Today, Explained - Critical race theory

Episode Date: June 7, 2021

Across the country, Republican lawmakers are pushing laws banning “critical race theory” in schools. It’s already had a chilling effect on teachers. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Visit connectsontario.ca. It's Today Explained. I'm Halima Shah sitting in for Sean Ramos-Furham. We're in the middle of a big shift in how Americans talk about history and race. And it's because of a lot of things. Activist movements. Politicians. For much too long, the history of what took place here was told in silence. Education and media. You say 1619 is as important as 1776. Yes. Our decision to buy that first group of 20 to 30 Africans

would influence almost everything that would follow after. In 2019, the New York Times published the 1619 Project, which looks at the year enslaved Africans were brought to North America as a starting point in U.S. history. It is as foundational to who we became as a country as our decision in 1776 to break off from the British. The project says slavery is central to American history and that Black Americans were integral

to achieving the democratic ideals that we now celebrate. The 1619 Project has been picked up by schools who want to integrate this telling of American history into their curriculums. Too often in schools, when we teach Black students, when they see themselves in the curriculum, too often we talk about them as victims of oppression. And so our students don't have any opportunities to see themselves represented in a positive light.

So I love that the 1619 Project does that. But that interest from educators is spurring a backlash from lawmakers. We need policies that bring us together, not rip us apart. And as governor, I firmly believe that not one cent of taxpayer money should be used to define and divide young Oklahomans about their race or sex. In more than a dozen states across the country,

we see that Republican lawmakers are proposing, and in some cases have even passed, bills that put limitations on discussions about race. Fabiola Sineas, race reporter at Vox. So as early as January and into the spring, we saw some states in the West, so Idaho, Oklahoma, Texas, even Utah recently joined. Republican legislators in New Hampshire and Rhode Island have brought their own bills forward.

And so we just see these bills snowballing. They're almost even copying each other. And it's apparent that the wave of bills is a part of a nationwide strategy to basically rally the Republican base against an ideology that they say is harmful to children. And that specific ideology is critical race theory. We need to protect our teachers from being forced to teach this garbage of social justice, including critical race theory. And what is critical race theory? the idea that America has not moved past its racist history, but racism continues to create inequality and disadvantage for oppressed groups today. And so one of the strongest tenets of critical race theory is this idea that we do not live in a colorblind society. And so

when it comes to passing legislation or policies, we need laws that specifically counter the ills of racism. So we can't have laws that are colorblind. So what exactly do these laws say and what would they do? Some of the bills specifically call for a stop to critical race theory. Others impose the teaching of patriotic education. So saying, hey, we need to get back to 1776. And other bills have other random specific lines. Like in Oklahoma, there's a specific line that says teachers can't teach materials that cause discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress. I found chemistry very psychologically distressing. Like, I hope that this means that chemistry is outlawed. Exactly. And so it's important to note that while the bills have language that are similar to one another, they're very vague, right? How are we supposed to determine what's psychologically distressing for a student on account of their identity? How does critical race theory, this

thing that a lot of people can't even define, become something that the right takes up as a cause? Yeah, it's interesting because critical race theory before last summer was something that was relatively obscure. You had your folks who are practicing this. You have your classes that have been taught for decades and decades at some schools like UCLA, for example. But it all started last summer. There was a conservative activist by the name of Christopher Ruffo who went on Tucker Carlson one night and said that he was beginning to wage a one-man war against critical race theory. Conservatives need to wake up that this is an existential threat to the United States and the bureaucracy, even under the Trump administration, is now being weaponized against core traditional American

values. He saw it as an indoctrination where people were leading trainings, so racial sensitivity trainings through the federal government. And he saw this as an indoctrination of just radical left wing ideology. And so he did several Tucker Carlson segments. And by late August, he said that he wouldn't stop until Trump issued an executive order. And I'd like to make it explicit.

The president of the White House, it's within their authority and power to immediately issue an executive order abolishing critical race theory trainings from the federal government. It's time to take action and destroy it within his own administration. By September, we basically have Trump picking up on critical race theory.

Critical race theory is being forced into our children's schools, and it's being deployed to rip apart friends, neighbors, and families. In early September, the Office of Management and Budget actually put out a memo instructing federal agencies to identify any critical race theory training within the departments. And so the federal government was going to begin to cut off funding to such programs, programs that specifically apparently stated that America is inherently evil or racist. And does the federal government propose an alternative? Yeah. So by late September, Trump issued an executive order that specifically banned

federal contractors from conducting racial sensitivity training. And around the same time, Trump doubled down on saying that critical race theory was something that was really bad for our country. Critical race theory, the 1619 Project, and the crusade against American history is toxic propaganda. So he instead introduces the 1776 Commission, which is just this huge initiative and effort to treat what he called the real history and the true history of America. It will encourage our educators to teach our children about the miracle of American history. Really put our founding fathers on a pedestal, for example. So essentially the whitewash history that is taught in our schools today. At what point do states start taking this up

as a cause of their own? Once Biden took office, he rescinded Trump's executive order pretty much immediately. And so around the same time, in January and into the spring, that's when we see states across the country begin to introduce their own bills.

So essentially copycat legislation of Trump's original executive order from 2020. And from there, it snowballed. So now we're at well over a dozen states that have introduced these bills. Do these bills have a real possibility of becoming law or having substantial impact? Or does this feel like something that's kind of just

fodder for a culture war? Yeah, a lot of people that I talk to say that these bills eventually just won't mean anything because they're going to run into a lot of just First Amendment challenges. But what people are really afraid of is that this is just going to instill fear in school leaders across the country. People are afraid to promote the teaching of certain topics. So one strong example was the Tulsa massacre in Oklahoma. Since the bill states that you cannot teach anything that's psychologically distressing, how can you teach something like the Tulsa massacre in an Oklahoma school? Wow. Yeah, and we've seen some instances where classes have been taken off of the registry. I'm not happy. This is information that everybody

needs to know. The high school and community college teacher Melissa Smith says House Bill 1775 has caused her to lose the class she was supposed to teach this summer at OCCC. I got an email a week or so ago saying that due to this new law, they were canceling my completely full race and ethnicity class. Now her students won't be able to... You spoke to conservative leaders, Fabiola. What did they tell you their rationale was for this? The rationale behind a lot of the bills is apparently protection.

The folks I spoke to said that they are working to protect children from indoctrination, working to protect children against harm to their mental health. So teaching about racism, specifically any teachings that say that America is inherently racist is something that could do irreparable harm to children is what I was told. And I think a lot of these leaders also believe that critical race theory is divisive. They said that constantly talking about race is something that just further divides America. And so their idea is we need to put a stop to this because we're just going to be further dividing the country. But folks on the other side, right, proponents of critical race theory say, no, we cannot move forward as a country until we reckon with America's racist past that is completely still creating problems for America today.

And just the fact that America still has so many racist policies that really do keep the country divided. Coming up, why Republicans are using a niche academic discipline as an election strategy. Thank you. pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With Ramp, you're able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions and automate expense reporting so you can stop wasting time at the end of every month. And now you can get $250 when you join Ramp. You can go to ramp.com slash explained, ramp.com slash explained, R-A-M-P.com slash explained. Cards issued by Sutton Bank, member FDIC, terms and conditions apply. only get with BetMGM. And no matter your team, your favorite player, or your style, there's something every NBA fan will love about BetMGM. Download

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BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Here's the way I like to think about critical race theory. Critical race theory is to race the same as economics is as to spending money. Ian Haney-Lopez knows what critical race theory is about. I'm a professor of race and American law at UC Berkeley. And he says Republicans might use the term critical race theory, but that's not really what they're talking about. Like race is something we all live.

We know something about it. Spending money is something we all do. We know something about it. But very few of us would say, hey, because we spend money, we're economists. We really understand the history of the market, the connection to government policy, the cultural dimensions, how it connects to power. Likewise with race. This is an effort to take seriously a complex, pervasive social phenomena. Can you talk to me about when critical race theory really emerged as a discipline and what it might have been responding to? So critical race theory is responding to a sort of a naivete, an optimistic naivete about racism that was pervasive across the 20th century. Across the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, there was a relatively optimistic understanding of racism, that race was a minor feature of American life.

Levittown, Pennsylvania, attracted international attention when violence erupted as William Myers, Jr. and his family moved into the three-bedroom house. And in this understanding of racism, racism is mainly interpersonal dynamics. William Myers, Jr. and his family are Negroes in an all-white community. Rooted in emotions and in ignorance. But for others, the Myers moving into Levittown constitutes an infringement of their own liberties. They react with anger and force. People just didn't know any better. People had been raised to think incorrectly about others.

And there was an optimism there that said, if we could just get people together, they'd figure it all out. People would correct their errors, would correct the stereotypes that they have about others, and we're all going to get past racism without really needing to change much at all about our society. Whereas critical race theory in the 70s comes along and says, well, we just went through this civil rights movement, we've seen this effort to promote

integration, and it produced a tremendous amount of backlash and hatred. What about you, sir? Do you think the college students will show up? integration, and it produced a tremendous amount of backlash and hatred. What about you, sir? Do you think the college students will show up? If I got anything to do with it, they won't show up. And also, we've seen that even where integration succeeded, racial inequality persisted. Racism isn't something so simple as interpersonal dynamics. It's institutional. It's cultural. We began to see it in the sort of stories that Hollywood was telling. It's political. We began to see it in the way in which the Republican Party, Richard Nixon in particular, was orchestrating his political campaigns, right? So critical race theory is really a moment when people start to push back against what is often called at the time liberal race theory, an understanding of racism that said racism is pretty minor, it's interpersonal, we're going to solve this, we're going to solve this quickly.

And critical race theory says, I wish that were true. What are the general principles for critical race theory? I think the number one principle is take race seriously. Understand that it is a pervasive social phenomena that has been integral to the rise of the United States since the days of colonialism in British North America. That's the number one principle. Take it seriously. From there, I think, critical race theory is making several different claims. It's saying this is deeply embedded in our society.

Things that are deeply embedded in our society are reflected in our institutions. From driving while black to the war on drugs, studies show racial bias is a factor in nearly every area of the criminal justice system. Our economy. Black American families have 13 cents of wealth for every $1 that a white family will have. Racism is deeply embedded in our culture. 40 seasons and only one black lead. The Bachelor franchise has never been very diverse.

And the show's producers are three. And those of us who are raised in a culture that is suffused with racist ideas cannot help but learn those ideas. This is not to say that racism is inevitable, and it's certainly not to say that racism is inherent in any one person as a function of their skin color or their racial category. That's one of the absurdities being promoted by the right. But it is to say, let's be honest, folks, if we grow up in a society in which racist ideas are everywhere around us, it's almost impossible but that we would have absorbed some of them. Now, the good news is, once we recognize that, every one of us has the ability to think about it and to try and push back against

those internalized ideas and to instead honor our values of racial egalitarianism, of recognizing our inherent equality, our shared connection. So at what point does critical race theory become influential, and what does that influence look like? Critical race theory is a set of ideas within law schools that takes racism seriously. Other disciplines have increasingly taken racism seriously. We as a society are moving toward taking racism seriously. Is it critical race theory? I wouldn't say so. You know, not in the narrow academic sense. It's not like everybody's suddenly carefully studying the seminal texts of this movement and replicating it. That's not what's happening at all. Rather, there's a general trend of more and more people saying, hey, racism is a big deal. It's pervasive. We can do better. At what point does critical race theory become influential? At the point where it's turned into a racial monster by the right? I don't know, right? So, from fascism, and from critical race theory.

It's like, you've got to be kidding me, right? The whole thing's absurd, except that it's the very obscurity of critical race theory. It's obscurity as an actual intellectual project that allows the right to imbue it with all sorts of scary meaning. One of the things that we talked about at the beginning of this show is this wave of legislation that's showing up in state houses that is effectively banning any kind of critical race theory-related education. When you hear these criticisms of critical race theory, especially in the classroom,

what are these Republican legislators really targeting? What are they taking issue with the most? They're not seriously engaging with critical race theory. It would be a tremendous mistake to grant this legislation legitimacy as an honest engagement with an academic discipline. It's not that at all. What the hard right has been doing for the last 60 years has been to promote a politics of racial fear couched in seemingly race-neutral language that allows plausible deniability.

This is what we mean by the term dog whistle politics. To use phrases like welfare queen or illegal alien, phrases that they know will trigger racist fears, but which they can also then turn around and deny are racist at all. And to say, no, I didn't say anything about race. I just talked about people who cheat the system. I just talked about people who won't follow the rules. Critical race theory is now and will be in 2022

one of the biggest dog whistles being pushed by the right. These laws are really targeting what you can and can't say in the classroom. And earlier we talked about how a lot of these efforts probably won't hold up in court. But is the fact that this is so hotly debated going to impact educators and the students that they teach? I mean, I don't think any of these laws will ultimately be upheld. But they're not, again, they're not designed to be upheld. They're designed to promote, to create a theater of racist threat. Will this have an impact on educators? Absolutely. And I don't mean to diminish that. But I also don't want us to think this is primarily about what's happening in education. This is really a story about the right's primary strategy for winning in 2022. We should understand on that level, this is not a conversation about what people should fear their neighbors or instead should reach their hands out across racial lines and build power with their neighbors, trust their neighbors, actually commit to the idea of a multiracial democracy in which we take care of each other. Ian Haney-Lopez is a law professor at UC Berkeley.

His latest book is Merge Left, fusing race and class, winning elections, and saving America. I'm Halima Shah, filling in for Sean Ramos-Furham, who is back with us tomorrow. Thanks for listening. It's Today Explained. you Bye.