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A workshop that Professor Crenshaw organized in 1989 helped to establish these ideas as part of a new academic framework called critical race theory. They sought, and then developed, new tools and principles to understand why. The students saw that stark racial inequality had persisted despite the civil rights legislation of the 1950s and ’60s. “It was our job to rethink what these institutions were teaching us,” Professor Crenshaw said, “and to assist those institutions in transforming them into truly egalitarian spaces.” The demonstrators, including Professors Crenshaw and Matsuda, who were then graduate students at Harvard, also chafed at the limitations of their curriculum in critical legal studies, a discipline that questioned the neutrality of the American legal system, and sought to expand it to explore how laws sustained racial hierarchies. That, she added, is at odds with what critical race theorists have been saying for four decades.
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“The rhetoric allows for racial equity laws, demands and movements to be framed as aggression and discrimination against white people,” she said. are using a decades-old tactic: insisting that acknowledging racism is itself racist. He has also called critical race theory “state-sanctioned racism.”Īccording to Professor Crenshaw, opponents of C.R.T. Ron DeSantis of Florida said to the state’s board of education in June, shortly before it moved to ban critical race theory.
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“The woke class wants to teach kids to hate each other, rather than teaching them how to read,” Gov. Republican-dominated state legislatures have tried to implement similar bans with support from conservative groups, many of whom have chosen public schools as a battleground. Trump’s order, but by then it had already been made into a wedge issue. Use of the term skyrocketed from there, though it is often used to describe a range of activities that don’t really fit the academic definition, like acknowledging historical racism in school lessons or attending diversity trainings at work. It is both humane and inclusive to say, ‘We have done things that have hurt all of us, and we need to find a way out.’” OK, so what is it?Ĭritical race theorists reject the philosophy of “colorblindness.” They acknowledge the stark racial disparities that have persisted in the United States despite decades of civil rights reforms, and they raise structural questions about how racist hierarchies are enforced, even among people with good intentions. “The problem is a system that reproduces bad outcomes. “The problem is not bad people,” said Mari Matsuda, a law professor at the University of Hawaii who was an early developer of critical race theory. Some of those critics seem to cast racism as a personal characteristic first and foremost - a problem caused mainly by bigots who practice overt discrimination - and to frame discussions about racism as shaming, accusatory or divisive.īut critical race theorists say they are mainly concerned with institutions and systems. “It’s only prompted interest now that the conservative right wing has claimed it as a subversive set of ideas,” she said, adding that news outlets, including The New York Times, were covering critical race theory because it has been “made the problem by a well-resourced, highly mobilized coalition of forces.”