Micro: How We Currently Talk About Race Isn’t Sustainable
There are two versions of Critical Race Theory: 1. The legal principle and 2. The academic container for talking about race which is borne from the legal principle. There are three main themes in CRT: Racism is commonplace. Racism happens everyday. White people dictate the terms of racial liberation (or, “interest convergence”). And three: Race is socially constructed. Independently these all make sense, but when taken together some questions arise.
As it currently exists, Critical Race Theory (CRT) doesn’t translate into a reality that many White Americans understand.
There are two versions* of CRT. (1) The legal principle and
(2) the academic container for conversations about race and racism.
The Legal Principle
Beginning in Ivy and Ivy+ schools throughout the 1970s and ’80s, the crux of CRT was borne in tandem and opposition with Critical Legal Studies.
This happened as affirmative action marginally increased enrollment of Students of Color in universities.
Still, educational systems hadn’t updated their studies outside of the interests of white populations.
Mainly led by students of Color, CRT slowly took form to create meaningful action around each schools' curricula and color-blind racism, which began under Nixon and formalized in Reganomics.*
The Academic Container
As law schools began to change their cultures, other schools within universities began adopting these frameworks to think and create action around race and racism.
Critical legal studies of the ‘60s gave rise to CRT in the ‘70s which, in turn, created a mass movement of critical studies: Languages, Disabilities, Women’s, Gender, Latino, Masculinity, Class. (to name a few)
Even Whiteness became part of the critical studies movement in the mid-1990s. (more on this later!)
Each of these studies empowered people to think about liberation and oppression related to each individual movement.
These classes became required courses to support professions that work with the general population. With the rationale being: how can we best serve population X if we don’t know about population X?
The resulting courses spilled out of universities and into the action plans of community organizers, social workers, teachers, hospitality majors, and marketing majors alike. As a result, CRT—the academic container—varies widely from scholar to sect to industry. Yet, CRT's three foundational tenants serve as touchpoints between the many theories within critical race studies.
1. Racism is commonplace. Racism happens every day.
2. White people dictate the terms of racial liberation (re interest convergence).
3. Race is socially constructed.
This list, introduced in Critical Race Theory: An Introduction by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefanic in 2017, has served as required reading for many social work schools and departments studying race and racism across the United States.
IF they exist in isolation, there is tremendous truth in each of the statements. (Spoiler alert for part 2: they don’t always work in isolation)
CRT Principle #1: Racism happens everyday. For many White Americans, the dominant racial identities aren’t explicitly racist. Interracial marriage was outlawed in 1967. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 made all public forms of discrimination illegal. Vice Presidents, Supreme Court Justices, Senators and Representatives held/hold positions of public decision making. Yet for many White American, because of these facts, don’t see racism as commonplace.
Again, the three most common pillars of CRT (the academic container) are :
1. Racism is commonplace. Racism happens every day.
2. White people dictate the terms of racial liberation (re interest convergence).
3. Race is socially constructed.
Let’s unpack each point. One at a time.
Yes, racism happens every day.
Heritage Foundation agrees that racist policy still exists, even in its own roundabout way.*
(*Canaparo, G (2021, August 12). Sloppy thinking about ‘Systemic racism.’ The Heritage Foundation. Retried from The Heritage Foundation website)
Policies and law are, after all, cultural (re organizational, legislative) and societal values-statements.
In 2021 alone, California valued sterilizing people with ovaries—without their consent—who were incarcerated. Most of whom are Black, Native, Latine, and Asian.*
State legislatures in Oklahoma, Ohio, and Florida increasingly valuing the criminalization of publicly videotaping police conduct.**
Governor Kevin Stitt of Oklahoma is seeking paths to overturn McGirt v Oklahoma one of the most significant actions by the Supreme Court honoring the sovereignty of Native nations.***
(*Beam, A. (2021, July 7). California poised to pay compensation to victims of forced sterilization. LA Times. Retried from LATimes website
** OK (HB 1643 by Humphrey and Bullard) http://www.oklegislature.gov/BillInfo.aspx?Bill=hb1643&Session=2100
OH (House Bill 22) https://www.legislature.ohio.gov/legislation/legislation-summary?id=GA134-HB-22, FL (HB 11) https://www.myfloridahouse.gov/Sections/Bills/billsdetail.aspx?BillId=73023
***Tulsa World (2021, July 20) Gov. Stitt sues federal government over McGirt v. Oklahoma-related dispute Retrieved from Tulsa World. com)
And yet, 56% of White Americans (79% of Republicans & 27% of Democrats) believe that “little or nothing needs to be done” to ensure equal rights for all Americans regardless of their racial or ethnic backgrounds.*
(*Pew Research Center (2021, August 12). Deep Divisions in Americans’ Views of Nation’s Racial History – and How To Address It. Retrieved from Pew Research Center .org)
According to William Frederickson’s award winning and highly acclaimed, A Short History of Racism, these 56% of White Americans are not completely wrong.
Frederickson argues that for textbook racism to manifest in society, five things need to be present:
The official ideology of the masses is explicitly racist.
Laws exist forbidding interracial marriage.
Social segregation is mandated by law and not the act of custom or private acts of discrimination.
Outgroup members are excluded from holding public office.
Access to resources and economic opportunities is so limited that most outgroup members are kept in poverty.
Currently, there seem to be two racial ideologies: Black or all Lives Matter. Both of these ideologies aren’t explicitly racist, but this shouldn’t ignore the implicit color-blind racism of “All Lives Matter” rhetoric and actions.
Loving v. Virginia overturned interracial marriage bans in 1967.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 made all public forms of social segregation illegal.
Vice Presidents, Supreme Court Justices, Senators, and Representatives of Color held/hold public office.
2018 Census Data from PovertyUSA finds that 74.6% of Native Americans, 79.2% of African Americans, 82.4% of Hispanic Americans, and 89.9% of Asian Americans (same as white Americans) live outside of —albeit archaic lines of — poverty.
So when most White people say that racism doesn’t exist anymore in the United States at a systemic level, we are, however vaguely, pointing to these facts.
Yes, racism happens every day, but many White Americans believe it is not common.
CRT Principle #2: White people dictate the terms of racial liberation. In 2021 America: Yes, this is true. Governorships, CEOs, state legislative bodies, federal courts, Congress: all of them are disproportionately White (>77%). But what happens when White people become a (numerically) racial minority within the next 20 years? Principle #2 will be moot.
Again, the three most common pillars of CRT (the academic container) are*:
Racism is commonplace. Racism happens every day.
White people dictate the terms of racial liberation (re interest convergence).
Race is socially constructed.
Let’s unpack each point. One at a time.
Yes, white people dictate the terms of racial liberation when white people are 60% of the US population but makeup
82% of state legislative bodies,
In light of the progress, White people like to attribute to the Freedom Movement, federal and state decision-making bodies are still predominantly held by White people.
Critical bills like The Civil Rights Act of 1964 or the Education Amendments of 1972 were passed from these decision-making bodies.
🤓 Both the 1964 and 1972 legislations are broken up into Titles. Each title names a different public activity (employment, housing, voting, education) and then says it’s illegal to discriminate in this area based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin (and later sexual orientation and gender identity).
We’re still feeling the effects of these decisions in Supreme Court decisions like Bostock v Clayton County (2020) in Title VII (employment) claims & In the appellate courts with Gloucester County School Board v Grimm (2021) and in Title IX (education) claims in Soule v. Connecticut or Hecox v. Little.*
(*Meaning, it could go to the Supreme Court next (if they decided to hear it))
Notably, The Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed after an infamous seventy-five-day filibuster and tremendous opposition from Southern Republicans and Democrats.
Two months after Johnson signed the bill, Republican strategists for the presidential election that November tried to get Black people to stay at home on election day “because we can’t get them to vote for us.”*
(*Franklin, B. (1694, September 25) GOP Halts Plea to Negro Voters. NYTimes. Pg. 15 Retrieved from TimesMachine.NYTimes. com)
Considering this conversation into 2021: most states to introduce voting rights restrictions since the 2020 election are Republican strongholds these past two presidential elections (MT, IA, KS, KY, AR, TX, FL). Georgia and Arizona, historically red states, also introduced restrictions.
Voting rights advocates aren’t making huge assumptions when they claim that state legislatures may have motives based on race.
The Supreme Court—already a disproportionately white institution— is in the process of creating bad law as they refuse to address race directly while simultaneously making it harder to hear racial discrimination cases.
Yes, in 2021, White Americans largely dictate the terms of racial liberation. Yet what happens when White people become a (numerically) racial minority within the next 20 years?
CRT Principle #3: Race is socially constructed. Socially constructed concepts change with a culture depending on our mores, values, and traditions. Race is no different. It’s not set in stone. There are no inherent or fixed traits about race, like many Woke activists like to claim. New Item
Again, the three most common pillars of CRT (the academic container) are:
Racism is commonplace. Racism happens every day.
White people dictate the terms of racial liberation (re interest convergence).
Race is socially constructed.
Let’s unpack each point. One at a time.
Like capitalism, like gender, like borders: race is socially constructed.
Money has no value until we give it (and reinforce its) value.
Gender has no meaning until we are taught (and reinforce its) stereotypes.
Borders have no value until Google Maps tell us, and then we reinforce its boundary.
Socially constructed concepts change with a culture over time.
We can understand how generations and cultures before us understood and interacted—however differently—with social tools and concepts still in use today. But we know they're different because they’re socially constructed.
Like clothing: High heels were invented to help keep men’s feet in stirrups.
Like time: Since 1918, every year, we have changed our concept of time-itself during daylight savings time.
As sociology teaches us, our social systems change depending on a culture's mores, values, and traditions.
Race, being socially constructed, is no different.
Remember what beloved founding father Benjamin Franklin said when Germans started immigrating to the US:
“[I]n Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans
also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth. I could wish their Numbers were increased…But perhaps I am partial to the Complexion of my Country, for such Kind of Partiality is natural to Mankind.
-Ben Franklin
(Ol’ Ben was conflating culture for skin color.)
The future of race is largely unknown, except that White people will become a numerically racial minority class within the next twenty-five-ish years.
The race of people who hold the majority of power— be it in the board room or the Congressional chambers—will more than likely change within many of our lifetimes. This change completely upends the notion of interest convergence: that White people will indefinitely dictate the terms of racial liberation.
The social construction of race complicates the claims of Woke Culture that White people can and will always be racist and in a fragile state. Race is a construct: we don’t know what the next decade brings.
When the Left holds the notion that racism is prejudice plus power, then the act of racism has the potential to transfer from White people to people of another race.
However, currently, many White people— on the Left and Right—are actively gatekeeping who and how we talk about race and racism.
If we don’t talk about it, nothing changes
Yes, there are problems with CRT. In the campaign to change CRT in schools, state legislatures went too far as White children now face the real threat of being racially illiterate. So, yes, there are problems, but a few weak parts don’t challenge the structural integrity of the whole.
Borne of Critical Studies, Woke Culture has weaponized the contradiction that social identities (race, (dis)ability, gender, sexuality, etc.) have fixed and unchangeable traits.
There’s a cognitive dissonance in Woke Culture that race is socially constructed—a pliable social status—yet it also holds a fixed/innate/immutable caveat around White superiority and permanency: White people will always be racist. White supremacy will never go away.
If White people will always be racist, what’s the incentive to achieve the unachievable?*
(*Insert Albert Einstein quote: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.”)
Is it to perform “the work” around other White people and People of Color so we can feel like the “good White?”
The concept of “our work is never done” mirrors the Non-Profit Industrial Complex and the insistence that NonProfits feed into the problem to stay relevant. It’s hard to imagine this feels affirming to folks of Color.
In Summer 2021, many of the anti-CRT bills taken up by state legislatures were about removing language around “inherently racist” or “inherently superior” from public school curricula.
These clauses are perhaps the only critically helpful parts of the bills.
However, Republicans, much like CRT, went too far in their theory of change by shooting itself in the foot.*
Republicans attempted the exact opposite of CRT—and in some cases succeeded—to eliminate even the smallest chatter of race, racism, and power dynamics.
(*As for why this happened, check out the section on Why White People Are Hurting)
CRT provides the container to have conversations that have the greatest potential to support White people in the future (not to mention today). Let alone to understand power dynamics, race, and racism today. To build empathy and compassion…
It seems misguided to want any children to grow up racially illiterate.
Yes, there are problems with CRT. But a few weak parts don’t challenge the structural integrity of the whole.
We just threw the baby out with the bathwater on this one.