! It took the rabid right wing anti-CRT (A-CRT) disinformation campaign to get me to look into just what CRT entails--six years after I retired in 2015. I was vaguely familiar with CRT when I was teaching American and global history in the NYC public high schools, but I've now come to see--Heavens to Betsy and Lo and Behold!-- I had been using these sinister CRT concepts throughout my teaching career of almost 30 years. What is demonized are in fact common place terms and understandings about the realities and history of racial discrimination in the U.S. such as institutional, structural and systemic racism, anti-racism, white supremacy and even such seemingly benign terms as... hide the children and close the windowns-- Diversity ! Inclusion! Equity! I'm just wondering when Empathy gets added to the list.
2. While I make no claim to be an expert on CRT, the role racism and white supremacy have played in the history of this country, and still play today, is a matter of irrefutable documented record.Facts are stubborn things. The A-CRTers don't like that truth, so they now try to censor and suppress those truths. And it is outrageous that teachers in many states are now prohibited from using--at the risk of losing their jobs-- those same basic terms and concepts attacked as CRT that are essential for understanding U.S. history and without which U.S. history is nothing but a whitewash.
(See Victor Ray's excellent comprehensive primer On Critical Race Theory Why It Matters & And Why You Should Care , Random House. 2023)
* That racism can take many forms, but certainly cannot be reduced to solely individual personal prejudices while denying its systemic, structural and institutional realities. For example, Florida, North Dakota and other states have now passed laws that actually forbid teaching "that racism is systemically embedded in American society and the American legal system to facilitate racial inequality." Instead, teachers have been instructed that "racism can only be discussed as the result of learned individual bias or prejudice." But isn't that a debatable claim, an appropriate subject for critical analysis and inquiry in junior and senior high class rooms rather than being forbidden by white supremacist dictates ?
* And doesn't that also apply to outlawing any teaching that the U.S. was founded at least in part if not much more so on white supremacist foundations? For instance, the Declaration of Independence lists as one of the colonists' grievances that the British were inciting slave uprisings, and forever enshrines the characterization of the native peoples as "merciless savages"! Or that the Constitution protected the rights of slave owners in at least three sections?
(see Slavery's Constitution by David Waldstreicher Hill and Wang, 2009, and Dark Bargain by Lawrence Goldstone, Walker and company 2005)
Are we no longer allowed to quote Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall that the Constitution "Was defective from the start, requiring several amendments, a civil war, and momentous social transformation to attain...its respect for the individual freedoms and human rights that we hold as fundamental today." (As quoted in "Hitler's American Model",James Q. Whitman, Princeton Univ. Press, 2017, p27.And how about the 1790 Naturalization Act restricting citizenship to whites only, among countless other examples ?
As Prudence Carter, dean of the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley put it, "This is one of the most ludicrous things that I personally have experienced in my lifetime, is that you actually have lawmakers who are trying to outlaw the teaching of structural racism... The idea that you can't even teach the history of this country. You can't teach the then, the now, nor the tomorrow." (Quoted in Education Week, Eesha Pendharkar , "Efforts to Root Out Racism in Schools Would Unravel Under 'Critical Race Theory' Bills May 26 2021
Just What Is CRT And Where Did It come From?Understanding CRT comes from understanding the history it is rooted in and arose out of. How far back shall we go?
A Quick and Cursory History: Slavery In World History
For tens of thousands of years, humans lived by what was at hand in nature by hunting, gathering, and fishing. It was not until the agricultural revolution about 10,000 years ago that planting seeds for crops and domesticating animals for livestock enabled a food surplus, giving reason to put to use competitors conquered in the fight for survival. Slavery developed as a by-product of the agricultural revolution in virtually every region on earth. "Enslaving an enemy rather than killing him became a means to harvest a man's labor...a new tool was acquired, the slave..." (Milton Meltzer, Slavery A World History, 1993 Da Capo p 2)
Two main forms of forced unpaid labor took root: lifetime hereditary chattel slavery where the laborer was held as property for life, and indentured servitude where a person's chattel-hood was time-limited, usually from four to seven years--if they survived that long. The Greeks, Romans, Chinese, Africans, Egyptians, Hebrews, Aztecs and others all used slave labor at some point or another. Both forms are mentioned in the bible. ibid, Meltzer.
Inventing The White Race As part of aSocial Control Scheme
Skin color had nothing to do with who got enslaved.: "In antiquity slavery was independent of race or class, and by far the vast majority of the thousands of slaves was white, not black...No single ethnic group was associated with slave status:" (Frank M. Snowden jr., Before Color Prejudice the Ancient View of Blacks, Harvard University Press, 1983 p 70)And were there even "white" people in antiquity ? asks Nell Irvin Painter in her valuable "The History of White People" . "Certainly some assume so, as though categories we use today could be read backwards over the millennia. People with light skin certainly existed well before our own times. But did anyone think they were white or that their character related to their color ? No, for neither the idea of race nor or the idea of "white" people had been invented, and people's skin color did not carry useful meaning...Northern Europeans were known by vague tribal names, Scythians and Celts, then Gauls and Germani. p1Slavery predated race--and racism. Eric Williams' classic "Slavery and Capitalism" makes the point : "Slavery in the Caribbean has been too narrowly identified with the Negro. A racial twist has been given to what is basically an economic phenomenon. Slavery was not born of racism; rather, racism was the consequence of slavery. Unfree labor in the New world was brown, white, black and yellow; Catholic, Protestant and pagan." p7
also see Slavery Before Race Katherine Howlett Hayes, NYU Press, 2013Theodore Allen makes the case in his seminal two volume work "The Invention of the White Race" that white supremacism was more than just a justification rationalizing racial oppression and the enslavement of Black people, as is often commonly understood. White supremacy with its attendant white skin "privileges" created for Europeans was developed as a conscious divide-and- conquer social control scheme by the British ruling class to control a labor force of white and black indentured servantsand slaves whose unity in Bacon's rebellion in 1676-77 threatened British rule in Virginia.But first the "white race" had to be invented; Europeans actually had to be indoctrinated to see themselves as "white", united by the color of their skin rather than primarily by tribe, language, nation or religion. As Allen describes,"The ruling class took special measures to be sure that the people they ruled were propagandized in the moral and legal ethos of white supremacism...the laws mandated that parish clerks...should read these laws to the congregants...the general public was regularly and systematically subjected to official white supremacist agitation." Theodore Allen, Invention of the White Race,Volume 2, Verso, p251
Of course prejudices have existed throughout history, but many today find it hard to believe that racism--the belief that white people are somehow superior to other humans by virtue of skin color--is only 400 years old! And it remains the singular "contribution" of the European conquest of the Americas that slavery became racialized and marked by skin color by the late 1600's.
I will always remember the incredulous, outraged reaction of a fellow teacher in a grad school course I was taking for my masters when I mentioned in a class discussion the title of Noel Ignatin's book How the IrishBecame White-- "What are you talking about ??? Was her startled response. "The Irish have always been white !!!" She was unaware of her own Irish history, and that being 'white' is a status to be attained more than an actual skin color,and there was a time when the signs said "No Irish or Blacks Allowed"!
The Birth of Capitalism Breathes New LifeInto The Use of Slave Labor
Over thousands of years, slavery had come to be replaced by the feudal system of serfdom---semi-forced labor, where peasants were tied to the land they worked, turning over the bulk of what they produced to the feudal lord while keeping a minimal subsistence portion for their own survival needs--if that. While greatly diminished, slavery itself never disappeared, but was relegated to a peripheral role in the feudal economy.
But two concurrent events were to breathe new life and resuscitate slavery in the 1400's: the rise of the new economic system of capitalism and the European conquest of the Americas. "The arrival of the Portuguese on the sub-Saharan African coast would ultimately represent a major new development in the history of the slave trade." (Herbert S. Klein African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean, p10,13)
So, slavery began to make a comeback with Portugal developing a slave trade off the west Africa coast in the mid-1400's (which Columbus played a role in), shipping almost 200,000 kidnapped Africans to Europe and elsewhere by 1500. It is well-established that slavery played a major role in the development of the capitalist economic system."The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment of the aboriginal population in mines, the beginning of the conquest and the looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of 'black skins' signaled the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation. On their heels treads the commercial war of the European nations, with the globe for a theatre... (Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 p 775, International Publishers, 1947 )
But there's very much a dialectical relationship whereupon the emerging capitalism breathed new life into slavery as a labor system. It was not just a one-way street: the European conquest of the Americas created a further development for a slave labor system, but of a new type--large scale commercial slavery.
In the British 13 colonies that were to break from Britain and form the United States, the 1600's were a time of fluidity regarding these two forms of bondage; it is not until 1700 that there were more black people kidnapped from Africa held as lifetime chattels in the colonies than whites held in servitude, mainly from Britain, but increasingly from Ireland, Scotland and Germany. (see Colonists in Bondage, Abbot Emerson Smith, 1947, p4, also see Allen, ibid)
In the seventeenth century, Britons, male and female, outnumbered Africans. By the middle of the century when Virginia's population of settlers numbered about 11,000, only 300 were African. Any of them--African, British, Scottish or Irish-- were lucky to outlive the terms of their service.Prior to the eighteenth century boom in the African slave trade, between one half and two-thirds of all early white immigrants to the British colonies in the western hemisphere came as unfree laborers, some 300,000 to 400,000 people.
But it was not just Africans and poor Europeans who fell victim to this newly revived form of exploitation, as recounted by Andres Resendez :
"In the Western Hemisphere, the very mention of the word slavery brings to mind images of Africans transported across the Atlantic, sugar plantations in the Caribbean, or the American Civil War. African slavery was surely a defining aspect of European colonialism in the Americas. But it was not the only one. Native Americans were subjected to a parallel system of bondage as degrading and vast as African slavery, a system that has nonetheless remained hidden and poorly understood. In our hemisphere, Indigenous slavery occurred in every major area, both predating and outlasting its African counterpart. During the four centuries between the arrival of Columbus and the beginning of the twentieth century, some 2.5 to 5 million Native people were enslaved. All European empires took part in this human traffic..." (Smithsonian Perspective :The Other Slavery https://americanindian.si.edu/sites/1/files/pdf/seminars-symposia/the-other-slavery-perspective.pd )
The Largest Slave Republic In Human History :
the United States of America
Once the 13 colonies won independence from Britain in 1783 under the banner of "All Men Are Created Equal", the former colonists leading the newly created United States used their freedom to create the largest slave republic in human history, with the enslaved population booming to four million people by 1860. 12 of the first 16 U.S. presidents were slave owners.
It took the U.S. Civil War to end slavery in 1865. Contrary to Maga congressman Josh Hartley's ignorant claim that the U.S. was a leader in doing so, the U.S. was third from last in ending slavery. That same year the 13th amendment to the constitution was passed, making official that slavery was abolished throughout the land. A 14th amendment was then passed in 1867 overturning the 1856 infamous Dred Scot Supreme Court decision that proclaimed that Black people had "no rights that a white person was bound to respect (the actual wording of the decision !) . In 1870, the fifteenth amendment was passed, granting Black men the right to vote ( but not women, black or white.)The U.S. military (now both Black and white since the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation) had occupied the defeated South, providing some protections for the rights and gains won by the now free population.What followed was the Reconstruction Era from 1865-1877, when truly remarkable achievements were quickly made by those once free of their chains: "Coalitions of freedmen, recent Black and White arrivals from the North, and White Southerners who supported Reconstruction cooperated to form Republican, biracial state governments. They introduced various Reconstruction programs including funding public schools, establishing charitable institutions, raising taxes, and funding public improvements such as improved railroad transportation and shipping." (see wikipedia.org/wiki/ Reconstruction_era)
But in 1877 as part of an infamous political compromise over a disputed presidential election, the military was withdrawn from the South, marking the end of Reconstruction. fn See C. Vann Woodward Reunion and Reaction: The Compromise of 1877 and the End of Reconstruction, Doubleday Anchor, 1956
In the words of W.E.B Dubois' Black Reconstruction "The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery". All the promises of a new democratic birth of freedom and democracy were crushed by Ku Klux Klan terror, the denial of voting rights through literacy tests and poll taxes, and sealed off by the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme court Decision declaring a "separate but equal" new social order which came to be known as Jim Crow law. This further codified and cemented second-class citizenship by declaring a "separate but equal" citizen status for Black people. Contrary to what school textbooks claimed, and some still claim to this day, Reconstruction did not fail: it was sabotaged, as surely as the promise of 40 acres and a mule lifeline for the formerly enslaved was reneged upon.(see C.Vann Woodward The_Strange_Career_of_Jim_Crow
The fight Against Second-Class Citizenshipand For Civil Rights
And so one hundred years after the Civil War ended legal slavery in 1865, in the aftermath of a world war fought against forces led by the nazi white supremacist Hitler who openly drew inspiration from the U.S. treatment of Blacks and Indians, a massive civil rights movement gathered strength, knocking down the many racist ways by which Black people were still relegated to second class citizenship-- despite those three reconstruction amendments to the constitution. (Hitler's American Model, p71-72)
In 1954, the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Bd of Ed overruled that 1896 Plessy decision of "Separate but equal" ruling that the doctrine was inherently unequal and ordered the desegregation of the public schools. In doing so it paved the way for further legal actions and laws against de jure discriminations such as the 1964 Civil Rights act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, 1968 Fair Housing Law and other legal victories.It took marches, sit-ins, boycotts and other grass roots mass actions to get the laws changed, but too often these gains had to then be fought for in the face of resistance that sometimes lasted for years--down to today.These gains were paid for in the blood, sweat and tears of millions of black people and their martyrs and allies from Emmett Till, the four young girls blown to bits in a Birmingham church, to the murders of Cheney, Schwerner, Goodman and Viola Luizzo, Medgar Evans, Malcolm and Martin Luther King, Fred Hampton and so many others.
And as it became clear that just doing away with explicitly discriminatory laws and statutes like those that forbade people of color from buying homes when Levittown in suburban Long Island was built in 1947, or renting apartments in the Stuyvesant town complex in Manhattan, was not enough to achieve equal rights. It became increasingly apparent that in people's lives, on the job, and in the hiring halls and in the communities, that de facto systemic racism was very much alive despite these legal gains. The 1965 Watts uprising followed by Detroit, Baltimore, and dozens of other cities, almost always sparked by incident of police brutality and murder, belied glib claims of progress.
So it is within this context of changed laws and policies that the reality by and large remained that by every measure of social well-being-- from life expectancy, infant and maternal mortality rates, unemployment rates, imprisonment, and all other measures of social well-being, the Black population was and still is significantly below the white population.See the invaluable annual Urban League report:nul .org/state-of-black-americaclick here
How Shall These Facts Be Understood ?
The following draws heavily from the excellent essay by Stephen Steinberg in "The Liberal Retreat Retreat From Race During the Post Civil Rights Era"from 'The House That Race Built" ed. by Wahneema Lubiano, Pantheon, 1997 :
For politician Daniel Patrick Moynihan, in his 1965 report The Negro Family the Case for National Action the source of the problem was to be found in the of the Black family: "At the center of the tangle of pathology is the weakness of the family structure...the principal source of most of the aberrant, inadequate or anti-social behavior...that now serves to perpetuate the cycle of poverty and deprivation " p26
As social scientist Christopher Jenks commented on this blame-the-victim explanation which reverses cause and effect : "The guiding assumption is that social pathology is caused less by defects in the social system than by defects in particular individuals and groups which prevent their adjusting to the system. The prescription is therefore to change the deviant not the system".p27
And as sociologist Herbert Gans presciently noted, "the report could be used to justify a reduction of efforts in the elimination of racial discrimination and the War on Poverty"-- which in fact happened when in 1970 Moynihan joined the Nixon administration and issued his infamous call for a government policy of 'benign neglect' given that the black community was well on a path of progress ! ibid 27And still others of a similar bent continue to find the answer in one or another "pathologies" of the Black community itself.
And with striking resonance today, psychologist William Ryan's 1971 popular Vintage Press book "Blaming the Victim" "Blew the whistle on the tendency of social science to reduce social phenomena to a individual level of analysis, thereby shifting attention away from the structures of inequality and focusing on the behavioral responses of the individuals suffering the effects of these adverse structures" p 28
The late James Loewen, author of Lies My Teacher Told Me gave a name to this reductionist denial of the weight of circumstances in his Teaching What Really Happened: "What is the basic idea of sociology ? It is this: social structure pushes people around, influences their careers and even affects how they think...I coined a new term...soclexia... makes it very difficult to grasp the basic idea of soiology" p7-9
Is The Fight For Equal Rights--or Black Liberation ?
click here The 1960's into the 1970's were tumultuous times. The fight for equal rights continued but began to take more of a back seat to more radical calls for Black Power and self-determination, and black liberation by any means necessary as Malcom X said. (see Harvard Siticoff's fine The Struggle For Black Equality 1954-1980, Hill and Wang, 1981)
The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee leader (SNCC) Kwame Toure (well-known at the time as Stokely Carmichael) became the voice for Black Power as the goal,rather than integration per se. And his book by that title written with Charles Hamilton coined the term "institutional racism" to distinguish everyday attitudinal blatant racism from the more hidden ways the ways the U.S. social structure operates--the institutional racism that the De Santis's, Trumps, Rufos and company try so hard to deny.The Black Panther Party For Self-defense upped the ante with its Ten-Point Program for self-determination for the black community, coupled with a broad call for "All Power to the People". Black Panther leader Fred Hampton raised the need to build a multi-racial Rainbow coalition uniting "Black, Brown, Yellow and white". Martin Luther King jr."s 1968 Poor People campaign sought to join together the fight for economic and civil rights.The refrain increasingly became not a call for an equal share of what many were seeing as a rotten pie, but the need to remake the whole damn system: socialist revolution.use pic of 1969 press conference of the Chicago BPP, Young Lords, and Young PatriotsThe question still stands today: Can the full liberation of Black people, as well as other oppressed and exploited people be achieved under our capitalist system? Does not CRT co-founder Derrick Bell's statement that structural racism "was an integral, permanent and indestructible component" of U.S. society at the very least pont in that direction? (see Saying it Loud 1966--The Year Black Power Challenged the Civil Rights Movement by Mark Whitaker, Simon and Schuster, 2023
So as the civil rights movement was borne out of the struggle against Jim Crow laws and second-class citizenship, so too was critical race theory borne out of the effort to better understand in order to change why despite massive social movements and gargantuan efforts, white supremacy and racism continued to infect U.S. society?
It is within this fertile political context that legal scholars Derrick Bell, Kimberly Crenshaw and others created Critical Race Theory, arguing that the white supremacy of the past lived on in the laws and societal rules of the present. As Crenshaw put it, critical race theory found that the issue was " Not simply a matter of prejudice but a matter of structured disadvantages that stretched across American society."
CRT has developed as the embodiment, elaboration and further conceptualization of the most basic understandings of the role white supremacy and racism have played and continue to play in the U.S. It is a deepening of the understanding that racism and white supremacy are more than a question of individual attitudes, beliefs and preferences. One doesn't have to agree with all its formulations or emphases, but without the rudiments CRT works from, U.S. history is a white wash.CRT is rooted in critical race facts that are in front of us every day in our lives, communities and schools as well as the news :
As legal scholar Ronald J. Krotoscynski jr has put it,
"Critical race theory is in its essence an approach, a method for understanding and analyzing how what is called 'race' and white supremacy have played out in the history of the U.S. ...crt... systematically considers how even neutral laws, regulations and social norms have different impacts on particular racial and ethnic groups. It examines how legislatures at times target racial minorities for adverse treatment-such as recent voter suppression laws in Arizona,Georgia and "At a time when we desperately need to have more frank and open conversations about race, class, social justice and the concept of "the other," they hamstring educators charged with preparing young people to live and work in an increasingly diverse society."Iowa-and at other times are simpleory,y indifferent how these new laws will impact those outside the majority." Washington Post, May 26, 2021
And as Victor Ray succinctly puts itin his On Critical Race Theory, "Critical race theory matters because it provides a better explanation for the resilience of racial inequality than individualist theory describing racism as a negative personal quirk " pxxxixThroughout, it must be kept firmly in mind that the attack on CRT is not on its finer points; rather it's a catch-all target for dismantling and suppressing the very basic understandings of how white supremacy and race play out.
The Propagandizing Indoctrinationof the White Supremacists
One of the main propaganda techniques is a type of psychological warfare by A-crters like Rufo and DeSantis to turn common place understandings into loaded and suspect terms, in an effort to intimidate and inhibit their usage. These hucksters villainize common place understandings into sinister terms. "Racism ?" perish the thought ! "Intersectionality" My goodness! How can the commonsense idea that we all are a complex of various identities --Males, female, black white brown, gay straight, bi, disabled, etc--each of which have different weight and meaning in U.S. society, and which changes to a greater or lesser degree as society does constitute an existential threat to U.S. society as ludicrously claimed by Christopher Rufo, the charlatan instigator of this whole contrived crisis claims ?
And why is it so threatening to recognize that that racism and white supremacy are more than individual prejudices, but are structural, systemic, and institutional? What makes those terms so controversial as to be forbidden from usage in a number of states, ruled out of order, demonized and censored? That the same everyday terms accurately describing and understanding U.S. society are literally made illegal and punishable by law, and if used by a teacher, by the possible loss of one's job? Is this 1984 or what? (Of course one of the banned books).
And their newly passed laws and restrictions as to what cannot be taught or even mentioned in schools is nothing less than the official enshrinement in those states of white supremacist official history! The official state histories of Florida, Texas, North Dakota and others are in fact white supremacist histories!
So first and foremost, the anti-CRT campaign is a pretext and a cover, an excuse, to whitewash, suppress and erase the teaching of the real history of the U.S. And the anti-CRT assault also needs to be recognized as part of the larger ongoing campaign to roll back and suppress the rights of women, people of color, LGBQT and others.Christopher Rufo :The Right Wing Con Man Selling Wolf Tickets to Critical Race Theory(Wolf ticket is a slang phrase that refers to a fake or counterfeit ticket)
The main architect of the anti-CRT disinformation campaign launched in 2020 by right wing propagandist and agitator Christopher Rufo, a Trump supporter, now working with Florida's fascist Governor DeSantis to destroy public education. A senior fellow at the right-wing Manhattan Institute, he's also been a board member at the evolution-denying Discover Institute. Rufo has made clear that his agenda targets public education itself, and with it teacher unions, "declaring that it was time to abolish the teacher unions and overturn the school boards" Rethinking Schools, Winter 2022-23,pRufo is a charlatan selling snake oil. It is important to expose just how admittedly and self-consciously cynical his A-CRT attacks are. Here's Rufo gloating like the charlatan he is, proudly declaring that his goal in the crusade " Is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think 'critical race theory.' We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans." For Rufo, "Critical Race Theory is the perfect villain"...an existential threat to the U.S....They report on concepts that are highly contested, like anti-racism, systemic racism, intersectionality, etc."
Rufo openly brags on Twitter about the success of his con: "In less than a year, my work has inspired a presidential order (Trump's "1776" project), legislature in the largest red states, and bills in the House and Senate. We have flipped school boards and protected millions from state sanctioned racism."
Rufo just makes stuff up, as when he was exposed for his false claims that CRT is taught in grade school and and his lies about a Diversity training program for the Dept of Transporation.So not a word from this demagogue about CRT can or should be believed. Rufo pedals what he thinks will get over, and daily right wing talk radio and tv hosts like Tucker Carlson are major bullhorns for his and others' fabrications about CRT.
As one commentator put it, "I thought of the bills that Rufo had helped draft, which restricted how social-studies teachers could describe current events to millions of public-school children, and the open letter a Kansas Republican legislator had sent to the leaders of public universities in the state, demanding to know which faculty members were teaching critical race theory. Mission accomplished.Benjamin Wallace-Wells, the New Yorker, June 18, 2021 How a Conservative Activist Invented the Conflict Over Critical Race Theory.
A MOST REVEALING INTERVIEW WITH RUFO
In a May 2021 interview with Marc Lamont Hill, host of the You Tube channel's 'Black News Tonight" Rufo makes a number of A-CRT claims debunked by Hill aptly demonstrating the utter nonsense Rufo offers up as critiques of CRT : For instance, Rufo ridiculously claims CRT is "state-sanctioned racism," compelling students to believe in ideas like race essentialism, racial superiority theory." He has also claimed that CRT is "official ideology taught in schools'-- but never backs up his claims. What schools? Where ?Hill ably refutes Rufo's nonsensical claims, responding that "Critical race theorists hold that the law and legal institutions in the United States are inherently racist insofar as they function to create and maintain social, economic, and political inequalities between whites and nonwhites, especially African Americans ". Every claim about CRT that Rufo makes is either an unsubstantiated straw man or just plain dishonest demagogery.
In fact it is Rufo who is the racial agitating flame thrower he claims CRT to be when he attacks Noel Ignatiev author of "How the Irish Became White" for calling for "the abolition of the white race". Is it really possible that ivy league educated lawyer Rufo doesn't understand that what Ignatiev, Theodore Allen and others call for is the not a genocide of melanin-deficient homo sapiens but rather the abolition of the idea that being ' "white", that skin color demarcates different "races" of people. The "white race" is itself a historically rooted white supremacist divide and conquer creation-which didn't exist before the European conquest of the Americas! There is no "white race". --but perhaps Rufo would beg to differ?As educator Cheryl Harris notes "The theory started as a school of thought in law to examine how racial inequality persisted in society despite policies adopted to eliminate it...The curriculums and programs targeted by the right have little to do with critical race theory itself... One of the challenges is there is what critical race theory is, and there's what it's being portrayed to be in the context of this disinformation campaign. So it's difficult to start out a discussion about what it is when what is being projected really bears no resemblance to it and has no intention of bearing any resemblance to it. Wallace-Wells, the New Yorker
Cheryl Harris notes "The theory started as a school of thought in law to examine how racial inequality persisted in society despite policies adopted to eliminate it...The curriculums and programs targeted by the right have little to do with critical race theory itself... One of the challenges is there is what critical race theory is, and there's what it's being portrayed to be in the context of this disinformation campaign. So it's difficult to start out a discussion about what it is when what is being projected really bears no resemblance to it and has no intention of bearing any resemblance to it. Wallace-Wells, the New Yorker
So the fraudster who's done more than any other individual to stifle and criminalize critical thinking, has the temerity to attack CRT as indoctination !
Critical Race thoery Has Been Around for 45 Years--Why isIt Under attack Now ?The year 2020 turned out to quite a reckoning.It should not be lost-or forgotten-- that the A-CRT crusade came on the heels of the largest protests of people of color and white people uniting together against the non-stop police murders of Black people. The cold blooded murder of George Floyd right in front of our very eyes galvanized millions and presented the spectacle of a multiracial unity that had not been seen since the height of the civil rights movement, all in the face of the most openly white supremacist U.S. president since Woodrow Wilson who legitimated the murder of a protester at a fascist hate rally where the chants were "Jews Shall not replace us !.
As the 2023 PM Press book "George Floyd Uprising" recounts :The Black stuggle has served a singular rolein American radical politics, oftern acting as the igniting element that sets wider layers of society into motion...p6"Multiracial crowds took to the streets night after night...the revolt soon spread to cities large and small across the country...in addition to daily mass demonstrations and marches, an entire array of creative form of collective action were spawned...occupations of of plazas, parking lots, and city streets fashioned themselves into autonomous zones...demonstrations tore down monuments to the confederacy and colonialism...the deadly climax of the Kenosha rebellion provoked a strike among the major league sports teams in the NBA WNBA, MLB, MLS and NHL...all told more riots (sic) took place in the summer and early fall of 2020 than during the long hot summer of 1967 and more people in this country participated in the resulting social movement than at any other time in American history" p 1-2
And then there was impact of the NY Times-sponsored 1619 Project which demanded recognition of slavery as integral to the founding and development of the U.S.
Clint Smith writing in the Atlantic "In recent years, Americans have seen a shift in our understanding of the country's history; many now acknowledge the shameful episodes of our past andevelopmentlongside all that there is to be proud of. But reactionary forces today are working with ever-greater fervor to prevent such an honest accounting from taking place. State legislatures across the country are attempting to prevent schools from teaching the very history that explains why our country looks the way it does. School boards are banning books that provide historical perspectives students might not otherwise encounter. Many of these efforts are carried out in the name of "protecting" children, of preventing white people from feeling a sense of guilt. But America will never be the country it wants to be until it properly remembers what it did (and does) to Black people."Crenshaw, same NYer article :"It should go without saying that what they are calling critical race theory is a whole range of things, most of which no one would sign on to, and many of the things in it are simply about racism...This is a post-George Floyd backlash," As she sees it, the crusade against critical race theory represents an effort to change the subject, rather than being about systemic and structural racism...
It's important to re-center the larger picture-- the attacks on CRT are part of a calculated and cynical campaign going well beyond censoring the teaching the truths of U.S. history. The A-crt crusade is very much one front in the escalating attacks on the rights of women, affirmative rights, voting rights, LGBTQ people and others. What is under attack is critical thinking, and the very foundations of an education grounded in inquiry:
How the Banning of a Ta Nahisi Lesson Using Critical Thinking Skills Exposes Ever More Clearly Who the Real Indoctrinators AreFlorida Governor Ron De Santis along with his sidekick Rufo, in the best tradition of attacking others for what they themselves are most guilty of, like to claim that CRT is indoctrination. A censorship of a Florida teacher who used Ta Nahisi Coates's memoir Between the World and Me for a critical thinking unitwill be discussed further in part two for how it exemplifies the utter bankruptcy of their A-CRT crusade.
Sign In a Provincetown Shop window : White Supremacy is Not the Shark. It is the Water. Guante ?
click hereclick here
CRT focuses on and analyzes how race and racism permeate virtually all aspects of life in U.S. society, whether easily and immediately recognizable like the police murders of innocent Back people like George Floyd, the massacre of 11 black church goers-or less visible such as the consistent significant disparities in social standing and well being between Black and white people.
I taught adult ed for seven years at nite where my students were mainly immigrants from Guyana, Bangla Desh and Caribbean, ranging in age from 25 or so to 45 or 50; one year I had a 72 year old retired construction worker who told the class he was there to get his high school diploma after working his whole life to put his kids through school, and now he wanted to get his diploma.
To facilitate class discussion, I sometimes asked my evening students what the biggest differences between life in the countries where they came from and life in the U.S. As students would offer their experiences-"the food', the "music", attitudes toward the teacher, invariably once the discussion proceeded, and people felt more comfortable in expressing their thoughts, someone would say "how important race is in the U.S.". At which point the whole discussion would change with everyone agreeing! For my overwhelmingly foreign-born and relatively-new-to the U.S. students, race and racism--white supremacy--was indeed the sea and not the shark while for still too many white people, it is only the shark.
In Summary :Florida governor says "We're not going to let you impose an agenda on our kids" and "we're not going to let them indoctrinate our kids". But the reality is :
* The attack on Critical Race Theory (TAOCRT) is a brazen attempt to mainstream and re-establish white supremacist thinking since the civil rights movement rose up to challenge it, and is part of the effort to roll back the gains of that movement. .* The attack on crt (TAOCRT) is an attack on teaching the truths of U.S. history.
* TAOCRT is a campaign to intimidate teachers from teaching those truths.
* TAOCRT is an attack on critical thinking, an attack on inquiry based teaching by ruling entire areas of thought out of order.
*TAOCRT is an attack on students by ruling questioning and curiosity out of order.
There are many good resources to follow up with on CRT. A few among them that I found particulaly useful are ;
1.On Critical Race Theory by Victor Ray, Random House, 2023--If I had to pick one book to read, or use for a course, this would be it.2.Marc Lamont Hill interview with Christopher rufo--https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihnuYXKBGZg. For that matter, any interview by Hill on Youtube!4. Critical Race Theory Explained! | First Amendment Unscripted .youtube.com/watch?v=8MoGTzQt77U5. Michael Eric Dyson interview on CRT: .youtube.com/watch?v=wQRibSsdgQY6.Video using 5 books to explain crt : .youtube.com/watch?v=2rDu_VUpoJ87. Critical Race Theory the Key Writings that Formed the Movement edited by Crenshaw, Gotonda, Peller, Thomas8.Critical Race Theory An Introduction Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic NYU Press, 20179. What is Critical Race Theory, and Why Is It Under Attack ? Stephen Sawchuck, Education Week May 18, 2021Bibliography:
Sources cited For this article :Education Week, Eesha Pendharkar , "Efforts to Root Out Racism in Schools Would Unravel Under 'Critical Race Theory' Bills May 26 2021Milton Meltzer, Slavery A World History, 1993Frank M. Snowden jr., Before Color Prejudice the Ancient View of BlacksNell Irvin Painter The History of White PeopleNoel Ignatin How the IrishBecame WhiteHerbert S. Klein African Slavery in Latin America and the CaribbeanColonists in Bondage, Abbot Emerson Smith,Andres Resendez Smithsonian Perspective :The Other Slavery W ikipedia.org/wiki/ Reconstruction eraStephen Steinberg The Liberal Retreat From Race During the Post-Civil Rights Era in the House That Race Built, ed.wahneem LubianoWilliam Ryan Blaming the VictimEric Williams Capitalism and SlaveryKarl Marx, Capital volume 1Theodore Allen the Invention of the white race. vol. 2The George Floyd Uprising, PM Press, 2023Hitler's AmericanModelVictor Ray On Critical Race Theory Why It Matters &And Why You Should Care , Random House. 2023)Slavery's Constitution David WaldstreicherDark Bargain Lawrence GoldstoneReunion and Reaction: The Compromise of 1877 and the End of ReconstructionC. Vann WoodwardThe_Strange_Career_of_Jim_Crow C. Vann WoodwardBlack Reconstruction W.E.B Dubois'The Struggle For Black Equality 1954-1980, Harvard SiticoffSaying it Loud 1966--The Year Black Power Challenged the Civil Rights Movement Mark WhitakerRonald J. Krotoscynski jrBenjamin Wallace-Wells, the New Yorker, June 18, 2021 How a Conservative Activist Invented the Conflict Over Critical Race TheoryMarc Lamont Hill, host of the You Tube channel's 'Black News Tonight" Interviews Christopher Rufo
Much thanks to Este Gardner for her feedback, input and support in writing this essay !
Coming in Part 2 of this essay : How I Used CRT Without Even Knowing It !which will include :*How the Banning of a Ta Nahisi Lesson Using Critical Thinking Skills Exposes Ever More Clearly Who the Real Indoctrinators Are*Race the Power of An Illusion :Using the 3 episode California Newsreel/PBS series in the class room.* Using the landmark PBS series Eye on the Prize
Critical thinking and Critical writing :
Howard Zinn's People's History vs. a mainstrean text on Columbus
Lincoln--Who really freed the slaves ? Was Lincoln the great emanicpator or were there other force at play ?
Integrating music jazz, folk, world into the curriculum, such as Oscare Brown jr's Bid Em In, 40 Acres and a Mule, Mingus, Coltrane, Gil Scot Heron, and others
Skool theme song for the De Santis & Rufo Bored of Education Playbook : Tom Paxton's What Did You Lern in School today ?
I am a long time antiwar,labor union and community activist/ organizer and a recently retired NYC high school educator. I also taught at Richmond College and at Alternate U (would love to hear from anyone who was there 1968-'70). I've also been (more...)
